Early years in journalism

Uninterested in finishing his graduate studies at Harvard or practicing law, Alsberg moved back to New York City to write. He sent an early play to Paul Kester, who recommended it to Bertha Galland. He sold a short story, "Soirée Kokimono", to The Forum in 1912; the story was selected for the following year's Forum Stories compilation.^[3]

Abram Isaac Elkus, a friend of Alsberg's brother Carl and a strategist for Woodrow Wilson's presidential campaign, sent Alsberg to London to investigate claims that American-made goods were cheaper abroad than in the U.S. due to Republican-imposed tariffs. Alsberg wrote up the results of his investigation in an article published in the New York Sunday World. The Wilson campaign used it to buttress their platform's call to reduce tariffs.^[3]

Alsberg began writing for the New York Evening Post in 1913,^[6] as well as its sister publication The Nation. His 1914 article for The Masses criticized the churches that turned away homeless during the brutal blizzard that hit New York on March 1.^[3] Alsberg went to London where he began working as a roving foreign correspondent for The Nation, New York World, and London's Daily Herald.^[6][8]

In August 1916, Alsberg was appointed personal secretary and press attaché to Elkus, who had been appointed U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire; they traveled on the Oscar II to Constantinople via Copenhagen. Alsberg took charge of the embassy's efforts to aid Armenians and Jews, which put him in contact with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC). When the U.S. declared war on Germany in April 1917, Turkey broke off diplomatic relations and the American embassy officials left. On his return to the states, Alsberg met with Secretary of State Robert Lansing to brief him on conditions in Constantinople and offered a plan for separating the Ottoman Empire from the German Alliance, which Lansing passed on to Woodrow Wilson. The next day, former Ambassador Henry Morgenthau suggested a similar plan to Lansing. A mission to Turkey consisted of Morgenthau and Felix Frankfurter (then an assistant to the Secretary of War), with Alsberg advising them on conditions and issues.^[9]

In 1917, Alsberg taught a course on the socialist-inspired cooperative movement at the Rand School of Social Science, while again writing for Evening Post and The Nation. In the Evening Post, Alsberg disputed the authenticity of the Sisson Documents, claiming that they were forgeries, which was later confirmed by historians. In Jan 1919, Alsberg was secretary of the Palestine Restoration Fund Campaign's National Finance Commission, and wrote for The Maccabaean, the official organ of the Zionist Organization of America. Later in 1919, Alsberg returned to Europe as a foreign correspondent for The Nation.^[10] He attended the Peace Conference in Paris as attaché to the Zionist delegation. While there, Alsberg reconnected with the JDC which needed volunteers to assess and provide relief to destitute Jews in Central and Eastern Europe.^[2]

Work with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee

While volunteering with the JDC, Alsberg's passport listed his occupation as "food relief" for the American Relief Administration. Alsberg described the period after the Russian Revolution and World War I as "the emergence of many minor nationalities, all imbued with grand imperialistic passions, fighting for their independence in a condition of economic wretchedness and moral degradation".^[2] New nations were formed after the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires.

He spent four years in various countries, including the "bandit-ridden Ukraine". His first stop was the new country of Czechoslovakia, where he set up programs in Prague to help refugees. Alsberg also continued his reporting for The Nation, the London Herald, and the New York World, bringing the anti-Semitism he was observing to international attention. Some of his articles were noticed by American authorities for their sympathy to Bolshevik, anarchist, and radical ideas, and he was observed for some time by Allied military intelligence.^[2]

In April 1919, the JDC transferred him to Poland, though he went reluctantly, concerned about abandoning his work in Prague. In June, he returned briefly to Prague, then went to Paris where he witnessed the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. For the rest of the year, Alsberg traveled throughout eastern Europe, reporting on Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania, and the Balkans. His experiences and observations made him abhor violence.

Travels in Russia

In September 1919, Alsberg arrived at Kamianets-Podilskyi, which was being fought over by the Bolsheviks, the White Army, and the Ukrainian Independence Movement. He went to Odessa and on to Kiev with Allied military officers, where he reported on the pogroms, the terrorism by the Cossacks, and the atrocities of the Bolsheviks.^[2]

Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman

In January 1920, Alsberg traveled north, intending to make his way to Moscow; "a believer in the utopia promised by a classless society, [he] wanted to witness and write about those ideals made manifest". After weeks trying to get into Soviet Russia, he finally succeeded in May. In August, he accompanied Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman (both of whom had been deported to Russia from the United States the previous year) on a six-week expedition to collect historic materials for the Museum of the Revolution. Their accommodations and treatment by the Soviets were luxurious and opulent, but Alsberg was able to get away from the controlled tours to see the disparity between what they were being told and the conditions of the general public. He conceded that "Russia has not now a democratic form of government in any sense of the word", but was still swayed by the framework of the "necessity of extreme measures in order to save the revolution", comparing it to U.S. actions during war when the government found "habeas corpus, free speech, and such-like refinements...superfluous".^[2] In Poltava, Ukraine, Emma Goldman acted as interpreter for Alsberg while he interviewed local Soviet officials.^[11] In Goldman's autobiography, she noted that Alsberg was particularly affected by the stories that the townspeople in Fastov told them of the pogroms.^[12]

For his travels with Goldman and Berkman, Alsberg had obtained written permission from the Soviet Union Foreign Office's Cheka and from a high-ranking Soviet official to travel on the expedition, but did not get a special visa from the local Moscow Cheka. The Foreign Office assured him the Moscow Cheka visa was not needed.^[2] But during their travels, orders were sent out to arrest Alsberg for travelling in Russia without having obtained permission from the Moscow Cheka, and he was taken into custody in Zhmerynka.^[13] Alsberg managed to get the police agent who escorted him to Moscow drunk on the trip. Arriving at the police station in Moscow carrying the agent, Alsberg set the unconscious body on the desk and said, "Here is the man you sent out to find me."^[14]

The following year, Alsberg accompanied the Bolshevik delegation to the Russo-Polish peace talks in Riga, and he wrote about the signing of the armistice. J. Edgar Hoover, head of the newly formed Bureau of Investigation (now the FBI), received voluminous reports on Alsberg due to his involvement with the Bolsheviks, his friendship with Goldman and Berkman, and because he was a Jew. Alsberg continued his association with and work for the JDC, working in Italy with refugees.^[15]

In Feb 1921, Alsberg returned to Russia. He was in Moscow during the Kronstadt Rebellion, an event which brought him to condemn the Bolshevik regime in the article "Russia: Smoked Glass vs. Rose-Tint" in The Nation. American Max Eastman responded in The Liberator, calling it "journalistic emotionalizing" and declaring Alsberg was "a petit-bourgeois liberal". Alsberg's article was reprinted in New York Call and reported on the front page of the New York Tribune.^[15] In all, Alsberg made six trips to Russia, carrying some $10,000 in cash to distribute to Jews in need. In one village, when they heard that soldiers were approaching, village elders dressed Alsberg in an old coat and skullcap as a disguise; he escaped on a ferry to Rumania while the soldiers' bullets missed their target.^[4]

American Relief Administration in Russia, 1922

Alsberg left Russia for Germany in May 1921.^[15] In September he went to Mexico to observe and write about the presidency of Álvaro Obregón following the Mexican Revolution. His articles accused the U.S. State Department of "putting into effect a private and unofficial imperialism of its own in Latin America" — accusations which were debated in major newspapers across the U.S. After the famine of 1921, the JDC sent Alsberg back to Russia to help set up trade schools and agricultural colonies for Jewish families.^[16]

JDC history and theater work

The JDC hired Alsberg to write a history of their organization in 1923, which was his first paid work for them. Alsberg submitted a draft in the summer of 1927. Although it was never published, Susan Rubenstein DeMasi wrote: "it still remains as perhaps the most exhaustive account of pre-World War II Central and Eastern European Jewry ever written."^[17]

Provincetown Playhouse

Alsberg became involved in the theater during the early 1920s. In 1924, Alsberg obtained the English translation rights to S. Ansky's The Dybbuk, written in Yiddish. His adaptation ran at the off-Broadway Neighborhood Playhouse.^[4] The New York Times called his adaptation "a triumph", naming it one of the ten best plays of the 1925–1926 season.^[18] Alsberg would continue to earn from productions of his adaptation of The Dybbuk throughout his life.^[19]

Alsberg was a director of the Provincetown Playhouse company for the 1925–1926 season, during which he translated and adapted Turandot with Isaac Don Levine. He was associate director of Abraham's Bosom, which won Paul Green a Pulitzer Prize, and producer of Him by e.e. cummings. George Gershwin asked Alsberg to act as librettist on an opera adaptation of The Dybbuk, to open at the Metropolitan Opera, but was unable to obtain the musical rights.^[18]

International Committee for Political Prisoners

Cover of Letters from Russian Prisons

Alsberg was particularly concerned about the conditions of political prisoners in Russia.^[20] He tried to involve the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in his cause, but their charter limited them to domestic issues, so ACLU co-founder Roger Baldwin and Alsberg formed the International Committee for Political Prisoners (ICPP), enlisting people such as Frankfurter, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, W.E.B. Dubois, and Carlo Tresca. (Baldwin later described the ICPP as similar to Amnesty International.) Alsberg contributed many documents to and edited Letters from Russian Prisons, and insisted that the title page list all committee members without singling out any individual contributors. The book was intended to bring to international attention the mistreatment that political prisoners in Russia suffered. Some committee members resigned, feeling that the book was too anti-Soviet. Alsberg later gathered material for and edited Political Persecution Today (Poland) and The Fascist Dictatorship (Italy) for the ICPP. Alsberg left the committee by 1928.^[21]

Alsberg spent several years traveling in Europe and working on his own writing,^[22] including his autobiography which he never finished. In March 1934, he joined the publications division of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) where his first assignment was editing America Fights the Depression, a book about the Civil Works Administration's accomplishments.^[23] He then took on editing two magazines for the agency.^[6]

Project leadership

Alsberg came to the Writers' Project with a "visionary sense of its potential to join social reform with the democratic renaissance of American letters".^[20] His original vision for the project was to produce a guide for each major region of the country, but changed the plans to a guide for each state due to political pressure.^[26] Alsberg insisted that the American Guide Series be much more than an American Baedeker; the guides needed to capture the whole of American civilization and culture and celebrate the diversity of the nation. He required that each state project include ethnography with particular attention to Native Americans and African Americans,^[27] and that the front third of every guide contain essays on local culture, history, economics, etc.^[20]

Alsberg appointed fourteen women as state directors of the project,^[28] and 40% of FWP employees were women. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was an enthusiastic supporter of the FWP.^[27] Two of the writers Alsberg personally recruited to the Writers' Project were John Cheever and Conrad Aiken.^[29]

Alsberg felt the American Guide Series needed to be supplemented with books about the people of the country. With this in mind, the project published ethnic studies such as The Italians of New York (in both English and Italian), Jewish Landsmanschaften of New York (in Yiddish), The Armenians of Massachusetts, and The Swedes and Finns of New Jersey. One of Alsberg's letters describes the approach that he wanted the ethnic studies writers to take:^[30]

"Get these people loosened up and get them to write about how people in these various groups live. One example of an interesting family and its development from immigrant through first and second generations is worth a whole volume of generalizations based on statistical data."

