Liberty (1924-1950)
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Liberty was a general-interest weekly magazine, originally priced at five cents and subtitled, "A Weekly for Everybody." It was launched in 1924 by McCormick-Patterson, the publisher until 1931, when it was taken over by Bernarr Macfadden until 1942. At one time it was said to be "the second greatest magazine in America," ranking behind The Saturday Evening Post in circulation. It folded in 1950. The editors included Fulton Oursler and Darrell Huff.
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[edit] Writers
Liberty carried work by many of the most important and influential writers of the period. Unusually for a magazine of the era, they bought the rights to many of the printed works outright, and these remain in the hands of the Liberty Library Corporation.
The magazine serialized many early novels by P. G. Wodehouse, and other contributors included Achmed Abdullah, H. Bedford-Jones, Robert Benchley, Walter R. Brooks, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert W. Chambers, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert W. Chambers, James F. Dwyer, Paul Ernst, Floyd Gibbons, Murray Leinster and Sax Rohmer.
[edit] Reading time
A memorable feature was the "reading time," provided on the first page of each article so readers could know how long it should take to read an article.
[edit] 1936 election
The magazine lost credibility in 1936 when it conducted a poll indicating Alf Landon would win the American Presidential election. Franklin D. Roosevelt won in a landslide. The poll was discovered to have been biased, as it only tapped people who owned telephones, which many people did not own in the 1930s, thus skewing the results.
