Background

Benjamin was born in Germany on November 30, 1891 to unknown parents. He was adopted as an infant by Michael and Rada Stolberg, Russian-Jewish immigrants to Germany who manufactured fine chocolates. His father was a strict disciplinarian and their relationship grew increasingly strained during Stolberg's adolescence.

With financial assistance from his father, Stolberg immigrated to America in 1908 and thereafter had little contact with his adoptive parents.

Education

Stolberg received a rigorous education at the Realgymnasium in Munich, from which he graduated in 1908.

Stolberg first studied medicine at Washington University in St. Louis, but he was ill-suited to the profession and dropped out in 1909 to begin a five-year vagabondage through urban and industrial America.

Relying for support upon his savings and what he could earn teaching in Boston charity schools, Stolberg entered Harvard in 1914, majoring in philosophy. He finished his course work ahead of his class in 1917 and spent most of 1918 and 1919 as a student of applied sociology at the University of Chicago (during which time he lived at Hull House). He received the M. A. in 1919.

Career

Stolberg lectured on social work at the universities of Oklahoma and Kansas during the next two years and spent 1921-1922 as head of vocational placement for the Chicago public schools. At this time he began to lecture on social and philosophical issues and to write interpretive articles on the labor movement and its politics for the Chicago Tribune.

During 1922 and 1923 he was acting editor of the Journal of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, but he increasingly turned his attention to labor reportage for the Nation, the New Republic, and the New York Evening Post. Stolberg moved to New York in 1923 and thereafter, with the exception of a few months as associate editor of the Bookman in 1928-1929 and as a reviewer of nonfiction for the Post in 1932-1933, he supported himself entirely as a free-lance journalist. Stolberg thought social journalism the most "strategic spot" from which to interpret history and society.

In the 1920's he sympathetically reported on the insurgent movement within the United Mine Workers and lent his personal support to efforts to unionize the sleeping-car porters and textile workers. Stolberg served as chairman of the New York chapter of the League for Industrial Democracy (LID) from 1925 to 1927.

In early 1931 he severed his connection with the LID because, as he wrote to Norman Thomas, the LID was "increasingly a purely liberal organization. " A political maverick throughout the 1930's, Stolberg found the New Deal wholly inadequate and he attacked the National Recovery Administration for its planlessness and intellectual confusion.

In the mid-1930's Stolberg was among the circle of independent, radical intellectuals who were sympathetic to the ideas, if not the political organization, of Leon Trotsky and his followers; he had long admired Trotsky as a "superb journalist" for his commentaries on world politics.

Stolberg joined in Trotsky's defense after the beginning of the Moscow purge trials in 1936; and in April 1937 he was a member of the commission of inquiry, headed by John Dewey, that exonerated Trotsky at Trotsky's home near Mexico City.

In a series of controversial and widely read articles entitled "Inside the CIO, " he detailed the extensive influence of the communists in several of the newly organized industrial unions. The series marked the beginning of a new phase in Stolberg's career in which his anti-Stalinism and his critique of liberal social planning were fused with an attack on the New Deal and the CIO that grew increasingly conservative over the next decade.

His influence as a critic of what he considered the "totalitarian liberalism" inherent in New Deal "state capitalism" reached its widest audience in 1939 and 1940 with the publication of several articles on the labor movement, the communists, and the Roosevelt administration in the Saturday Evening Post and the New York Herald Tribune.

By the end of the 1940's Stolberg had become a frequent contributor to the American Mercury, a defender of Robert A. Taft and a supporter of Herbert Hoover. Stolberg lived for many years in the Chelsea Hotel in New York City, where he died.

Achievements

• Benjamin Stolberg has been listed as a notable author, jouurnalist by Marquis Who's Who.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The economic consequences of the new deal / by Benjamin Stolberg and Warren Jay Vinton

    (Copyright, 1935 First Edition By Benjamin Stolberg and Wa...)

  • Tailor's progress. The story of a famous union and the men who made it

    (Stolberg, Benjamin, Tailor's Progress: The Story Of A Fam...)

  • The Story of the Cio
  • The reminiscences of Benjamin Stolberg (Columbia University oral history collection)

Politics

A Marxist of independent views, Stolberg was critical of both the communists, whom he considered sectarian and reckless, and the "reactionary leadership" of the American Federation of Labor.

Views

His essays and articles - on education, psychology, politics, and literature, as well as on the labor movement - were marked by sophistication, knowledgeability, and caustic wit.

Stolberg thought social journalism the most "strategic spot" from which to interpret history and society.

Never friendly to the popular-front mood of the major liberal journals of opinion and increasingly alarmed at what he considered the statist character of the New Deal, Stolberg shifted his labor reportage from the pages of the Nation to the more conservative Scripps-Howard newspapers in January 1938.

Personality

Although he suffered periodic writing blocks and moments of depression, he was regarded as a lively conversationalist and had a wide circle of friends in the labor movement and the New York intellectual community.

Connections

He married Mary Malvina Fox, who was also active in LID affairs, on January 7, 1925; they had one son. The marriage ended in divorce in 1929, and Stolberg did not remarry.

Wife:

Mary Malvina Fox

colleague:

Warren Jay Vinton