Joseph Freeman
Joseph Freeman was a Ukrainian-born American writer and political activist, known for his involvement in leftist movements and his contributions to political literature. Born in 1897 and immigrating to the U.S. at the age of ten, Freeman grew up in a working-class neighborhood in New York City. He developed a passion for writing early on, joining the Young Zionist Club and contributing poetry to its publication. After graduating from Columbia University in 1919, he worked as a correspondent in Europe and became involved with the communist publication The Liberator. Throughout the 1920s, he collaborated with prominent figures in the communist movement and contributed to various publications, even working for the Soviet news agency TASS.
Freeman authored several notable works, including his autobiography "An American Testament," which explored his life and Communist influences, though it strained his relationship with the Communist Party. He was also a vocal opponent of Nazi Fascism, highlighted in his book "Never Call Retreat." In his later years, Freeman's writing took a more mainstream direction, and he embraced Buddhism before passing away in 1965. Freeman's legacy reflects a complex interplay between art, politics, and personal ideology, making him a significant figure in American literary and political history.
On this Page
Subject Terms
Joseph Freeman
Writer
- Born: October 7, 1897
- Birthplace: Piratin, Ukraine, Russia
- Died: August 9, 1965
- Place of death: New York, New York
Biography
Joseph Freeman was born in 1897 in Piratin, Ukraine, but immigrated to the United States in 1907 when his father faced possible proscription into the Russo-Japanese War. In New York, the Freemans lived in the working-class community of Williamsburg, where the young Freeman quickly developed a strong sense of his own identity. He joined the Young Zionist Club and wrote poetry from an early age for its publication, the Young Judean, as an adolescent. Once his father had accumulated enough money as a land speculator, Freeman enrolled at Columbia University in the midst of World War I. An avid protestor of the war, Freeman often found himself disillusioned and in legal trouble.
Following graduation in 1919, Freeman traveled to Europe as a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. There he enjoyed the free, bohemian lifestyle that many American artists shared in at Paris. He became a writer and later an editor of The Liberator, a communist paper that attempted to merge art and politics. The mid-1920’s saw Freeman working for the Soviet news agency Telegrafnoje Agentstvo Sovietskovo Soïuza (TASS) and collaborating with Max Eastman and Mike Gold, among others, on several Communist publications, including New Masses, a successor to The Liberator. Freeman also traveled the country as a publicist for the American Civil Liberties Union, an organization that had linked but also conflicting objectives with Freeman’s communist goals. While with the ACLU, Freeman met the radical economistScott Nearing, with whom he published Dollar Diplomacy: A Study in American Imperialism, a study of worldwide American Corporate Capitalist expansionism, in 1925. In 1929, while on assignment for TASS in Mexico, Freeman met Ione Robinson, an apprentice painter to Diego Rivera, with whom he had a brief marriage that ended when Freeman became jealous after Robinson posed nude for Rivera. Later in 1934 Freeman would marry another painter, Charmian von Wiegand. The pair remained married for thirty years but did not have children.
In 1936, Freeman published an ambitious autobiography entitled An American Testament that traced Communist influences throughout the course of his life. Although he censored some of his ideas in hopes of avoiding controversy, this, his most famous work, led to the destruction of his relationship with the Communist Party, which labeled him as a romantic for emphasizing the Freudian ideal of self-sacrifice. The latter part of Freeman’s life was spent campaigning against Nazi Fascism. A key work on that topic was Never Call Retreat (1943), in which he detailed the experiences of a history professor who had escaped a concentration camp. He would write for the Information Pleaseradio show in the 1940’s before publishing his final novel, The Long Pursuit, a gripping satire of the media, in 1947. The end of Freeman’s writing career proved to be more successful; it was more mainstream and sacrificed the sharp, personal, and radical beliefs that dominated Freeman’s earlier newspaper days. He spent his twilight years in New York, adopting Buddhism before his death in 1965 at age sixty-seven.