Eugene Lyons

Eugene Lyons in 1940.

Eugene Lyons (1898–1985) was an American journalist and writer. A fellow traveler of the Communist Party in his younger years, Lyons became highly critical of the Soviet Union after having lived there for several years as a correspondent of United Press International. Lyons is remembered by many as a biographer of President Herbert Hoover.

Biography

Early years

Eugene Lyons was born July 1, 1898 to a Jewish family in the town of Uzlyany, now part of Belarus but then part of the Russian empire. His parents were Nathan Lyons and Minnie Privin. He grew up on the East side of New York City among the teeming and odoriferous tenements of Sidney Kingsley’s Dead End.

"I thought myself a 'socialist' almost as soon as I thought at all," Lyons recalled in his memoirs. As a youth Lyons attended a Socialist Sunday School on East Broadway, where he had sang such socialist hymns as "The Internationale" and "The Red Flag." He later enrolled as a member of the Young People’s Socialist League, the youth section of the Socialist Party of America (SPA).

In 1916, Lyons enrolled in the College of the City of New York before transferring to Columbia University the next year. During his school years he worked as an assistant to an English teacher in an adult education course.

During World War I, Lyons was enlisted in the Students Army Training Corps, an adjunct of the United States Army. With the end of the war in November 1918, Lyons was demobilized and honorably discharged. He later recalled that on the day he removed his uniform wrote his very first story, a piece for Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and the Workers Defense Union which she organized on behalf of the Industrial Workers of the World. Lyons worked for the Workers Defense Union for some time, composing news releases for the socialist daily newspaper, The New York Call and other left wing publications. "It was a time of raids on radicals, 'Treat-'em-rough!' hooliganism, and mass deportations," Lyons later recalled.

Lyons then went to work as a reporter for the Erie Dispatch-Herald. He also worked briefly for the New York paper Financial America and writing copy in the publicity departments of two motion picture companies.

In the fall of 1920, with revolution in the wind in Italy and dreaming of becoming the next John Reed, Lyons made his way for Naples bearing credentials of the Federated Press news service and the monthly magazine The Liberator. En route he met another aspiring correspondent bearing identical credentials, Norman H. Matson, and the pair decided to spend the next six months sharing expenses in pursuit of their common goal. Versed in the ongoing case against the Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, Lyons made the pilgrimage to Nicola Sacco' native village of Torremaggiore, a town in which Sacco's older brother Sabino governed as mayor. Lyons' Italian experiences would later be put to use in his first book, The Life and Death of Sacco and Vanzetti, published in 1927 by the Communist Party-affiliated International Publishers, in which he argued the case for the pair's innocence.

An attaché of Soviet Russia's new Italian embassy approached Lyons with a suggestion that he might be used as a secret courier to Moscow owing to the greater likelihood that an American could traverse the dangerous frontier unmolested, but before this plan could be put into action, Lyons' radical predilections drew the attention of the Italian police. Lyons was arrested, escorted to the French frontier, and expelled from Italy.

Home in America, Lyons spent 1921 and most of 1922 in Boston working on behalf of the Sacco and Vanzetti defense effort, meeting with the pair frequently at their prison cells.

In the fall of 1922, Lyons became editor of Soviet Russia Pictorial, the monthly magazine of the Friends of Soviet Russia, an organization closely connected with the then-underground Communist Party of America. Lyons later recalled that "unhesitatingly, I cast my lot with the communists. I devoted the next five years largely to Soviet activities." Following the termination of Soviet Russia Pictorial in 1924, Lyons moved to a position writing for TASS, the official news agency of Soviet Russia.

Moscow years

Lyons' position as a correspondent for TASS lead to his gaining a similar position for United Press International as its Moscow correspondent — instead of reporting from the United States for the Soviet press, now he would write on Soviet events for an American audience. While Lyons never joined the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), he had close ties and was considered a fellow traveler of the organization. UPI thought that Lyons' political background and the close contacts it implied would give him and it an edge over its competition in delivering news from the Soviet Union. Lyons remained the UPI's man in Moscow from 1928 until 1934, years which gradually transformed him from a friend of the Soviet state and communism into a tireless and fierce critic of both.

