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A Nonconformist History of Our Times #3
The Truman Era: 1945–1952
Muckraking journalist I.F. Stone chronicles the beginning of the Cold War in this collection of newspaper columns, charting the dangerous foreign policy and suppression of domestic dissent presided over by the mediocre machine politician in the White House.
264 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1953
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About the author
I.F. Stone
34 books53 followersIsidor Feinstein Stone (better known as I.F. Stone or Izzy Stone) was an American investigative journalist.
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."
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."
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 31, 2013
My first exposure to I.F. Stone was finding his history of the Korean War at the Maine South library whilst I was trying to find and read everything they had about psychedelics. Stone's book distracted me from the project, it being so different an account of that conflict from what I'd been taught that it's very unorthodoxy had me captivated.
The second exposure beyond many mentions of him and occasional pieces by him in such periodicals as Commonweal, The New Republic, The Nation, The Progressive and Ramparts was a documentary film shown at the A.R.H. Auditorium at Grinnell College about his life. He had just retired his Weekly when the film was made.
The third exposure was his Death of Socrates. The retirement of I.F. Stone's Weekly was not the retirement of I.F. Stone. He had learned Latin as a young man. Now, as a man in his eighties, he set out to learn classical Greek, starting with Homer, a grammar and a lexicon and ending with his astute study of the trial of Sokrates.
Now, the fourth major exposure was in recently finding six of what appears to be a seven volume set of his writings put out by Little, Brown--the first, about the war years, was missing.
This particular volume appears to be made up of thematically arranged essays from the several papers and magazines Stone wrote for during 1945 to 1952--before the founding of the Weekly. The essays are good, but the book's index is inadequate and the sources of the individual articles are not cited, just their dates.
The second exposure beyond many mentions of him and occasional pieces by him in such periodicals as Commonweal, The New Republic, The Nation, The Progressive and Ramparts was a documentary film shown at the A.R.H. Auditorium at Grinnell College about his life. He had just retired his Weekly when the film was made.
The third exposure was his Death of Socrates. The retirement of I.F. Stone's Weekly was not the retirement of I.F. Stone. He had learned Latin as a young man. Now, as a man in his eighties, he set out to learn classical Greek, starting with Homer, a grammar and a lexicon and ending with his astute study of the trial of Sokrates.
Now, the fourth major exposure was in recently finding six of what appears to be a seven volume set of his writings put out by Little, Brown--the first, about the war years, was missing.
This particular volume appears to be made up of thematically arranged essays from the several papers and magazines Stone wrote for during 1945 to 1952--before the founding of the Weekly. The essays are good, but the book's index is inadequate and the sources of the individual articles are not cited, just their dates.
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January 1, 2026Stone demonstrates an amazing intellectual range for a daily newspaper columnist. Not every prognostication was born out by events, but the well-remunerated survivors of the genre at the New York Times and Washington Post pale in comparison to these good-humored, well-informed dispatches from a doomed political movement.
Stone was intellectually formed by a world -- the left of the New Deal -- that is dissolving around him. He can tell that persecution has selected for fellow travelers that are admirably brave but not over-equipped with political skill or discretion. He believes in socialism as a good in itself and a historical inevitability -- a mistake, at least on the time scale he seems to imagine, but one that seemed plausible on the global stage into the 1980s. The same confidence struck me in Michael Harrington's "Socialism" (1972). Given the inevitability of socialism, Harrington decides that the important questions is the type of socialism we get; working from the same premise, Stone decides that the important question is how to get the U.S. not to destroy too much of the world in its effort to roll back the tide.
In the context of the second red scare, Stone does not simply retreat to a civil libertarian position. He instead demands acknowledgement of the real reasons behind the Russian and Chinese revolutions. He ultimately wants something more than coexistence between east and west. For the sake of peace and understanding, Stone promotes the idea of "relativity", with reference to Einstein -- the idea that more than one truth may be valid, given different national traditions and trajectories. The Jesuits warned me about about this -- but, leaving our eternal souls aside, the disasters attendant on black-and-white Cold War thinking makes an alternative seem attractive. he was seeking to avert.
