Isadore Feinstein Stone (December 24, 1907 – June 18, 1989) was an American investigative journalist, writer, and author.
Known for his politically progressive views, Stone is best remembered for I. F. Stone's Weekly (1953–1971), a newsletter which the New York University journalism department in 1999 ranked 16th among the top hundred works of journalism in the U.S. in the twentieth century and second place among print journalism publications.
Early life
Stone was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Jewish Russian immigrants who owned a shop in Haddonfield, New Jersey; the journalist and film critic Judy Stone was his sister.
Stone attended Haddonfield High School. He was ranked 49th in his graduating class of 52 students. His career as a journalist began in his second year of high school, when he founded The Progress newspaper. He later worked for the Haddonfield Press and for the Camden Courier-Post. After dropping out of the University of Pennsylvania, where he had studied philosophy, Stone joined The Philadelphia Inquirer, then known as the "Republican Bible of Pennsylvania".
After advice from a newspaper editor in 1937, Stone changed his professional journalistic byline from "Isadore Feinstein Stone" to I. F. Stone; the editor had told him that his political reportage would be better received if he minimized his Jewish identity. Years later, Stone acknowledged being remorseful about having changed his professional name, thereby yielding to the systemic antisemitism then prevalent in American society. Personally, Stone spoke of himself as "Izzy" throughout his life and career.
Politics in the 1930s Influenced by the social work of Jack London, Stone became a politically radical journalist and joined the Philadelphia Record (the morning edition rival of The Philadelphia Inquirer) owned by J. David Stern, a Democrat. Stone later worked for the New York Post newspaper after Stern bought it during 1929."ketupa.net media profiles: curtis". Retrieved August 26, 2012. In late adolescence, Stone joined the Socialist Party of America, a political decision influenced by his reading of the works of Karl Marx, Jack London, Peter Kropotkin and Herbert Spencer. Later, he quit the Socialist Party due to the intractable sectarian divisions, ideological and political, that existed among the organizations that constituted the American Left.
During the 1930s, Stone was an active member of the communist-dominated Popular Front, which opposed Adolf Hitler and National Socialism. On May 1, 1935, Stone joined the League of American Writers (1935–1943), whose members included Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett, Frank Folsom, Alexander Trachtenberg, Louis Untermeyer, Myra Page, Millen Brand and Arthur Miller. (Members were largely either Communist Party members or fellow travelers.)
During the 1930s, as a left-wing journalist, Stone criticized Joseph Stalin's consolidation of power in the Soviet Union in an editorial for the New York Post (December 7, 1934) that denounced and likened Stalin's purge and execution of Soviet citizens to the political purges and executions occurring in Nazi Germany (1933–1945) and stated that Stalin's régime in Russia had adopted the tactics of "Fascist thugs and racketeers." As the Moscow Trials (1936–1938) proceeded, Stone attacked Stalin's actions as heralding a new Thermidor, which was the time of counterrevolution and reaction against the French Revolution (1789–1799). Additionally, Stone criticized Lenin and Trotsky for their "cruel and bloody ruthlessness" in executing the Romanov family. He scolded the US Socialist Workers Party, then followers of Trotsky, for believing he would have been less repressive than Stalin.
In 1939, following the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, he wrote to a friend that he would do "no more fellow traveling" for the USSR, and used his opinion column in The Nation magazine to denounce Joseph Stalin as "the Moscow Machiavelli who suddenly found peace as divisible as the Polish plains and marshes". Stone bitterly denounced the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact in public and in private as a betrayal of leftist political principles.
Affiliations A former editor of The Nation, Victor Navasky, said that plain, solid work characterized Stone's investigative journalism. He was an old-school reporter who did his homework and perused public-domain records (official government and private-industry documents) for the facts and figures, the data, and quotations that would substantiate his reportage about the matters of the day.
As a liberal, politically outspoken reporter from the American left wing, Stone often had to work in ideologically hostile environments (military, diplomatic, business) where information was controlled, making verifiability the essence of his journalism, corroborated by facts in the public domain, which the reader could verify. About his style of work as an investigative journalist, Stone said: I made no claims to 'inside stuff'. I tried to give information which could be documented, so [that] the reader could check it for himself ... Reporters tend to be absorbed by the bureaucracies they cover; they take on the habits, attitudes, and even accents of the military or the diplomatic corps. Should a reporter resist the pressure, there are many ways to get rid of him. ... But a reporter covering the whole capital on his own – particularly if he is his own employer – is immune from these [political] pressures.
