The New Leader Steps Out

Among the first to learn of the menace of Russian Communism were the old-line Socialists. During the years when other left-wingers joined the admiring liberals in praise of Soviet Russia, the old-fashioned

Socialists steadfastly exposed and condemned the Soviet regime for what it was --a corruption of the ideals of Socialism into a slave state.

In the U.S. no old-line Socialist has worked harder at his job of telling the truth about Communism than a Russian refugee journalist named Samuel Moise-witch Levitas. For the past 20 years, with a little band of writers, "Sol" Levitas has carried on his indefatigable campaign in the New Leader, a weekly newspaper he publishes in a crowded Manhattan office at 7 East 15th Street.

Often his on-the-target fire has been joined by salvos from able Russian Analyst David J. Dallin and from such disillusioned ex-Communists or onetime sympathizers as Max Eastman, Louis Fischer, Granville Hicks and the late General Walter Krivitsky. While the anti-Communist crusade is the most important New Leader job, it is not the only one. It also aims to present "a variety of opinions consistent with our democratic policy." As a result, its pages have glittered with articles by such big names as Philosophers John Dewey and Bertrand Russell, Novelists George Orwell and Arthur Koestler, Poet Carl Sandburg, Politicos Herbert Morrison and Leon Blum, Labor Leaders Walter Reuther and James Carey, and a host of others.

New Dress. Next week, the 26-year-old New Leader will appear in a new dress. Abandoning its traditional newspaper format, it will turn itself into a weekly magazine with illustrated covers, more pictures, better paper.

Once the official organ of the American Socialist Party, the New Leader broke from the party in 1936, when it felt that the young Socialist "militants" were going off in an anti-democratic direction. To the autoworkers, journalists, Government officials and professors who read the New Leader, it still seems to espouse theoretical socialism. But when it gets down to concrete recommendations, its line is often Fair Deal pragmatism. The carrot for big-name contributors is not money. The New Leader will sometimes pay as high as $10 a week to a contributor of a weekly column, but it pays nothing for articles. The lure to writers is complete freedom to have their say and veer as far right or left as they wish, provided they are still short of Fascism or Communism.

Old Truth. Sol Levitas, who has been executive editor of the New Leader since 1930, is a slight, mustached man with a melancholy air and beseeching eyes, enough patience to sit for hours over a chessboard or fishing line, and enough ready wit to cajole or browbeat articles out of reluctant writers. Whenever they are so bold as to bring up the subject of money, Levitas tartly replies: "Don't expect to profit from the truth." To help pay for printing what he considers the truth, Levitas periodically wangles sizable cash contributions from sympathetic conservatives and such labor leaders as the garment workers' David Dubinsky.

Levitas learned about Communism the hard way. Born in the Russian Ukraine in 1894, he was living in the U.S. when the Russian Revolution started in 1917. A social democrat in politics (roughly equivalent to a present-day British Laborite), Levitas went back to Vladivostok, was vice-mayor and a delegate to the Russian congress that ratified the Brest-Litovsk treaty with Germany. After the Bolsheviks seized power, Levitas was jailed several times because of his anti-Bolshevik activities. He escaped to Poland in 1923, made his way back to the U.S. and, after eight years of lecturing around the U.S., started to wage the fight against Communism with the New Leader. Unlike most U.S. organs of leftist opinion, the New Leader never minimized the threat to the U.S. of Stalinist Russia (as well as Naziism, Fascism and Falangism), even during the war.

New Appeal. In the '20s the New Leader charged the Communists with diverting Sacco and Vanzetti defense money to other purposes. In the early '30s it reported the horrors of the forced starvation of 3,000,000 and more kulaks of the Ukraine and north Caucasus. Six months before the Stalin-Hitler pact, the New Leader prophesied that it would happen. The weekly attacked the Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam agreements from the beginning, contending that the U.S. had been taken in.

Because of the New Leader's wide sources of information, such agencies as the State Department, the FBI and the Treasury frequently ask the weekly for information about Communists and Communism. Its file is kept updated by refugees from Iron Curtain countries, who usually make a beeline for the New Leader office as soon as they reach New York.

With his new format, Levitas hopes to make his magazine more nearly selfsupporting, specifically by convincing businessmen that his fight is their fight also and they should support him with their advertising.

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