North, Joseph

NORTH, JOSEPH (1904-1976). Crusading journalist of the Daily Worker, editor of the New Masses, and, later, of World Magazine, Joseph North was born in Ukraine, immigrating to Chester, Pennsylvania with his family when he was under a year old. North was a child laborer in a local mill and shipyard before studying journalism at the University of Pennsylvania. Work as a reporter for The Chester Times followed, ultimately bringing him to New York City, the John Reed Club, and the office of the Daily Worker. At the behest of poet and journalist A.B. Magill, North and was among those active in the 1934 re-founding of the New Masses, as it transformed from a monthly to a radical arts weekly. He wrote for the magazine and intermittently served as an editor. In his autobiography, North wrote of the staff of the magazine: “Its writers must carry their notebooks and pencils to the surging picket lines…I agreed to be one of its four working editors to fashion it as the times required.” Referring to the New Masses office as “Mecca,” North wrote of the many drawn to the Sixth Avenue loft, particularly “the artists, blessed men whose eyes seemed to pierce walls as well as hypocrisy and cant.”

In this period, North officially joined the Communist Party and began writing for various Party publications. With the start of the Spanish Civil War, he was sent to Spain as a front-line war reporter for the Daily Worker. While his work was perilous, North came under harsh criticism by peers for his decidedly pro-Communist journalism, being called out in particular by Ernest Hemingway while both were reporting on the war. By 1938, he was back at his seat on the editorial board of the New Masses. Three decades later, as he was anthologizing some of the treasures of the magazine, North stated that “the history of the 1930s was rewritten in the 1940s,” citing the alterations done in the face of the red scare beginning in the latter part of the post-war years. He described the magazine as “the conscience of the literary world in that time.” North worked closely with contributing writers, including Bertolt Brecht, Langston Hughes, Theodore Dreiser, Louis Aragon, Dorothy Parker, George Bernard Shaw, Ralph Fox, Meridel Le Seuer, Lincoln Steffens, Maxim Gorky, Ralph Ellison, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, Erskine Caldwell, and Richard Wright.

Through the decades, North, time and again, left his editor’s chair for the road, reporting from active battle zones. In the 1940s, he was within the European theatre of war. In the 1950s, it was Korea and in the 1960s Vietnam, dispatching news from the heart of battles. Upon his final return to New York, North focused his attention on Word Magazine, the Sunday supplement of the Daily World, for the remainder of his life.

North, Joseph. No Men Are Strangers. New York: International Books, 1958.

North, Joseph, editor. New Masses: An Anthology of the Rebel Thirties. New York: International, 1969.

Spartacus-Educational https://spartacus-educational.com/Joseph_North.htm