The journalistic professionalism and integrity of I. F. Stone derived from his intellectual willingness to scour and devour public documents, to bury himself in The Congressional Record, to study the transcripts of obscure congressional committee hearings, debates and reports. He prospected for news nuggets – published as boxed paragraphs in his weekly newsletter – such as contradictions in the line of official policy, examples of bureaucratic mendacity and political obscurantism. Stone especially sought evidence of the U.S. government's legalistic incursions against the civil liberties and the civil and political rights of American citizens.Navasky, Victor. I. F. Stone, The Nation, posted July 2, 2003, July 21, 2003 issues. Retrieved September 9, 2006.
The New York Post In 1933, Stone worked as a reporter for the New York Post newspaper. He supported the politics of U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1933–1945), especially the progressive reforms of the New Deal (1935–1938) programs FDR was instituting to rescue the U.S. economy from the poverty imposed by the Great Depression which started in 1929. In his first book, The Court Disposes (1937), Stone criticized what he described as the politically reactionary role of the U.S. Supreme Court in blocking the realization of the socio-economic reform programs of the New Deal.
In the course of working as publisher and reporter, J. David Stern and Stone quarreled about journalism, its practice, and its practices, especially about the content and tone of Stone's New York Post editorials critical of a business plan to refinance the public transit system of New York City. After an acrimonious quarrelling, Stern's concern about Stone's attitude prompted an inter-office note to Stone and the managing editor, informing them that, henceforth, he was part of the news department staff.
In response to his publisher's management decision – subordinating a reporter to the newsroom managing editor – Stone complained to the Newspaper Guild, presenting his case against the managers of the newspaper for unfair labor practices. The Post contested the case, which proceeded to an arbitration hearing that ruled against Stone, who consequently resigned from the Post's staff.
The Nation In 1939, after leaving the New York Post, Stone worked for The Nation, first as associate editor and then as its Washington, D.C., editor. Two years later, in the book Business as Usual: The First Year of Defense (1941), Stone reported on perceived flaws of the early stages of America's WW2 preparation. He alleged inefficient planning and execution, and the business-as-usual attitude, of the industrial and business monopolies — and its tolerance by the U.S. military — that resulted in the tardy production of matériel for the Arsenal of Democracy with which President F. D. Roosevelt said the U.S. would help Europeans and Asians combat the totalitarianism of National Socialist German Workers Party, fascist Italy and Imperial Japan.
On August 4, 1939, Stone along with 400 other writers and intellectuals signed a letter condemning anti-Soviet attitudes in the United States, called for better relations between the two countries, described the USSR as a supporter of world peace, and said "The Soviet Union considers political dictatorship a transitional form and has shown a steadily expanding democracy". The letter was published in September 1939 shortly after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was known in the United States and during the same month that the Soviet invasion of Poland began. Upon hearing of the Pact, Stone repudiated the letter and denounced the actions of the Soviet Union and would criticize it and the CPUSA, which repeated the views of the USSR about the war. In return the CPUSA denounced him as one of the leading "Imperialist war-mongers" until Operation Barbarossa which caused a change in communist views of the war."
In the matter of war-production employment, Stone's exposé of alleged institutional racism and anti–Semitism of the FBI's process for vetting job applicants is evident in the semantics of questions meant to discover, identify and exclude political subversives from civil service in the U.S. government. He characterized questions the FBI asked about job applicants as ideological and bigoted, such as, "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 "Is he always criticizing Vichy France?" All which Stone believed were poor questions to ask during a war in which collaborationist Vichy France (1940–44) actively participated in the military occupation as the puppet régime of France. To the mainstream American reader concerned with the affairs of daily life, Stone reported that, "Questions like these are being used as a sieve to strain anti-fascists and liberals out of the government. They serve no other purpose.". Readers thanked The Nation for Stone's informing the public of the FBI's racist, fascistic and anti-Semitic un–American activities. Concomitantly, some on the American political right wing criticized Stone for maintaining the anonymity of his FBI sources.
In 1946 Freda Kirchwey, the editor (1933–55) of The Nation, fired Stone from the magazine for accepting employment with the newspaper PM (picture magazine) as a foreign correspondent covering the anti–British Jewish Resistance Movement in Mandatory Palestine (1920–48), where the Jews awaited the foundation of the State of Israel.
PM (newspaper) Stone was the Washington, D.C., correspondent for PM, and published a series of feature articles about the Jewish European refugees who ran the British blockade to reach Palestine. He later further developed that reportage from the summer of 1946 and wrote the book Underground to Palestine.Roger Starr, PM: New York's Highbrow Tabloid , City Journal, Summer 1993. Accessed online March 5, 2007.Nel, Philip. "About the Newspaper PM" . The Crockett Johnson Homepage. Retrieved June 21, 2005. In 1948 Picture Magazine closed, and was replaced in Stone's career first by the New York Star (1948-1949) and then by The Daily Compass, published until 1952.
I. F. Stone's Weekly