Gleason, Leverett Stone

GLEASON, LEVERETT STONE (1898-1971). Born in Massachusetts to a family with deep progressive roots—his mother’s father had funded the abolitionist movement in Kentucky and Ohio, while his father’s father had devoted much of his practice to the free treatment of Black veterans after serving as a U.S. Army surgeon during the Civil War—Gleason attended Phillips Academy Andover and then Harvard University for a year before dropping out to fight in France during World War I. After studying at the Sorbonne with the American Students’ Detachment, which trained college students of military leadership, he returned to Boston and got his start in publishing at the Open Road for Boys, a magazine promoting outdoor life.

At 34, Gleason moved to New York City and participated in the birth of the American comic book industry as advertising manager at Eastern Color Printing and then United Features Syndicate. Once he started his own publishing house, he made it big with titles like Daredevil, Captain Battle, and Crime Does Not Pay, which chronicled the real-life adventures of convicted criminals and ushered in a new genre of comic. His management philosophy reflected his pro-Labor convictions; while most comics artists and writers in New York were paid poorly and had little control over their content, Gleason established a profit-sharing arrangement with his editorial team, giving them partnership status and substantial autonomy.

Daredevil Battles Hitler (1941), a bold call for the U.S. to enter World War II at a time when many Americans preferred to stay out, hinted at Gleason’s anti-fascist politics. In fact, he was a prolific publisher of progressive magazines, including Friday (1940-41), a Left-leaning imitation of Life, Reader’s Scope (1944-49), an alternative to the conservative Reader’s Digest, and Salute (1946-48), an appeal to the veteran readers of Yank. Lev Gleason Publications also reprinted anti-fascist tracts such as Johannes Steele’s When and How the War Will End! (1943), Sabotage! The Secret War Against America (1943) by Michael Sayers and Albert E. Kahn, and The Incredible Tito! Man of the Hour (1944) by Howard Fast.

After Pearl Harbor, Gleason reenlisted in the Army, serving stateside until 1943. Following the war, his activism—in particular, his service on the executive board of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee—came under scrutiny by the U.S. government and the mainstream press. The House Un-American Activities Committee named the Committee, formed to aid anti-Franco refugees of the Spanish Civil War, a “communist-front organization,” and the FBI initiated a decade-long investigation into Gleason’s life and work. For refusing to name names, Gleason and fellow board members were convicted of contempt of Congress. Nevertheless, he persisted in pursuing his political ideals through his publications, including the New Castle News (1945-51), a Democratic alternative to the Republican New Castle Tribune in Chappaqua, New York, where he lived and proved a thorn in the side of local luminaries like the Reader’s Digest’s DeWitt Wallace.

Lev Gleason Publications collapsed in 1956, following a decline in the popularity of comic books and a concerted attempt to censor their content. Gleason retired to a quiet life on Cape Cod, making ends meet by selling patriotic home ornaments. But he remained an activist at heart. “My greatest satisfactions have been doing what I can politically to make ours a better country and the world a little more peaceful,” he wrote a year before he died. “I have been strongly opposed to the Vietnam War since the outset. And I do hope for better things. Probably because of the efforts of today’s youth, especially the militant ones, who have more guts than we had.”

Dakin, Brett. American Daredevil: Comics, Communism, and the Battles of Lev Gleason. Toronto: Chapterhouse, 2020.

Lev Gleason Publications. Comicbooksdb.com https://web.archive.org/web/20160303213336/http://comicbookdb.com/publisher.php?ID=1396