The Subversive Socialist Journalism of I.F. Stone

The ongoing debate 29 years after he died about whether the radical journalist I.F. Stone was a Soviet spy is yet another embarrassing partisan dustup that makes leftists look soft on Soviet Communism and rightists look hostile to good journalism.

The question is also secondary—like emphasizing Babe Ruth’s pitching. I.F. Stone carved out his reputation most dramatically, week by week, from 1953 through 1971, as he and his wife Esther produced his four-page Washington newsletter. This Mom-and-Pop newspaper operation peddled truth, demanded justice, and defied convention as journalism turned corporate, conformist, consumerist. 

Stone believed that radicals should be iconoclasts—rejecting truisms, left and right. He believed journalists should be independent—beholden to no bosses to bully them, no sources to massage them, no peers to pressure them. And he proved that defending democracy required vigilance, range, and creativity. 

“Izzy” Stone crusaded for his egalitarian Marxist socialism and Peter Kropotkin anarchism by partnering with his wife in an eminently capitalist small business. Churning out their mischief-making pamphlet weekly, they paid their bills on time, keeping a balanced bottom line. 

Stone’s subversive liberalism was so freewheeling that if, in a nearly seven-decade career which championed black rights and workers’ dignity, free speech and advocacy journalism, he initially succumbed to KGB charms, it only makes his subsequent denunciations of Soviet oppression and New Left hooliganism more impressive.  ...