Josephine Frey Herbst

• Josephine Frey Herbst
• Born: March 5, 1892
• Died: January 28, 1969

Political journalist and novelist, was born in Sioux City, Iowa, the third of four daughters of Mary (Frey) Herbst and William Benton Herbst, a farm implement salesman. Her parents, Unitarians and distant cousins, were Pennsylvanians of Colonial descent. In 1888 William Herbst moved to Sioux City where he and a friend established a small farm equipment store, Herbst & Hannam. In 1889 Mary Herbst joined him with their two daughters, Frances, age five, and Alice, four. Josephine was the third. A fourth daughter, Helen, was born in 1895. Although the family lived in near poverty, they were close and devoted. Mary Herbst, self-taught in literature, instilled in her children her belief that they could accomplish whatever they wished, and Josephine, called Josie all her life, was the daughter most influenced by her mother’s attitudes.

After high school graduation in 1910, Josephine Herbst attended Morningside College in Sioux City and worked for her father. After two years of saving, she enrolled at the University of Iowa in Iowa City in 1912. At the end of that year, her father’s business failed, and she began teaching seventh and eighth grades in Stratford, Iowa. In September 1915 she enrolled in the University of Washington at Seattle and took a clerical job, but illness prevented her from finishing her studies. By the summer of 1917 she had saved enough to head for the University of California at Berkeley.

It was at Berkeley that she finally received her bachelor of arts degree in 1918 at the age of twenty-six. Herbst was introduced to the so-called radical community in San Francisco and Oakland, a group of journalists, writers, and artists about whom she wrote to her mother, “I always knew that somewhere in the world were people who could talk about the things I wanted to talk about and do the things I wanted to do and in some measure at least I have found them.” The group opposed World War I, and were hopeful and enthusiastic about the revolution in Russia. It was during that year that she conceived the idea of a trilogy of novels dealing with economic and social forces in America.

Following graduation, Herbst worked for a year as a stenographer in Oakland and Seattle, and as a free-lance editor in San Francisco. In October 1919 she moved to New York City where a California friend, Genevieve Taggard, introduced her into the New York radical community. She worked as a caseworker for a private charity, sold books at night at Gimbel’s and Brentano’s, and lived in Greenwich Village. Early in 1920 she met Maxwell Anderson, then an editorial writer for The New York Globe, and they began an affair lasting several months until Anderson ended it. That summer Herbst, working as a cigarette clerk at a Catskill hotel, discovered that she was pregnant and was persuaded by Anderson to have an abortion. Except to Taggard, Herbst never revealed the abortion, which haunted her for the rest of her life.

In the fall of 1920 Herbst became a reader for a group of magazines run by H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, including not only the well-known Smart Set but also a group of sex and detective publications, Les Boulevardes, Saucy Stories, The Parisienne, and Black Mask.

Herbst left for Europe in May 1922, spent the summer traveling with Max Eastman and Albert Rhys Williams, then settled in Berlin where, with the rampant inflation of the Weimar Republic, she could live frugally but comfortably on twenty dollars a month and spend most of her time writing. A year later she traveled to Zurich, then lived in Florence, Italy, until April 1924, when she moved to Paris where she soon met a twenty-three-year-old American, John Herrmann of Lansing, Michigan, also an aspiring writer. Herrmann was a friend of Ernest Hemingway, and Herbst also met Nathan Asch, Claude Mackay, Robert McAlmon, and others in the expatriate circle in Paris. She and Herrmann sailed for New York in October 1924, and for most of the next two years lived and wrote together in a small house in New Preston, Connecticut. They were married on September 2, 1926. They had no children, separated in 1935 after a stormy relationship with infidelities by both, and were divorced in 1940.

Herbst and her husband joined the large circle of writers in New York, becoming friends of Katherine Anne Porter, Malcolm Cowley, John Dos Passos, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and Hart Crane. Although radical discussion and politics remained important, Herbst’s main interest was her writing. She worked as a researcher investigating labor conditions, then as a reader for Dell Publishing Company. Herrmann was a traveling salesman for a book company. In the spring of 1928 they bought a small farmhouse in Erwinna, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and except for brief travels and stays in New York, it remained Herbst’s home for the rest of her life.

Her first novel, Nothing is Sacred, was published in the fall of 1928. Like all of her fiction, it was strongly autobiographical, and recounts her family’s life at the time of her mother’s death. Money for Love, her second novel, was published in 1929.

During the winters of 1930 and 1931 the Herrmanns visited Key West, Florida, and renewed their friendship with Ernest Hemingway. In the fall of 1930, they attended the International Congress of Revolutionary Writers in Kharkov, Russia, and spent a month in that country. Herbst wrote a brief account of the session for The New Republic. During the next few years, their circle of writers and intellectuals became more involved with leftist politics and Herbst became a political journalist for several magazines and newspapers. In 1931 she accepted the invitation of Theodore Dreiser to become a member of the executive board of the new National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, affiliated with the Communist party. She attended the Farmers’ Second National Conference in November 1933 (Herrmann was a delegate) and reported on it for New Masses. The conference endorsed a radical program including cancellation of debts, an end to evictions, reduction of rents and taxes, and an end to oppression of blacks.

Herbst never became a party member, although Herrmann soon enrolled and worked for the party’s cause in Washington, D.C. She wrote an article for the New Masses, “Lynching in the Quiet Manner,” about the Scottsdale, Alabama, trial. In 1932 she visited and reported on the Iowa and Nebraska farm strikes for Scribner’s magazine.

