I.F. Stone: The Compleat Newspaperman

Isadore Feinstein (1907-1989) took the not so Judaic-sounding nom de plume, I.F. Stone, to better navigate the secular shoals of big city journalism. But to his fans he was always reduced to his beloved nickname, Izzie. Indeed, in 1975, that liberal librarian Keith Doms of the Free Library of Philadelphia gave me permission to run a national competition for the best undergraduate journalism in the investigative tradition of this local boy who made himself good. Inevitably, the award was called the IZZIE.

I made only two phone calls to the master, one to ask his permission to make an award under the aegis of FLOP, and one to tell him the results. He was grandpa friendly on the first, unabashedly thrilled on the second. I had assembled a distinguished jury one Sunday morning at my house in Greenbelt Knoll—including the likes of Peter Binzen, late of the Inky, MOMA’s cinema man William Sloan, and Annenberg Dean George Gerbner.

We agreed unanimously to give the prize to the University of Arizona for its new monthly monitor of its state’s media, “The Pretentious Idea”. The ironic title derived from the editor of the Arizona Republic’s snooty response to students asking him for financial and moral support for the new publication. “What a pretentious idea,” he snapped, “students monitoring professionals.” Izzie loved the humble chutzpah of the students. But he seemed most pleased by the special praise given to an Atlantic City teacher/newspaper supervisor whose students uncovered fiscal hanky-panky in their school’s audiovisual department.

Alas, one of my best students from Annenberg was then running a new media department in Santa Rosa Junior College, and he inveigled me to spend the next year, 1975-76, as the visiting Andreini Fellow to shake up his troops with new media courses as well as by running a weekly FM radio series over KALW, San Francisco, “Museroom West,” whose epigraph was Ezra Pound’s adage, "Literature is News That Stays News”. (Another powerful motivation was my getting myself out of Philly during its Centennial celebration infestation with excessive colonial militiamen.)

So the Izzie stalled after its inaugural year. The Nation Magazine tried to revive it during the 90’s. And as late as last year that Izzie freak Danny Schechter was mulling a revival. Anyone who reads the new compilation, “The Best of I.F. Stone” (New York, Public Affairs Press, $23.95), would agree that we ought not to forget his example, however we decide to honor it.

Stone was a philosophy major at Penn, and (having endured my own stretch of academic boredom) I assumed he dropped out before graduation through ennui. Absolutely not, “but the atmosphere of a college faculty repelled me,” he conceded. When Penn finally got around to granting him an honoris causa bachelor’s hood, he raved about his professors of a half century before to the local press.

When they asked him how he felt about finally getting his B.A., his fey response was pure Izzie: “I got out of Phy Ed.” And here was a thinker who spent his retirement teaching himself Greek, so he could bring the same authenticity to his last book, "The Trial of Socrates” (1988) that he had brought to his relentless probing of America’s political institutions during one of its most dangerous eras.

But printer’s ink was early in his blood. “In the small town where I grew up Haddonfield, N.J., I published a paper at fourteen, worked for a country weekly and then as correspondent for a nearby city daily. I did this from sophomore year in high school through college, until I quit in my junior year.” (The Best of I.F. Stone, p.2) “While going to college I was working ten hours afternoons and nights doing combination rewrite and copy desk on the Philadelphia Inquirer, so I was already an experienced newspaperman making $40 a week—big pay in 1928.”

He claims to have become a radical in the ‘20’s while still in his teens, mostly from reading Jack London, Herbert Spencer, Kropotkin, and Marx. He was elected to the committee of the New Jersey Socialist Party before he was old enough to vote! He did publicity for Norman Thomas in his run for the Presidency in 1928, but, significantly, drifted away from political work because of his distaste for left wing sectarianism. He even has good words for Colonel McCormick of the Chicago Tribune because that man stood for something, unlike most publishers who, Stone contended, were really just running merchandising schemes.