ODDS & ENDS
- Had American politics developed differently, you could imagine a serious conflict between a secular left and and the the Catholic church on the question of the role of Catholicism in public life (as opposed to discrete conflicts on issues like abortion, gay marriage, etc.), repeating the anti-clerical struggles of southern Europe. Stone gives a sense of what this would look like -- he sees the Catholic church everywhere in the reactionary turn during the Truman administration, and obscurantist force for reaction in the U.S. and around the world. You can see how he gets there, but its surprising how frequently this theory comes up. When Stone's interlocutor is inconveniently out of communion with the Church of Rome he has the option of saying they have a sort of Catholic mentality, as he does this in the case of Quaker Whittaker Chambers.
- That silliness aside, I found Stone's blistering treatment of Chambers quite effective and a bit of a corrective for the very sympathetic treatment he got from the "Know Your Enemy" podcast.
- Stone decision to write a week of columns from the conference of the American Political Science Association is a little bizarre, but probably effective as a check-in on the cutting edge of elite self-legitimization.
- The piece on a 1950s call girl scandal is remarkable in its refusal to even gesture toward a criticism of prostitution. I.F. Stone says "sex work is work" in 1952.
- Discussion of the communist party's role in the progressive party speaks to some tensions in the "broad tent" left today.
Stone was intellectually formed by a world -- the left of the New Deal -- that is dissolving around him. He can tell that persecution has selected for fellow travelers that are admirably brave but not over-equipped with political skill or discretion. He believes in socialism as a good in itself and a historical inevitability -- a mistake, at least on the time scale he seems to imagine, but one that seemed plausible on the global stage into the 1980s. The same confidence struck me in Michael Harrington's "Socialism" (1972). Given the inevitability of socialism, Harrington decides that the important questions is the type of socialism we get; working from the same premise, Stone decides that the important question is how to get the U.S. not to destroy too much of the world in its effort to roll back the tide.
In the context of the second red scare, Stone does not simply retreat to a civil libertarian position. He instead demands acknowledgement of the real reasons behind the Russian and Chinese revolutions. He ultimately wants something more than coexistence between east and west. For the sake of peace and understanding, Stone promotes the idea of "relativity", with reference to Einstein -- the idea that more than one truth may be valid, given different national traditions and trajectories. The Jesuits warned me about about this -- but, leaving our eternal souls aside, the disasters attendant on black-and-white Cold War thinking makes an alternative seem attractive. he was seeking to avert.
ODDS & ENDS
- Had American politics developed differently, you could imagine a serious conflict between a secular left and and the the Catholic church on the question of the role of Catholicism in public life (as opposed to discrete conflicts on issues like abortion, gay marriage, etc.), repeating the anti-clerical struggles of southern Europe. Stone gives a sense of what this would look like -- he sees the Catholic church everywhere in the reactionary turn during the Truman administration, and obscurantist force for reaction in the U.S. and around the world. You can see how he gets there, but its surprising how frequently this theory comes up. When Stone's interlocutor is inconveniently out of communion with the Church of Rome he has the option of saying they have a sort of Catholic mentality, as he does this in the case of Quaker Whittaker Chambers.
- That silliness aside, I found Stone's blistering treatment of Chambers quite effective and a bit of a corrective for the very sympathetic treatment he got from the "Know Your Enemy" podcast.
- Stone decision to write a week of columns from the conference of the American Political Science Association is a little bizarre, but probably effective as a check-in on the cutting edge of elite self-legitimization.
- The piece on a 1950s call girl scandal is remarkable in its refusal to even gesture toward a criticism of prostitution. I.F. Stone says "sex work is work" in 1952.
- Discussion of the communist party's role in the progressive party speaks to some tensions in the "broad tent" left today.
April 26, 2013
That bastard.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews