Joseph North
Joseph North was born Jacob Soifer in the Ukraine to Jessie Soifer and Balia Yasnitz in 1904. His brother was Alex North, the composer. (1) The family immigrated to the United States in 1905 and settled in Chester, Pennsylvania. North's first job was working in a textile mill at the age of 12. This was followed by employment in the local shipyard. (2)
North returned to education and eventually graduated with a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and worked for several years after his graduation as a reporter for a variety of newspapers in the city. Howard Fast became one of his closest friends: "He was a big, shaggy bear of a man, always unkempt even when he dressed with the greatest care, good hearted, good-natured. He reminded me of Friar Tuck in the Robin Hood tales, a man without rancor or hostility, a man I loved and who became like a brother to me." (3)
Joseph North and the New Masses
Joseph North also contributed to the left-wing journal, The Liberator. When it was taken over by Robert Minor and the Communist Party of the United States (CPUS), North and some other journalists, including Michael Gold and John Sloan, were unhappy with this development and in May 1926, they started their own journal, the New Masses. The main financial backer of the venture was Rex Stout, who contributed $4,000 to help the magazine get started. Over the next few years the journal was associated with the American Socialist Party. (4)
Over the years most of the well-known left-wing writers and artists produced material for the magazine. This included Max Eastman, Upton Sinclair, Sherwood Anderson, Erskine Caldwell, Richard Wright, Ernest Hemingway, Alvah Bessie, James Agee, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, John Dos Passos, Josephine Herbst, Albert Maltz, Agnes Smedley, John L. Spivak, Meridel Le Sueur, Theodore Dreiser, Floyd Dell, Art Young, William Gropper, Albert Hirschfeld, Carl Sandburg, Waldo Frank, Granville Hicks and Eugene O'Neill. During this period the journal published the work of an array of independent writers and artists. (5)
Michael Gold became editor but when he allowed New Masses to become a strong supporter of the Soviet Union, non-communists such as Max Eastman, Rex Stout and Floyd Dell ceased to become involved in the journal. (6) Gold produced a visually exciting journal by employing artists such as William Gropper, Art Young, Hugo Gellert and Reginald Marsh.
Joseph North now joined the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) and in 1931 he married fellow member Helen Oken. He also contributed to the Daily Worker. North now became strongly committed to the policy of fully supporting Joseph Stalin. (7)
Spanish Civil War
The CPUSA was a strong supporter of the Popular Front government and North was sent to report on the Spanish Civil War. North arrived in Valencia In September 1937. According to Paul Preston, the author of We Saw Spain Die: Foreign Correspondents in the Spanish Civil War (2008), Luis Rubio Hidalgo, the chief of the Republican Foreign Ministry's press office, was not very helpful to North: "Finally, he agreed to let him have the misery amount of five hundred words per week. North was in despair until things changed after Rubio was eventually replaced by Constancia de la Mora, who gave him ample facilities for sending cables." (8)
Louis Fischer was working for The Nation covering the war when he joined forces with North. Fischer travelled in North's Ford car when they went to cover the fighting at Ebro. (9) "If a truck ahead of you stopped with a jerk and its occupants dashed out into the fields you knew they had sighted a plane. But the road was empty and we had to keep a look-out ourselves. As we approached a spot where a side road intersected our main highway I noticed that a soldier and a boy who had been sitting on a culvert quickly jumped up and ran. I shouted to the driver and he turned off his motor. The moment he did so we heard a much bigger and louder motor zooming above us. We threw open the doors and bolted, hoping to get to the open field, for a road is dangerous because it is so clearly visible from the air and offers no protection. But we could not get as far as the field. The plane had opened up its machine-guns and was strafing us. I had been under bombs many times, but this was the first time I had been strafed and it was pretty awful. We all lay in the stinking ditch by the side of the road.... He closed his guns. We looked up. A bomb separated itself from the fuselage of the plane and fell with a whining whistle. It hit somewhere near. But that was all. No explosion. Another bomb dropped from the plane. 'He must be down to about one thousand feet', Joe North said. The bomb whistled, struck earth. Silence. A third bomb and a fourth bomb. He resumed altitude and made off. Two of us ran into the field. But the plane had finished with us. He had dropped four duds. We decided he must have been an Italian. We found all four bombs. One had fallen on the side road about twenty yards from where we lay. The other three had fallen in the field near the road. If one had exploded it would have killed or maimed us all." (9)
Ernest Hemingway was highly critical of Joseph North's reporting of the Spanish Civil War. He did not like the way that his articles in the Daily Worker did not provide an objective account of the conflict. "I like the Communists when they're soldiers; when they're priests, I hate them. Yes, priests, the commissars who hand down the papal bulls... That air of authority your leaders wear, like cassocks." Hemingway used to call North "Stalin" and on one occasion he told him: "Listen, Comrade Stalin, we've (the journalists working for the North American Newspaper Alliance) filed more good stuff in one day than the Worker has printed in two years." (10)
Vincent Sheean, who was working for the New York Herald Tribune, toured the front-line with North and was astonished that his fellow reporter took little interest in military operations or in verifying information until he realized that no matter what happened, North reported the conflict on the orders of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA). (11) Milton Wolff agreed with Sheean's assessment and that he "unfailingly underestimated casualties" and seemed to "believe everything he wrote in the Daily Worker". (12)
