Arrived

Ten years of age and 10,000 subscribers is not a record in magazine publishing. But those two facts last week spelled out the relatively permanent arrival of another journal of opinion. In the corridor of intellectualistic protest where the New Republic and the Nation have long stalked, Common Sense now also strolls.

Common Sense was founded ten years ago this month by two young Yale intellectuals who had the idea that the U.S. needed a magazine of native (i.e., non-Stalinist, non-Trotskyist) radicalism. Founder Alfred Bingham, one of the seven versatile sons of Connecticut's Old Guard Republican Senator Hiram, had at the age of 27 already traveled around Europe and taught school in Russia. Founder Selden Rodman, was, at 23, a poet who detested the word pinko and who, at Yale, edited a radical undergraduate magazine.

Unlike most young radicals with the urge to publish, they had the persistency and the money to keep at it for a decade and to raise Common Sense to a level of intellectual respectability. They have by now published contributions by most of the right left-people--John Dos Passos, John Chamberlain, John Dewey, Marquis Childs, Stephen Spender, et al. They have ground axes for India's freedom, racial equality, a nonpunitive peace. They have also succeeded for ten years in running an average deficit of around $700 a month.

Best sign of the vitality of their effort: while the Nation and the New Republic continued to rumble along without much upsurge in circulations (11% and 7% respectively--both to roughly 27,000), Common Sense since Pearl Harbor has boosted its circulation from 6,000 to 10,000.

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