Noted historian and magazine editor James Weinstein is dead at 78

. Posted June 19, 2005.

James Weinstein, a noted historian and longtime publisher and editor of the progressive magazine In These Times, died June 16 at his home in Chicago. He was 78 years old and had been battling brain cancer for several months.

Weinstein began his long and varied career, like many leftists of his generation, as a member of the Communist Party in the late 1940s and early 1950s. He soon found himself a target of the witch hunts of that era. Those troubles began in 1949, when he gave a ride to friend of a friend, a man who "didn't utter a word" for the entire trip. This passenger turned out to be Julius Rosenberg, who would later be executed in perhaps the most sensational and controversial espionage case in American history.

After Rosenberg's arrest, Weinstein was swept up in the investigation. Although never charged with any crime, he was trailed by FBI agents, who amassed some 2,000 pages of files on the most minute details of his life, and was later subpoenaed to testify before a congressional hearing held by Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy.

He left the Communist Party in 1956, following public revelations about the atrocities of the Stalin era, and later became a harsh critic of both the party and the Soviet system. Many of his books and articles were devoted to showing that the rise of the American Communist Party after the Russian Revolution fatally compromised what had been a promising American socialist movement. Weinstein also urged fellow historian Ron Radosh to research the Rosenbergs and defended Radosh and Joyce Milton's conclusion that Julius was a spy. But unlike many of his former colleagues who turned to neo-conservatism, he remained a committed and forceful advocate of socialism, holding out the prospect of an authentically American left that could embrace democratic principles of old Socialist Party.

"Jim Weinstein was one of the intellectual leaders of the American progressive movement," said Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). "At a time when more and more of our media is controlled by huge corporate conglomerates, it is no small achievement that he successfully published a well-respected independent magazine, In These Times, for decades. Jim will be sorely missed by those of us who are fighting for a world of peace and justice."

Weinstein was born on July 17, 1926, and grew up in Manhattan. He became interested in politics at the age 10, while listening to radio dispatches from the Spanish Civil War with his parents. By his freshman year in high school, he was already active in left-wing endeavors, attending the last American Youth Congress in Washington.

He joined the Communist Party in 1948, although he was never an unquestioning follower. Weinstein often described himself as a "Groucho Marxist," whose world view was influenced by Duck Soup as well as by Das Kapital, and his subversive sense of humor did not always go over well with his more doctrinaire comrades. "I never took the dogmatic stuff very seriously," he recently explained, "so within the party I was always known as a somewhat untrustworthy person."

Weinstein attended Cornell University, but his undergraduate career was interrupted by a stint in the U.S. Navy, where he attained the rank of electronic technician's mate 2nd class. He graduated from Cornell in 1949 with a degree in government, and then attended Columbia University Law School for one year before dropping out. After working as a tester and troubleshooter at various electronic companies--where he was active in the the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (AFL) and then the International United Electrical Workers (CIO)--he returned to Columbia in 1956, earning a master's degree in history under the noted historian Richard Hofstadter.

Weinstein's heart was not, however, in being an academic. He dropped out of graduate school before earning a doctorate and in 1960 moved to Madison, Wisconsin, where he wrote two seminal books on the Progressive Era and worked as an editor for the scholarly journal Studies on the Left. In 1966, he ran unsuccessfully for Congress as an independent in New York's old 19th Congressional District on Manhattan's West Side. The following year he moved to San Francisco, where he founded Socialist Revolution (later renamed Socialist Review) and the Modern Times bookstore. In 1974, he moved to England, where he taught at the Centre for the Study of Social History, but once again he grew tired of academia.

The scion to a Manhattan real-estate fortune, Weinstein had determined early on to pour his wealth into projects that helped other people. In an interview shortly before his death, he recalled a recurrent argument he had during the 1950s with fellow leftist Lorraine Hansberry, the future author of Raisin in the Sun. Like Weinstein, Hansberry had come from a wealthy family, but the two friends disagreed on what to do with their fortunes. "Her position was, 'It's dirty money, I don't want to touch it," he recalled. "And mine was, 'Money doesn't get dirty: It's what you use it for that gets it dirty. If you have the money and you're using it for the right things, use it!'"

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