Freeman, Joseph

FREEMAN, JOSEPH (1897-1965). A journalist with a wide array of professional credits and a founder of the New Masses and Partisan Review, Joseph Freeman was a leader of the Communist Party’s Cultural Commission until his disillusionment with the Party.

Born in a small village in the Ukraine, Freeman moved to the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn in 1904 with his family. As a teen, he joined the Socialist Party and soon enrolled in journalism studies at Columbia University (1915-1919). Upon graduation, he wrote for Harper’s and Women’s Wear, relocating to London and Paris for several years where he encountered the expatriate American writers and other moderns. He returned to New York in 1922 and began working for both the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union and The Liberator. Freeman’s association with the Communist Party (CP) also began at this point. In 1924 he took a position as the publicity director of the ACLU and in 1926 became a founding member of the New Masses. Holding strong Russian language skills, Freeman was called to duty as a translator in the Soviet Union in 1926-1927.

Freeman, during an assignment in Mexico for the Soviet news service TASS, married revolutionary painter Ione Robinson (1919-1989), an associate of Diego Rivera and Frieda Kahlo. They divorced in 1932. He soon married again, to painter and arts journalist Charmion von Wiegand (1896-1983). Freeman’s first book, Voices of October: Art and Literature in Soviet Russia (1930), co-authored with Joshua Kunitz and Louis Lozowick, brought him a level of esteem within the movement. By 1931 he stood as a New Masses editor and a speaker at the John Reed Clubs’ Midwest conference. He also accompanied Soviet writer Boris Pilnyak to Hollywood. His book The Soviet Worker (1932) followed, and in 1934 he was a founding member of Partisan Review’s editorial board. Freeman, one year later, wrote the introduction to the noted anthology Proletarian Literature in the United States. However, his most famous book, An American Testament: A Narrative of Rebels and Romantics (1936), served as a historical document of communist arts and activism as well as a personal memoir. He reflected on his own experiences, but also expressed grave rancor toward the Soviet cultural leadership.

Though yet a Party loyalist, Freeman was often conflicted. Known as undisciplined and controversial by the CP hierarchy, he missed publication deadlines, engaged in sexual dalliances, and harshly criticized his peers, particularly those he deemed insufficiently proletarian. A prime mover of the first American Writers Congress, he once shouted down Kenneth Burke (1897-1993) after the noted poet’s presentation of “Revolutionary Symbolism in America.” Still, Freeman rebelled, often bitterly, against the Party’s later 1930s cultural program, one guided by the Soviet doctrine of socialist realism. By 1937, the brutal realities of the Moscow trials and executions shook Freeman. In 1939 Freeman was expelled, his An American Testament cited by leadership as a defense of Trotskyism.

Briefly, Freeman returned to his earlier position with the ACLU, and in 1943 published his novel Never Call Retreat, a fictionalized but only a slightly veiled account of his experiences in the revolutionary movement. In 1947 his final volume, The Long Pursuit, was published. Freeman served as publicity director of the Poets Theatre in 1948 and then worked through the early 1960s in public relations. For the remainder of his life, Freeman retained the progressive ideals that led him to the Party years earlier.

Freeman, Joseph. The Soviet Worker. New York, NY: Hyperion, 1931.

Freeman, Joseph. An American Testament: A Narrative of Rebels and Romantics. New York, NY: Farrar & Rinehart, 1936.

Aaron, Daniel. Writers on the Left. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1961.

Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front. New York: Version, 1997.

Wald, Alan M. Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Left. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

Joseph Freeman Papers, 1920-1965. Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Columbia University. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/archival/collections/ldpd_4079704/