Eugene Lyons

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For other people named Eugene Lyons, see Eugene Lyons (disambiguation).

Eugene Lyons in 1940.

Eugene Lyons (July 1, 1898 – January 7, 1985), born Yevgeny Natanovich Privin (

fellow traveler of Communism in his younger years, Lyons became highly critical of the Soviet Union after several years there as a correspondent of United Press International. Lyons also wrote a biography of President Herbert Hoover
.

Background

Eugene Lyons was born on July 1, 1898, in Uzlyany, then part of the Russian Empire and now part of Belarus, to a Jewish family. His parents were Nathan Gebelow and Minnie Privin. He immigrated with his parents to the US in 1907, and he grew up among the tenements of the Lower East Side of New York City. "I thought myself a 'socialist' almost as soon as I thought at all," Lyons recalled in his memoirs. As a youth, he attended a Socialist Sunday School on East Broadway, where he sang socialist hymns such as "The Internationale" and "The Red Flag". Later, he enrolled as a member of the Young People's Socialist League, youth section of the Socialist Party of America (SPA).

In 1916, Lyons enrolled in the College of the City of New York before he transferred to Columbia University the next year. During his school years he worked as an assistant to an English teacher in an adult education course.[1]

Career

Early career

During World War I, Lyons was enlisted in the Students Army Training Corps, an adjunct of the

US Army. With the end of the war in November 1918, Lyons was demobilized and honorably discharged.[2] He later recalled that on the day he removed his uniform, he 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.[3] Lyons worked for the Workers Defense Union for some time and composed news releases for the Socialist daily newspaper 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.[4]

Lyons then went to work as a reporter for the Erie, Pennsylvania Dispatch-Herald.[5] He also worked briefly for the New York paper Financial America and at writing copy in the publicity departments of two motion picture companies.[6]

In the fall of 1920, with revolution in the wind in Italy and dreaming of becoming the next

Sacco and Vanzetti, Lyons made the pilgrimage to Sacco's native village of Torremaggiore, where Sacco's older brother Sabino was the mayor.[8] Lyons's Italian experiences were later put to use in his first book, The Life and Death of Sacco and Vanzetti, which was published in 1927 by the Communist-affiliated International Publishers
in which he argued the case for the pair's innocence.

In Italy, Lyons was approached by an official of the Soviet Union's new Italian embassy to become a secret courier. The Soviets thought that as an American, he could cross frontiers safely, but before anything came of that, Lyons was arrested by the Italian police as a radical and expelled into France.[9]

Back in America, Lyons spent 1921 and most of 1922 in Boston working for the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti. He met the pair frequently in prison.[10]

In the fall of 1922, Lyons became editor of Soviet Russia Pictorial, the monthly magazine of the

TASS
.

USSR

Lyons' work for TASS led to his becoming the

fellow traveler.[11]
The UP 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 UP's man in Moscow from 1928 to 1934, which gradually transformed him from a friend of the Soviet state and communism to a tireless and fierce critic of both.

Lyons was initially supportive of the Soviet regime and found its repressive actions credible. He covered the

show trials
of the late 1930s. Lyons saw that the trial was unfair and that the accused were denied an opportunity to fully defend themselves, but he still believed that they must have been guilty of something.

UP's choice of Lyons paid dividends in 1930. On November 22, he was summoned to the

Riga correspondents.'[13]

(Charles Malamuth served as assistant to Lyons and accompanied him to the interview with Stalin.[14][15]

)

Lyons' interview with Stalin ran two hours in duration, joined midway by Commissar of Defense Kliment Voroshilov.[16] 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."[17]

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 UP.

blinkered defense of the revolution to his assembled audiences.[19]

"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

kulaks and Left-Right and Right-Left deviators and secret Trotskyists and heil Stalin and 2 + 2 = 5.[21]

His doubts gradually overwhelmed his faith in the revolution.

Lyons was among the earliest writers to criticize

1932 famine
. Writing about Duranty in 1941, Lyons said, "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 played a role in concealing

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 that "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."[22]

United States

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, Moscow Carrousel. Published in 1935, it was followed by a far more outspoken account of events, Assignment in Utopia, which was published in 1937.

Lyons' writing directly influenced

totalitarian
lying.

Following his return from the Soviet Union, Lyons very briefly flirted with Trotskyism.[24] Leon Trotsky gave credit to Assignment in Utopia for revealing the Stalin administration's systematic use of antisemitism for political legitimacy; he judged the book “interesting, though not profound”.[25] Already in 1938, however, Trotsky rebuked Max Shachtman for giving a platform to Lyons, who had developed links to White Russians, and by 1939 he was more interested in addressing contradictions and splits in the CPUSA than the “individual sweatings” of Lyons.[26]

After two books on his Moscow experience and a biography of Stalin, Lyons set to work on a full-length study of CPUSA influence on American cultural life in the 1930s, The Red Decade. The book was not popular when first published in 1941, however, as 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 in the 1930s.