North was critical of other journalists. In his autobiography he criticised Herbert Matthews for his lack of sympathy for wounded soldiers. "Suddenly, as the truck rounded a sharp bend, the driver lost control and it somersaulted before our eyes, the scene of gaiety changed to horror as bodies lay bleeding on the ground. Matthews jammed the brakes on, we leaped out; I can never recall where Hemingway found a medicine kit, but he was on his knees bandaging the injured and solacing them. We worked away together, the blood of the dying on our hands. I noticed that Matthews strode among the bodies, bending down, not to help, but to interview the dying, jotting notes in a little notebook." This upset Hemingway who roared at Matthews: "You sonofabitch, get out or I'll kill you". (13)
Soviet Spy Network
On his return to the United States he continued to work for the Daily Worker and reported on the Second World War. North was editor of the New Masses until it ceased publication in 1948. According to the authors of Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (2000), North was a member of the Soviet network run by Jacob Golos. (14) In her confession to the FBI, Elizabeth Bentley admitted that North recruited William Remington to the network. (15)
North continued to try and persuade other journalists to join the Communist Party of the United States. He approached Cedric Belfrage in 1945 after the purge had taken place of Earl Browder and his followers. "Joe North asked me to lunch to explain the upheaval in his party... With all the respect I had for the CP as the core of the radical movement, I found this a poor way to build confidence in party leadership and party democracy." (16)
North divorced Helen Oken in 1957 and married Augusta Strong in 1963. (17) Howard Fast argues in his autobiography, Being Red (1990), that Joseph North remained a committed communist to the end of his life. "He (North) had given himself to orthodoxy, and that is a terrible curse - in a Communist Party or a religion or in politics or in any system of thinking. (18)
Joseph North died in December 1976.
Primary Sources
(1) Howard Fast, Being Red (1990)
Joe North was to become, in the years ahead, one of my closest friends. He was a big, shaggy bear of a man, always unkempt even when he dressed with the greatest care, goodhearted, good-natured. He reminded me of Friar Tuck in the Robin Hood tales, a man without rancor or hostility, a man I loved and who became like a brother to me. With all that, he had given himself to orthodoxy, and that is a terrible curse - in a Communist Party or a religion or in politics or in any system of thinking.
(2) Louis Fischer, Men and Politics (1940)
Joe North, the owner of the Ford car, now insisted on returning to Barcelona, and the Frenchman, Englishman, and I concurred. The morning was gone. We pointed the car to the river. Occasionally, the chauffeur reminded us to crane our necks out of the windows to watch for aeroplanes. Usually, one was guided by the trucks. If a truck ahead of you stopped with a jerk and its occupants dashed out into the fields you knew they had sighted a plane. But the road was empty and we had to keep a look-out ourselves. As we approached a spot where a side road intersected our main highway I noticed that a soldier and a boy who had been sitting on a culvert quickly jumped up and ran. I shouted to the driver and he turned off his motor. The moment he did so we heard a much bigger and louder motor zooming above us. We threw open the doors and bolted, hoping to get to the open field, for a road is dangerous because it is so clearly visible from the air and offers no protection. But we could not get as far as the field. The plane had opened up its machine-guns and was strafing us. I had been under bombs many times, but this was the first time I had been strafed and it was pretty awful. We all lay in the stinking ditch by the side of the road. I thought to myself, "I don't want to be crippled or blinded. It's better to die". The plane was laying down a field of fire around us. We were his lone target. I hunched my back, put my head as close as possible to the stench, covered my eyes with one hand and the top of my head with the other. How long did it last? Probably not more than two minutes. But they can be very long. He closed his guns. We looked up. A bomb separated itself from the fuselage of the plane and fell with a whining whistle. It hit somewhere near. But that was all. No explosion. Another bomb dropped from the plane. "He must be down to about one thousand feet", Joe said. The bomb whistled, struck earth. Silence. A third bomb and a fourth bomb. He resumed altitude and made off. Two of us ran into the field. But the plane had finished with us. He had dropped four duds. We decided he must have been an Italian. We found all four bombs. One had fallen on the side road about twenty yards from where we lay. The other three had fallen in the field near the road. If one had exploded it would have killed or maimed us all. One bomb had embedded itself in he ground and was standing with its point upward. A bomb is so constructed that it should strike point first. All the bombs were defective. They were hundred-pounders and their shells were rusty.
(3) Joseph North, No Men are Strangers (1958)
Suddenly, as the truck rounded a sharp bend, the driver lost control and it somersaulted before our eyes, the scene of gaiety changed to horror as bodies lay bleeding on the ground. Matthews jammed the brakes on, we leaped out; I can never recall where Hemingway found a medicine kit, but he was on his knees bandaging the injured and solacing them. We worked away together, the blood of the dying on our hands. I noticed that Matthews strode among the bodies, bending down, not to help, but to interview the dying, jotting notes in a little notebook. After all, he was first and foremost, "a Times man", and deadlines to even the most humane of Times men, were mote urgent than death or life. To every man his loyalties. Hemingway started at the sight: "You sonofabitch", he roared, "get out or I'll kill you". After this I felt a regard for him, a warmth, which has lasted to this day, for, I felt, thinking about it afterward, I had seen the real man; despite his tough guy pose, here was a humanist, a partisan of humanity.