Lyons was initially supportive of the Soviet regime and found the actions it took against its internal opponents to be credible. In his coverage of the 1928 Shakhty Trial of mining engineers, regarded by historians today a precursor to the show trials of the late 1930s, Lyons could not rid himself of his belief that those charged must be guilty of something even as he recognized the trial to be an unequal contest in which those accused were denied an opportunity to fully defend themselves.

UPI's choice of Lyons paid dividends when on November 22, 1930, he was summoned to the Kremlin for a surprise interview with Joseph Stalin, a move to eliminate rumors circulating in the West about the Soviet leader's demise. Lyons thus became the first Western journalist to interview Stalin and his report of the encounter represented a major "scoop" that was widely reported throughout the American press. Lyons later recounted his meeting with the Soviet leader, a conversation which was conducted in Russian with the occasional help of a translator:

"One cannot live in the shadow of Stalin's legend without coming under its spell. My pulse, I am sure, was high. No sooner, however, had I stepped across the threshold than diffidence and nervousness fell away. Stalin met me at the door and shook hands, smiling. There was a certain shyness in his smile and the handshake was not perfunctory. He was remarkably unlike the scowling, self-important dictator of popular imagination. His every gesture was a rebuke to the thousand little bureaucrats who had inflicted their puny greatness upon me in these Russian years. * * *

'Comrade Stalin,' I began the interview, 'may I quote you to the effect that you have not been assassinated?'

He laughed. At such close range, there was not a trace of the Napoleonic quality one sees in his self-conscious camera or oil portraits. The shaggy mustache, framing a sensual mouth and a smile nearly as full of teeth as Teddy Roosevelt's, gave his swarthy face a friendly, almost benignant look.

'Yes, you may,' he said, 'except that I hate to take the bread out of the mouth of the Riga correspondents.'"

Lyons' interview with Stalin ran two hours in duration, joined midway by Commissar of Defense Kliment Voroshilov. Lyons' cable detailing the interview was widely reproduced across America and was hailed by an editorial in the New York Daily News as "the most distinguished piece of reporting of this year, if not the last four or five years."

On the heels of his journalistic coup, Lyons returned to the United States for a brief visit in March 1931, making a lecture tour to 20 Northeastern cities organized by UPI. While he already had begun to harbor doubts about the myriad of problems and violence associated with the Russian revolution and was torn between "looming doubts and waning loyalties," Lyons found himself engaged to speak mostly before businessmen's luncheon clubs. "Looking into their self-satisfied faces, I could forget my doubts," Lyons later recalled. He delivered a blinkered defense of the revolution to his assembled audiences.

"Had I remained in America permanently I might have evolved a new, if badly scarred and patched, enthusiasm," Lyons wrote in his memoirs. "I might have ended by contributing high-minded lies to the New Masses and slept happily ever after." But Lyons did return, where he found an ever-increasing level of terror exerted by the GPU against recalcitrant peasants, anyone suspected of secretly holding gold or foreign currency, and those accused of economic crimes such as sabotage:

"The newspapers were filled with the same braggadocio and threats. Victories, successes, triumphs, but the plan for spring sowing far behind; three shot for sabotaging the rabbit-breeding plans; enginemen and signalmen shot for counter-revolutionary negligence in connection with a disaster on the Kursk line; eighty-four arrested for forging bread cards. Another internal loan was being oversubscribed — 'voluntary' contributions of a month's wages or two months' wages. Another blast-furnace started in Magnitogorsk. Poincaré-War and agents of imperialism and dastardly kulaks and Left-Right and Right-Left deviators and secret Trotskyists and heil Stalin and 2 + 2 = 5."

Doubts gradually overwhelmed revolutionary faith.

Lyons was among the earliest writers to criticize New York Times Moscow reporter Walter Duranty for journalistic dishonesty. Writing about Duranty in 1941, Lyons would say, "Of all his elliptical writing, perhaps his handling of the famine was the most celebrated. It was the logical extreme of his oft-repeated assertion that 'you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs.' Now he made his omelet by referring to the famine as 'undernourishment.'"