In later years, Lyons' political views shifted to the right, and for a time, he was editor with

American Jewish League Against Communism.[27]

In the early 1940s and the

Second Red Scare that followed World War II, Lyons was a frequent contributor to the popular press on anticommunist themes and criticized liberals whom he deemed 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 front joint organization bringing together Communist and Socialist student groups.[28] In 1947, Lyons attacked former Vice President Henry A. Wallace as an appeaser of the Soviet dictatorship who refused to face up to the true nature of the regime.[29]

Writing for the

House Committee on Un-American Activities for investigating the covert activities of the CPUSA and for exposing alleged Soviet spies in the Government's employ.[31]

Since 1951 Lyons was the chairman of the American Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia.[32][33][34]

In addition to his work as a freelance journalist, Lyons wrote biographies. He published a widely-read biography of former President

RCA and founder of NBC
.

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

Death and legacy

Lyons died age 86 on January 7, 1985, in New York City.

His papers are housed at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and in the Special Collections department of Knight Library at the University of Oregon in Eugene.

In Agnieszka Holland's biographical thriller Mr. Jones (2019), Lyons was portrayed by Edward Wolstenholme.

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.[35]
  • Assignment in Utopia. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1937.[23]
  • 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.

See also

References

  1. ^ Eugene Lyons, Assignment in Utopia. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1937; pg. 8.
  2. ^ Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, pg. 9.
  3. ^ Lyons notes that the Workers Defense Union had its offices in the building of the Rand School of Social Science, in New York City. Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, pg. 10. For an advertisement touting the Workers Defense Union, see back cover of Dance of the Ten Thousand, Archived March 3, 2016, at the Wayback Machine New York: Rand School of Social Science, December 3, 1918.
  4. ^ Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, pg. 10.
  5. ^ "Moscow Scoop," Time, December 8, 1930
  6. ^ Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, pg. 12.
  7. ^ Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, pg. 21.
  8. ^ Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, pg. 24.
  9. ^ Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, pp. 25–27.
  10. ^ Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, pg. 34.
  11. ^ a b Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, pg. 37.
  12. ^ The original typescript of Lyons' cable containing his interview with Stalin, signed off by Stalin as "in general, more or less correct," may be seen in the Eugene Lyon Papers at the University of Oregon.
  13. ^ Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, pp. 384–385.
  14. ^ "La preuve qu'il ne s'agit pas de philanthoropie". Ce Soir newspaper. January 28, 1953. Retrieved December 3, 2016.
  15. ^ "Joan London Papers: Finding Aid". Online Archive of California: Huntington Library. 2000. Retrieved December 3, 2016.
  16. ^ Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, pp. 387, 390.
  17. ^ Cited in Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, pg. 391.
  18. ^ Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, pp. 397, 400.
  19. ^ Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, pp. 398–399.
  20. ^ Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, pp. 414–415.
  21. ^ Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, pp. 415–416.
  22. ^ Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, pg. 575.
  23. ^
    New English Weekly
    , June 9, 1938, garethjones.org
  24. ^ Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), p. 149.
  25. ^ Trotsky, Leon (1938). "Twenty Years of Stalinist Degeneration". Marxist Internet Archive.
  26. ^ Trotsky, Leon (1940). "In Defense of Marxism - From a Scratch to a Danger of Gangrene". Marxist Internet Archive.
  27. ^ Krause, Allen (2010). "Rabbi Benjamin Schultz and the American Jewish League Against Communism: From McCarthy to Mississippi". Southern Jewish History. Southern Jewish Historical Society: 167 (quote), 208 (fn25 on founding). Retrieved March 21, 2020.
  28. ^ Eugene Lyons, "Mrs. Roosevelt's Youth Congress," The American Mercury, vol. 49 (April 1940), pp. 481–484.
  29. ^ Eugene Lyons, "Wallace and the Communists," The American Mercury, vol. 65, pp. 133–140.
  30. ^ Eugene Lyons, "Who's Hysterical?" American Legion Magazine, vol. 48 (March 1950), p. 20.
  31. ^ Eugene Lyons, "The Men the Commies Hate Most," American Legion Magazine, vol. 49 (October 1950), pp. 14–15.
  32. ^ Fischer, George (1951). Russian Émigré Politics. Free Russia Fund. p. 82.
  33. ^ Eugene Lyons
  34. ^ Американский комитет освобождения от большевизма и советская эмиграция в Европе
  35. ^ Moscow Carrousel in libraries (WorldCat catalog)

External links

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