Harry Freeman (journalist)


Harry Freeman was a 20th-Century American journalist, best known for serving in the New York bureau of TASS. The magazine editor Joseph Freeman was his brother.

Background

Freeman's family came from Piratin near Lviv, part of the Poltava district in the Ukraine, then in the Russian empire. His parents, Stella and Isaac Freeman, were Jewish and lived in the Pale of Settlement as per anti-semitic laws of the Tsarist regime. His parents worked as shopkeepers.
Freeman graduated from Cornell University with a degree in history.

Career

In his 1952 memoir, Whittaker Chambers called Freeman "the best mind that I was to meet among the American Communist intellectuals." Freeman brought Chambers to work at the Daily Worker newspaper: both had recently joined the Communist Party, Freeman was "writing foreign news." Chambers met his wife when he was covering the 1926 Passaic Strike with Freeman. Freeman and Chambers signed a petition with colleagues that asked the Central Committee of the Communist Party to have Louis Engdahl removed as editor. Later, Freeman took over the copy desk, while Chambers succeeded him on foreign news. In 1929, he succeeded his brother at TASS and lived with his wife Vera Schaap and his brother Joseph in an apartment on Henry Street in Brooklyn Heights, rented from Eugene Lyons. Chambers recalled Freeman's guests included Sender Garlin, Abe Magill, James S. Allen, Joseph North, Anna Rochester, Grace Hutchins, Nadya Pavlov, and Kenneth Durant. When Freeman moved to TASS, Garlin took over on the Daily Worker's copy desk.
During the 1929 factionalism in the Party, Freeman was a Lovestoneite
Freeman also worked at the Brooklyn Daily Eagle newspaper and the New Masses magazine. He also contributed to Pravda. He was also a United Nations correspondent and from 1946 to 1948 served as vice president of the Foreign Press Association.

McCarthyism

Freeman appeared before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee on February 21, 1956, on the scope of Russian intelligence operations in America. He invoked the Fifth Amendment when declining to answer many questions. He did say that he had never spied against the U.S. and had no association with the Communist Party since August 1941. His testimony was the first of many Americans at TASS, coming in response to a claim by defector Yuri Rastvorov in 1954.

Later years and death

In 1976, Freeman received the Order of Friendship award from the Soviet Union.
Freeman died at age 72 on January 7, 1978.