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Harry Lewis Golden (May 6, 1902 – October 2, 1981) was an American writer and newspaper publisher.
In 1904 Leib Goldhirsch, a former Hebrew teacher, emigrated to Winnipeg, Manitoba, only to move the family to New York City the next year and "became an editor of the The Forward."
For a time, Harry worked as a newspaper seller on the Lower East Side and could remember shouting out headlines about the Leo Frank case about which he later wrote a book.Golden, Harry A Little Girl is Dead p. vi As a teenager, he became interested in Georgism, and later spoke on its behalf.
He became a stockbroker but lost his job in the 1929 Great Depression. Convicted of mail fraud because he had held onto funds entrusted and thereby caused a loss to investors, Golden served four1929-1933 years in a Federal prison at Atlanta, Georgia and, decades laterDecember, 1973 President Richard M. Nixon gave Golden a full presidential pardon for the mail fraud conviction.
From 1942 to 1968, Golden published The Carolina Israelite as a forum, not just for his political views but also observations and reminiscences of his boyhood in New York's Lower East Side. He traveled widely: in 1960 to speak to Jews in West Germany and again to cover the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel for Life. He is referenced in the lyrics to Phil Ochs' song, "Love Me, I'm a Liberal": "You know, I've memorized Max Lerner and Golden."
His satire "The Vertical Negro Plan," involved removing the chairs from any to-be-integrated building, since Southern whites did not mind standing with blacks such as at bank tellers' windows, only sitting with them.
Golden reportedly convinced a southern department store manager to put an "Out of Order" sign by the water fountain marked White; within three weeks all were drinking from the Colored-designated drinking fountain.
Calvin Trillin devised the Harry Golden Rule, which states that "in present-day America it's very difficult, when commenting on events of the day, to invent something so bizarre that it might not actually come to pass while your piece is still on the presses."Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. NAL Books, 1987, p. 79.
Golden's books include three collections of essays from the Israelite and a biography of his friend, poet Carl Sandburg. One of those collections, Only in America, was the basis for a play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. He also maintained a correspondence with Billy Graham.
Irving Howe compared Philip Roth's early novel Portnoy's Complaint to For 2¢ Plain in a critical review of Roth's novel in Commentary when Complaint was published in 1969.David Remnick, "Into the clear" (profile of Roth), The New Yorker, May 8, 2000, p. 85. Retrieved 2013-03-21.
See also, "Carolina Israelite: How Harry Golden Made Us Care About Jews, the South, and Civil Rights" by Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett, The University of North Carolina Press, 2015.
Desegregation
In 1941, he moved to Charlotte, where, as a reporter for the Charlotte Labor Journal and The Charlotte Observer, he wrote about and spoke out against racial segregation and the Jim Crow laws of the time.Pressman Fuentes, Sonia, "Harry Golden & the Coat", The Jewish Magazine, October 1998.
Personal
His Irish Catholic wife, the former Genevieve Gallagher, had predeceased him.
Critical attention
Ted Solotaroff addressed the "Harry Golden phenomenon" in "Harry Golden & the American Audience" in Commentary magazine, March 1961.
Bibliography
Awards
External links
Categories: 1902 Births, 1981 Deaths, 20th-century American Essayists, 20th-century American Jews, 20th-century American Journalists, 20th-century American Male Writers, Activists For African-american Civil Rights, American Anti-racism Activists, American Male Essayists, American Male Journalists, American Male Non-fiction Writers, American People Convicted Of Mail And Wire Fraud, American People Of Ukrainian-jewish Descent, American Satirists, American Stockbrokers, Emigrants From Austria-hungary To The United States, Georgists, Jewish American Anti-racism Activists, Jewish American Essayists, Jewish American Journalists, Jewish American Non-fiction Writers, Jews From Galicia, People From The Kingdom Of Galicia And Lodomeria, People From Ternopil Oblast, People Pardoned By Richard Nixon, Ukrainian Jews, Writers From Charlotte, North Carolina
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