The first novel of her projected trilogy, Pity Is Not Enough, the social history of a family from Reconstruction to 1920, was published in 1933 and established her as an important novelist. In it she wrote of jobs given to returning soldiers and said, “Cheap girls were fired for cheaper men.” Her theme was the need to change the social system of unequal classes.

The second volume, The Executioner Waits, was published in 1934, solidifying her reputation. More panoramic than the first, it graphically presented the struggles of the powerless against poverty and personal disaster in depression America, and the battle between radicalism and conservatism. It is reminiscent of Steinbeck in emotional content and of John Dos Passos in structure and style.

The third volume, Rope of Gold, appeared in 1939. In it, in a narrator’s soliloquy to Abraham Lincoln, she said, “We’re making the same old fight, property versus human rights.” She urged the necessity of revolution, yet lamented what she believed was its futility.

In September 1934, Herbst again visited Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota, reporting her findings in New Masses. Her observations went not only into vivid and compassionate articles, but formed an important human note in her novels.

Herbst’s most influential political journalism was her coverage of the revolutionary movement in Cuba, the resistance inside Germany to Hitler’s rise, and the progress of the Spanish Civil War.

Herbst went to Cuba early in 1935 for New Masses and found a country whose desperately poor majority were yearning for revolution. While preparing conventional articles, she made contact with the underground, her actual objective, and secretly visited “Realengo 18” a huge and remote area in the mountains where 15,000 Cubans lived and farmed in a relatively free and communal way. Her series was entitled “Cuba on the Barricades.”

Herbst next sought an assignment from The New York Post to investigate underground resistance to Hitler’s regime within Germany. She had to operate with extreme secrecy, keeping no notes, meeting people surreptitiously in parks and train stations. Cautiously she gathered evidence of a desperate opposition: strikes, illegal newspapers and leaflets, brave individual acts of defiance by ordinary people. Herbst’s six-part stories on the front page of the Post, headlined “Behind the Swastika,” were also reprinted as a pamphlet by the Anti-Nazi Federation of New York and played a part in the unsuccessful effort to place early sanctions on Hitler.

Herbst sailed for Spain on March 19, 1937, and joined the horde of war correspondents in Madrid. She soon headed for the battle lines, sharing life in the trenches by day and sleeping on any handy village floor. Her calm demeanor was legendary; she once served coffee and toast while shells splattered the walls.

In 1938 Herbst spent time in Washington, D.C., where she was one of the leaders in a demonstration to lift the State Department’s embargo on arms to Spain. With Nathan Asch she wrote a one-act documentary play, The Spanish Road, for use by the League of American Writers to help raise money for the Loyalist cause.

Herbst went to Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Colombia in the winter and spring of 1939 to do a survey for Modern Age Publishers. She found wrenching contrasts of wealth and poverty and a deep suspicion of the United States. She only published one article, in Friday, a photo-magazine. In 1941 her novel Satan’s Sergeants was published. A story of rural existence with earthy, flinty dialogue, it was yet another story of how the innocent are exploited and ruined. Herbst’s radicalism declined as did the country’s as war edged closer, but she never publicly renounced anything she had said or done.

In December 1941 Herbst went to Washington to seek a job with the government as other of her writer friends had done. She obtained a position in the Office of the Coordinator of Information, a propaganda and intelligence agency, working on the German desk writing scripts for daily broadcasts in German. Less than five months later on May 21, 1942, as she was returning to her office from lunch, she was confronted by security guards who padlocked her desk, searched her handbag, then ushered her from the building. She was suspected of being both a Communist and a Fascist, and although she was eventually cleared, the real reason for her firing has never been discovered in the security investigation documents, and charges that she was a courier to Moscow were shown to be false. She stated her attitude in an article in the liberal newspaper PM: “I am reported to have protested against the violation of various civil liberties ... in the 1930’s. Good.”

Herbst wrote one more novel, Somewhere the Tempest Fell (1947), which received a lukewarm reception from critics and public.

In the last years of her life Herbst worked on her memoirs, a novella about Nathanael West, Hunter of Doves (1954), and New Green World (1954), a biography of John and William Bar-tram, eighteenth-century American naturalists. She also continued writing literary criticism. In 1954 her application for a passport was refused, and not until almost a year later, in March 1955, was her right to travel abroad restored.

Herbst finished and published only three parts of her extensively planned memoirs: “The Starched Blue Sky of Spain” (1960) and “A Year of Disgrace” (1961) in The Noble Savage, a literary journal; and “Yesterday’s Road” (1968) in New American Review.

In 1965 she received a cash grant from the Rockefeller Foundation and in 1966 a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1967 she served on the fiction advisory panel of the National Book Awards.

In the summer of 1966 Herbst was treated for cancer of the cervix and recovered. In December 1968 she entered New York Hospital with a fast-developing lung carcinoma and died there. She was buried in a family plot in Graceland Cemetery, Sioux City.

Herbst, in addition to her novels and criticism, wrote and published several short stories. Her unpublished manuscripts, notes, letters, and a complete bibliography are at the Beinecke Library of Yale University. The only biography is an excellent one by E. Langer, Josephine Herbst (1984). See also A. Kazin, On Native Grounds (1942); L. E. Aguilar, Cuba 1933: Prologue to Revolution (1974); D. Aaron, Writers on the Left (1977); H. Swados, ed., The American Writer and the Great Depression (1966): W. Rideout, “Forgotten Images of the Thirties: Josephine Herbst,” The Literary Review, Fall 1983. An obituary appeared in The New York Times on January 29, 1969.