The Haunted Fifties

The Merlin Press Ltd, 1969. Reprint. Reprint of 1964 publication. Hardcover. Good/good. xxvi, 394 pages. Index. Signed by author. DJ is in a plastic sleeve. DJ has some wear and soiling. Preface by James R. Newman. From Wikipedia: "Isidor Feinstein Stone (December 24, 1907 June 18, 1989), born Isidor Feinstein, better known as I. F. Stone and Izzy Stone, was an American investigative journalist and author. He is best remembered for his self-published newsletter, I. F. Stone's Weekly, which was ranked 16th in a poll of his fellow journalists of "The Top 100 Works of Journalism in the United States in the 20th Century". Stone was born Isidor Feinstein in Philadelphia. His parents were Russian Jewish immigrants who owned a store in Haddonfield, New Jersey. His sister is journalist and film critic Judy Stone. He studied philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, where he wrote for the Philadelphia Inquirer as a student. Stone attended Haddonfield Memorial High School, where he ultimately graduated ranked 49th in his class of 52. He started his own newspaper, the Progress, as a high school sophomore. He later worked for the Haddonfield Press and the Camden Courier-Post. After dropping out of the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied philosophy, he joined the Philadelphia Inquirer, then known as the "Republican Bible of Pennsylvania". Influenced by the work of Jack London, he became a radical journalist. He joined the Inquirer s morning rival, the Philadelphia Record, owned by liberal Democrat J. David Stern, and he moved to the New York Post after Stern bought that paper during the Great Depression. In the 1930s, he played an active role in the Communist-dominated Popular Front opposition to Adolf Hitler. But in the wake of the Hitler-Stalin pact in August 1939 Stone wrote to a friend saying no more fellow traveling and used his column in The Nation to denounce Stalin as the Moscow Machiavelli who suddenly found peace as divisible as the Polish plains and marshes. Stone moved to the New York Post in 1933 and during this period supported Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. His first book, The Court Disposes (1937), was a critique of the Court's role in blocking New Deal reforms. On the advice of an editor that his political writings would be better received if he were not perceived as Jewish, he changed his name to I. F. Stone in 1937. He would later recall he "still felt badly" about the change, and referred to himself as "Izzy" throughout his career. After leaving the New York Post in 1939, Stone became associate editor and then Washington editor of The Nation. His next book, Business as Unusual (1941), was an attack on the country's failure to prepare for war. Stone's expose of the FBI for The Nation during the war caused a sensation and deeply embarrassed J. Edgar Hoover, when Stone revealed the nature of the questions the FBI asked to ferret out subversives from the civil service: "Does he mix with Negroes? Does he...have too many Jewish friends? Does he think the colored races are as good as the white? Why do you suppose he has hired so many Jews? " And, at a time when Vichy France was a Nazi puppet regime, "Is he always criticizing Vichy France? " In Stone's column he noted "questions like these are being used as a sieve to strain anti-fascists and liberals out of the government. They serve no other purpose." Many readers wrote in to thank the magazine for running the article, but The Nation was criticized for allowing Stone to conceal the identity of his sources. In 1946, The Nation s editor Freda Kirchwey fired Stone when she found out that he had signed with the leftist New York newspaper PM as a foreign correspondent covering the Jewish underground in Mandatory Palestine. At the end of World War II, Stone traveled to the Near East to report on the efforts of displaced Eastern European Jews to enter Palestine. In the resulting book Underground to Palestine (1948), Stone wrote that the displaced persons made strenuous efforts to reach the Jewish homeland of Israel although it would have been far easier to emigrate to the United States because, they have been kicked around as Jews.