I. F. Stone

Journalist

• Born: December 24, 1907
• Birthplace: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• Died: June 18, 1989
• Place of death: Boston, Massachusetts

Stone was a renowned investigative journalist who started his own weekly publication, I. F. Stone’s Weekly. The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University awards the I. F. Stone Medal annually to journalists who demonstrate and honor journalistic independence.

Early Life

I. F. Stone was born in 1907 to Russian Jewish immigrants Bernard and Katy Feinstein, who moved to America and worked as shopkeepers in Haddonfield, New Jersey. Bernard expected his son to take over his business, but Stone refused.

In high school, at age fourteen, Stone started his own monthly newspaper called Progress, and he delivered it on his bicycle after school. He was inspired by the publications The Nation and The New Republic, which he loved reading. His publication ran for only three months; the third issue addressed radical issues such as canceling war debts; supporting Mahatma Gandhi’s anticolonialism efforts to end British rule in India; and ending newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst’s “yellow peril” campaign, which generated fear about Chinese immigrants. Stone graduated, ranked forty-nine out of fifty-two students, but he managed to teach himself to read two books by Lucretius in Latin and a poem by Sappho in Greek, and he stayed involved with chess club, speaking contests, and the high school senior play.

Future education did not bode well for Stone. He attended the University of Pennsylvania, which was obligated to accept high school graduates from close communities, but he dropped out his junior year at age twenty. In 1931, J. David Stern, owner of the Evening Courier in Camden, New Jersey, where Stone had worked previously, employed Stone as an editorial writer at The Philadelphia Record and New York Post. Stone joined the New Jersey Socialist Party, and he ended up being elected to the executive committee before he was old enough to vote.

As Stone became more interested in investigative journalism, he left the Socialist Party and focused on becoming a credible independent journalist. In 1928, Stone did publicity work for Norman Thomas, a Socialist Party candidate for the U.S. presidency.

During his publicity work for Thomas, Stone met Esther Roisman, a West Philadelphia Republican, on a blind date. They married and had three children, Jeremy, Christopher, and Celia. As Stone’s parents got older, his mother suffered from manic depression and his father landed in financial debt.

Life’s Work

At the time President Franklin D. Roosevelt was crafting political strategies to handle the Great Depression, Stone wrote four articles under the alias Abelard Stone for the publication Modern Monthly. He wrote under an alias to protect his job at The Philadelphia Record because the newspaper’s owner, Stern, was a Republican and Roosevelt supporter. Stone wanted to write radical articles without risking his job. Eventually, Stern transferred Stone in 1933 to the New York Post to write for the editorial staff.

In 1937, Stone published his first book, The Court Disposes. The book argued about Supreme Court justices overstepping the constitutional boundaries on economic issues and addressed the Supreme Court’s failures to protect civil political liberties.

In 1938, Freda Kirchwey, associate editor for The Nation, hired Stone, who had been reading The Nation since he was twelve. As a writer for The Nation, Stone revealed how American businesses were planning shortages and manipulating scarcity deliberately to bolster profits.

Stone published Business as Usual in 1941. He documented his observations about business activity under the Office of Price Administration (OPA) and the War Production Board. Eventually, he took a second full-time position with Ralph Ingersoll’s PM publication, and Stone wrote for the New York Star and The Compass.

Stone finished writing another book, called The Hidden History of the Korean War, in 1951. He then became unemployed in November, 1952, when The Compass went bankrupt. Stone received $3,500 in severance pay from The Compass, a $3,000 interest-free loan from a friend, and, with help from his brother Marc, Stone began his own newspaper. Stone’s wife helped him manage his business for eighteen years. Stone was able to capture a wide audience because he asked customers from PM, the New York Star, and The Compass if they would subscribe to his new publication. The I. F. Stone’ s Weekly covered political and world issues. Stone died of a heart attack in 1989.

Significance

Stone proudly claimed to be a Jewish atheist, but in 1946 he took a break from Washington to write about the state of Jewish refugees in Europe when the British prevented them from entering Palestine. He was the first journalist to report about the effort to build a Jewish state through armed rebellion, and he was also the first to evade the British embargo to report a story.

Bibliography

Guttenplan, D. D. The Life and Times of I. F. Stone. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009. This extended literary book documents Stone’s life and work from adolescent to adult.

Landers, R. “Iffy Izzy.” Commonweal 137, no. 3 (2010): 22-23. This article discusses the content of the biographies about Stone written by MacPherson and Guttenplan. It also discusses the quality of Stone’s work.

MacPherson, Myra. All Governments Lie. New York: Scribner, 2006. Gives details about the political and social battle of Stone’s life.

Middleton, Neil. The Best of I. F. Stone’s Weekly. New York: Penguin Books, 1973. This book is a publication of Stone’s best works from his independent newspaper, I. F. Stone’s Weekly.