Ironically, Lyons himself had earlier played a role in the concealment of the 1932-33 Holodomor in Ukraine when he denounced journalist Gareth Jones as a liar for his initial reports of the famine. Jones had published the first significant reports of the massive famine in the Manchester Guardian, only to have the veracity of his reporting denounced by Lyons, Duranty, and others in the Moscow press corps. Lyons later self-critically recalled, "throwing down Jones was as unpleasant a chore as fell to any of us in years of juggling facts to please dictatorial regimes-—but throw him down we did, unanimously and in almost identical formulas of equivocation. Poor Gareth Jones must have been the most surprised human being alive when the facts he so painstakingly garnered from our mouths were snowed under by our denials."

Return to America

After his return to the United States early in 1934, Lyons wrote two books about his Moscow years. The first was a rather subdued work entitled Moscow Carrousel, published in 1935, which was followed by another far more outspoken account of events, Assignment in Utopia, published in 1937.

One of those directly influenced by his writing was George Orwell. In his seminal novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell borrowed a chapter title from Assignment in Utopia, "Two Plus Two Equals Five." Lyons recalled that this was a common slogan in the USSR during the drive to complete the first Five-Year Plan in just four years; Orwell adapted it as a metaphor for official totalitarian lying.

Following his return from the Soviet Union, Lyons very briefly flirted with the Trotskyist movement. Leon Trotsky himself initially praised Assignment in Utopia but later became quite critical of Lyons as the journalist moved to the political right.

After completion of his two thick books of his Moscow experience and a biography of Stalin, Lyons set to work on a full length study of CPUSA influence on American cultural life during the 1930s, entitled The Red Decade. The book did not prove popular at the time it was published in 1941, however, since soon after it saw print the Soviet Union was invaded by Nazi Germany and became an American ally in World War II. The book's fame came only later, during the era of McCarthyism, when its title became a byword for the popular front alliance between communists and liberals during the 1930s.

In later years Lyons' political views shifted to the right, and for a time he was editor with Reader's Digest, Plain Talk and National Review. He was also involved with Radio Free Europe.

During the early 1940s and the Second Red Scare which followed World War II, Lyons was a frequent contributor to the popular press on anti-communist themes, targeting liberals if Lyons deemed them inadequate in their denunciations of the Soviet regime. In The American Mercury Lyons was critical of first lady Eleanor Roosevelt for lending her prestige to a gathering of the American Youth Congress, a united front joint organization bringing together communist and socialist student groups. In 1947, Lyons attacked former Vice President Henry Wallace as an appeaser of the Soviet dictatorship who refused to face up to the true nature of the regime.

Writing for the American Legion in 1950, Lyons accepted the premise that American government agencies had been infiltrated with Soviet spies. He also lauded the work of the House Committee on Un-American Activities for its work investigating the activities of the Communist Party and exposing communists in the government employ.

In addition to his work as a freelance journalist, Lyons was engaged as a biographer, publishing a widely-read biography of former President Herbert Hoover in 1964 and another on his first cousin, founder of NBC and chairman of RCA David Sarnoff, in 1966.

Lyons returned once again to the topic of Soviet communism in his final book, Workers' Paradise Lost. published in 1967.

Death and legacy

Lyons died on January 7, 1985.

His papers are housed in the Special Collections department of Knight Library at the University of Oregon in Eugene.

Works

• The Life and Death of Sacco and Vanzetti. New York: International Publishers, 1927.
• Modern Moscow. London: Hurst & Blackett,1935.
• Moscow Carrousel. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1935.
• Assignment in Utopia. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1937.
• Stalin, Czar of all the Russias. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1940.
• The Red Decade: The Stalinist Penetration of America. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1941.
• Our Unknown Ex-President: A Portrait of Herbert Hoover. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1948.
• Our Secret Allies: The Peoples of Russia. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1953.
• Herbert Hoover: A Biography. Garden City, NY: Doubleday,1964.
• David Sarnoff: A Biography. New York: Harper & Row, 1966.
• Workers’ Paradise Lost: Fifty Years of Soviet Communism: A Balance Sheet. New York: Funk and Wagnalls 1967.

External links

• Guide to the Eugene Lyons Papers, Knight Library, University of Oregon, Eugene. Retrieved July 19, 2010.
• "Stalin Laughs!", Time, December 1, 1930. Report of Lyons' interview with Stalin.