This fall, the Hoover Institution Library & Archives acquired a new increment to the papers of Joseph Freeman, the American writer, editor, and journalist who is best known for his work as co-founder and editor of The New Masses, an influential Marxist journal that ran from 1926 to 1948 and had close ties to the Communist Party USA. The journal published works by many notable twentieth-century writers and poets such as Upton Sinclair, Langston Hughes, and Ernest Hemingway. The new addition to Freeman’s papers includes manuscripts, correspondence, and notes. The bulk of the manuscripts were written while Freeman was living in Mexico in the 1950s. Of particular interest is a manuscript titled simply “Survey,” which includes Freeman’s autobiographical notes of his time living in Moscow in the 1920s. Also in the collection is Freeman’s request to the US printing office for a transcript of the testimony he gave during the House of Un-American Activities hearings.
Originally from Ukraine, Freeman was born 1897 to a Jewish family. His family fled Ukraine in 1904 to avoid persecution and pogroms carried out by the Russians. Settling in Brooklyn, Freeman’s family remained vehemently anti-tsar and pro-communist; Freeman started publishing political and socialist commentary when just a teenager. After graduating from Columbia University in 1919, he launched a long career as a writer, editor, and journalist—a career that would take him across the globe and put him into contact with central communist figures in the United States, Mexico, and the Soviet Union.
The latest increment to the Joseph Freeman collection was formerly in the care of his late wife, Charmion von Wiegand, the daughter of journalist Karl H. von Wiegand, whose collection is also housed at the Library & Archives.