Reception

Although the first books in the American Guide Series published under the auspices of the project—Idaho, Washington: City and Capital, and Cape Cod Pilot—were met with praise, the furor that accompanied the release of Massachusetts damaged the reputations of the project and Alsberg. A reporter published a story decrying the Massachusetts guide because it spent forty-one lines discussing the Sacco-Vanzetti case, while only giving nine lines to the Boston Tea Party and five to the Boston Massacre. Other newspapers jumped on the bandwagon to smear the Writers' Project (and the Roosevelt administration by association). Senators demanded investigations. More scrutiny found that the guide had a number of passages that appeared to be pro-labor, and the book was banned by several Massachusetts mayors.^[31] Ralph M. Easley, representing a group called the National Civic Federation, complained in a letter to President Roosevelt that the Writer's Project was "dominated by Communist sympathizers whose principal interest was political agitation".^[32] After these complaints, WPA administrators placed a worker in the Writers' Project central office to censor "subversive" material.^[33]

When Alsberg threw a cocktail party to celebrate the publication of the Washington guide, Alsberg and the Writers' Project were attacked on the Senate floor by Mississippi's Senator Bilbo in a tirade because a woman from his own state had been invited to a party that had both white and black guests. Bilbo later had his comments expunged from the Congressional Record.^[34]

Poster celebrating the American Guide series

Alsberg struggled with the project's tension between providing jobs (relief) and creative works.^[20] The American Guide Series was a necessary product to justify the project's existence, but Alsberg sympathized with the many writers who chafed at being confined to writing guidebooks and secretly allowed some project writers to focus on their own creative writing. One of those writers, Richard Wright, used the time to work on his first novel, Native Son, which would become a bestseller when published in 1940. Alsberg also quietly attempted to put out a literary magazine, but the single issue was subject to bickering and resistance from the Writers Union (Stalinists, who insisted that the magazine's editors were Trotskyites). Knowing the Writers' Project was a target of the Dies Committee, Alsberg abandoned the magazine effort and also ended the creative writing program.^[35]

Dies Committee

The Dies Committee was a special investigation committee established by the House Committee on Un-American Activities and chaired by Martin Dies Jr. Aiming to discredit the New Deal by attacking individual projects, Dies claimed that one-third of the Writers' Project's members were Communists. Despite inaccuracies in statements from the committee being widely reported in the press, Alsberg's superiors refused him permission to issue any statements refuting the charges. Alsberg was called to testify before the committee December 6, 1938, after months of requesting a hearing.^[32] In Alsberg's testimony, he emphasized his anti-Communist views and stated that he had to "clean up" the Writer's Project, going so far as to threaten to shut it down at the mention of strikes. Unfortunately, these statements reinforced the committee's suspicions that many Communists were part of the project.^[36] Within the project, liberals felt Alsberg had been too deferential toward the committee, while conservatives felt the committee had gone too easy on Alsberg.^[32] Numerous co-workers said his testimony was brilliant, but Alsberg wanted to resign afterward.^[37] Despite Dies's compliments to Alsberg on his testimony, the committee condemned the Writers' Project.^[38]

In 1939, Congress cut the WPA budget, and 6,000 were laid off from Federal One. The FWP was then investigated by Clifton Woodrum's House subcommittee on appropriations, which attacked a letter to the editor Alsberg had written ten years previously about conditions in prisons. The Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1939 cut funding and required the FWP, now renamed the Writers' Program, to obtain state sponsorship for its projects. The new head of the WPA, Francis C. Harrington, demanded Alsberg's resignation. Alsberg refused to resign immediately, continuing to work on state sponsorships and works in progress. When Alsberg continued working past the 1 August deadline that Harrington set, he was fired.^[39][40] The liberal press was indignant, with The Nation writing "The dismissal looks too much like a living sacrifice on the altar of Messrs. Dies and Woodrum and the Red-baiting they represent".^[41]

Under Alsberg's leadership, the Writer's Project had produced over 200 books of more than 20 million words.^[32] Lewis Mumford praised the guidebooks as "the finest contribution to American patriotism that has been made in our generation".^[27]