When the Compass closed in November 1952, he decided to launch his own weekly four pager. He called it his “piggy-back launching”, using the mailing lists of PM, the Star, the Compass and of people who had bought his books—five in print by then. With two advance mailings he amassed 5,000 subscribers at $5 each. He praises the Government for never politically quibbling over his or Seldes second class mailing privileges. “The difference between the second-class rate and the cheapest third-class rate was the equivalent of my salary.” (p.4)

We think of his weekly as a one-man operation, but it was actually a two person business—his dancing partner wife Esther ran the business side and the circulation peaked at 20,000. And as radical as his journalism may have been, he was still an aesthete at heart, glorying over his beautiful Garamond type face, eschewing sensational headlines, but designing the page with discreet boxes and other graphics devices to order his thoughts. I can just picture him and Esther doing their twice weekly dancing stints, mulling over the next edition as they sweetly smooched.

It is marvelous to have him explain his journalistic tactics. Take his coup with the Atomic Energy Commission. In the first underground atomic test in the fall of 1957, the New York Times repeated the AEC line that it couldn’t be detected beyond 200 miles. Yet Izzie noted reports from Toronto, Rome and Tokyo saying the explosion had been detected in those distant places. Since Dr. Edward Teller and his crew at the Livermore Laboratory opposed a nuclear test ban agreement, they were eager to prove that underground tests could not be detected beyond their 200 mile limit.

Izzie filed away the press reports of long distance detection. Eisenhower’s disarmament chief Harold Stassen told Hubert Humphrey’s Senate Disarmament Subcommittee that a network of stations 1000 kilometers (580 miles) apart would police any nuclear test ban. The AEC repeated its 200 mile prediction, to undercut Stassen. Izzie called the AEC and reminded them of the Toronto, Rome and Tokyo reports. They promised to look into it while Izzie tracked down a seismologist at the Coast and Geodetic Survey.

The seismologist said he didn’t believe the Toronto, Rome and Tokyo stories, but that he knew for a fact some 20 U.S.stations had detected the explosion, one 2600 miles North of the Nevada test site in Fairbanks, Alaska, another 1200 miles East in Fayetteville, Arkansas. The Geodetic man asked Izzie why he was interested. When he cited the AEC, his informant clammed up. The AEC later said it had made an “inadvertent” error! And so it goes, when Izzie sniffs a story.

Perhaps most important for cadet journalists is his elegant explanation of how government press bureaucracies neuter potential critics—flattering them with free dinners with powerful figures, and so on. Izzie philosophizing on the dynamics of such tactics is worth the price of admission, not to mention his thoughtful rerun of those critical phases of our late twentieth century history in the pieces reprinted here.

And although inspired by George Seldes’earlier weekly “In Fact”, Izzie makes a point of how much harder it was to replicate their kind of journalism in the McCarthy Era. Seldes had enjoyed the backing of left wing unions during the Popular Front era, for example—which evanesced when he sided with Tito against Stalin. Izzie had to build his own circulation, one reader at a time.

One final note. I emigrated back to Northern California in 1982 to begin my second life as a free lance journalist. To my glee, I soon made my first masthead, as cultural reporter for the “San Francisco Business Journal”, next to the old faithful “Welcomat”, my most satisfying stretch of ink.

Except for one missed opportunity. When Izzie was scheduled to speak in the Hearst Lecture Series, I sent him a proposal that I assemble two of the Bay’s most vocal local lefties, Vincent Hallinan and Harry Bridges, for a sit down meal with him. “If you can find us some good dim sum place, you’re on!” Heh, you’d have to be sum dam dim if you’d couldn’t find such in San Francisco.

But I had made a special choice, the place where I had just very vocally mocked Veep George Bush over his 1984 campaign stumble of attacking Geraldine Ferraro for her feminism! Alas, the best laid plans of fans gang aft--kaput! His sister, Judy Stone, then the film critic of the San Francisco Chronicle used her family veto to cancel this slummy dimming—worried about her brother’s overextended heart. Yo, I still have the unending pleasure of his tasty prose. Nothing dim about that. Still, that cudda been a what a bin!