John L. Spivak
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
John Louis Spivak (June 13, 1897 - September 30, 1981), an American socialist (and eventually communist) reporter and author was most concerned with the problems of the working class and the spread of fascism in Europe and the United States from the 1920s through the 1940s.
Contents |
[edit] Early Life and Career
As a boy Spivak worked in a number of industrial factories in his hometown of New Haven, Connecticut. Landing his first job as a reporter for the New Haven Union. He moved to New York where he worked at the Morning Sun, Evening Graphic, and The Call, the paper of the American Socialist Party. His first major story came when he covered the West Virginia coal strikes that broke out after the end of World War I. He then served briefly as a reporter and bureau chief in Berlin and Moscow for the International News Service and upon his return to the U.S. became a feature writer for leftist newspapers and magazines such as the Communist Party's Daily Worker, Ken, and the New Masses. American Conservative writer Phillip Jenkins states Spivak was an operative of the Soviet NKVD.
Spivak traveled throughout the South in the early 1930s interviewing prison camp officials and photographing camp atrocities and their corresponding punishment records. His novel, Georgia Nigger, depicting the brutality of prison camp chain gangs was serialized in the Daily Worker.
[edit] Accusations of 'Business Plot'
His 1935 exposé in the communist party's New Masses charged a congressional committee with deliberately suppressing evidence of an offer made to Maj. Gen. Smedley D. Butler by Wall Street financiers to lead a military coup against the U.S. government and replace it with a fascist regime.
[edit] Muckracking
As a writer whom fellow muckraker Lincoln Steffens described as "the best of us," he also investigated the anti-Semitic and financial activities of Charles E. Coughlin, the Catholic radio priest who founded the Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak, Michigan. Most of Spivak's work, however, was dedicated to supporting communism, exposing capitalism, fascism and underground Nazi spy groups in Central America, Europe, and the U.S. He wrote several "muckraking" books about fascism and nazism.
With the rise of McCarthyism, Spivak spent much of the 1950s and 1960s writing under several pen names for men's magazines including Cavalier, Esquire, Fury, Male, and Man to Man. Intent on writing his autobiography, he and his wife, Mabel, retired to their farm in Easton, Pennsylvania. Spivak died in 1981, six months after his wife died. They had been married for 64 years and were survived by a daughter and grandson.
[edit] Writings
- Devil's Brigade (Brewer and Warren, Inc., 1930)
- Georgia Nigger (London, Wishart & Company, 1933)
- Plotting America's Pogroms (The New Masses, 1934)
- America Faces the Barricades (Covici Friede Inc., 1935)
- Europe Under the Terror (Simon & Schuster, 1936)
- Secret Armies: the New Technique of Nazi Warfare (Modern Age Books, 1939)
- Honorable Spy: Exposing Japanese Military Intrigue in the United States (Modern Age Books, 1939)
- Shrine of the Silver Dollar (Modern Age Books, 1940)
- Sex, Vice and Business (writing as Monroe Fry) (Ballantine Books, 1959)
- A Man In His Time: An Autobiography (Horizon Press, 1967)
[edit] External links
- Syracuse University. "John L. Spivak Collection". http://library.syr.edu/digital/guides/s/spivak_jl.htm. Retrieved on 2008-15-12.
- New York Times. "John L. Spivak Obituary". New York Times. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C07EED91539F930A35753C1A967948260. Retrieved on 2008-15-12.
