Beacon Out

Last spring, a few months out of his copyreading job on the Chicago Times, Sydney Justin Harris found $30 in his jeans, a printer willing to give him $1,000 worth of credit. Thought Sydney Harris: What Chicago needs is a liberal magazine.

Thereupon Harris turned to and, almost singlehanded, turned out a first edition of The Beacon. The paper looked enough and sounded enough like The Nation to be its pulp brother. In The Beacon?, columns Sydney Harris got off his chest much about Chicago he had not been able to express during his work for the Chicago dailies.

In a month The Beacon had as advisers such leading Chicago lights as Professor Paul Howard Douglas. University of Chicago economist, and Charles P. Schwartz. of the Chicago Plan Commission. Others, like Edwin L. Kuh Jr., a director of Chicago's Board of Trade, and President Robert Maynard Hutchins of the University of Chicago, gave cash to keep The Beacon burning. Getting such hard-hitting liberals as Harold L. Ickes and Robert Marion La Follette to write for him, Factotum Harris soon found himself free to do an editor's job. His most constant local target was Chicago's notorious Kelly-Nash machine. Editor Harris labeled Mayor Kelly "a Charley McCarthy'' who has "not yet denounced American Motherhood. Aside from that, he hasn't missed a pitch."

Last week, when the Kelly-Nash machine was upset by Governor Henry Homer in the Illinois primaries (sec p. 13), Editor Harris might have felt some justifiable pride in having helped. But he was too full of worries. There was not enough money in The Beacon's till to pay for printing the first anniversary issue, now a fortnight overdue. Not ready to admit he was licked. Sydney Harris last week broadcast a final appeal for help.

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