"James Weinstein, 1926–2005:

Wealthy US Publisher With a Socialist Dream"

Godfrey Hodgson, London Guardian

The wealthy New York socialist, journalist and publisher James
Weinstein, who has died of brain cancer at the age of 78, was a
maverick of the American left, who liked to call himself a
"Groucho Marxist". Once a communist, he left the party in 1956,
dis-illusioned with the atrocities of Stalinism, and campaigned
for a new American socialism which he saw as returning to the
country's radical tradition that had been forced into a "long
detour" by the 1917 Russian revolution.The heir to a Manhattan real estate fortune, Weinstein had a
number of distinctly non-socialist traits and tastes, including a
sharp sense of humour, a valuable collection of Mexican art and a
liking for late-night games of a version of poker called Texas
Hold 'Em. A pupil of the great liberal historian Richard
Hofstadter, he published a number of influential books, but his
great influence came from the magazine, In These Times, which he
founded in 1976, edited and subsidised.

He once had a memorable exchange with the African-American writer
Lorraine Hansberry, author of A Raisin In The Sun, about money.
Hansberry argued that her own family fortune was dirty money that
she did not want to touch. Weinstein replied: "Money doesn't get
dirty; it's what you use it for that gets it dirty. If you have
money and you're using it for the right things, use it."

Weinstein was born in Manhattan, where his father was a
successful investor with leftwing ideas. As a child, he
remembered listening to radio reports from the Spanish civil war.
He was an undergraduate at Cornell University, in upstate New
York, until his career was interrupted (as he put it) by a hitch
in the US navy, where he "rose to the rank of electrical
technician's mate, second class", and then dropped out after one
year at Columbia University law school.

After working at various electronic companies, where he was also
a union organiser, he returned to Columbia to take a master's
degree under Hoftstadter.

Before collecting his doctorate, however, Weinstein moved to
Madison, Wisconsin, where he wrote two books on the progressive
era and worked as an editor at the journal, Studies On The Left.
By this time, he had been through the double drama of joining and
quitting the Communist party, and of being caught up in the
McCarthy era, and, in particular, in the trial of Julius
Rosenberg, who was executed as an alleged spy for the Soviet
Union in 1953.

Weinstein always claimed that his only contact with Rosenberg was
when he gave him a lift as a friend of a friend, and that
Rosenberg did not utter a single word. However, that did not stop
the FBI from trailing him; he claimed that when he eventually saw
his FBI file, it was more than 2,000 pages long. He was also
subpoenaed to a hearing by Senator Joe McCarthy.

Despite having left the Communist party — and unlike many former
New York leftists who ended up as neo-conservatives — Weinstein
devoted the rest of his life to trying to resurrect a viable
American left which he considered to have been destroyed by the
detour of many American socialists and progressives into
communism.

In 1966, he ran for the US Congress as an independent on the
Upper West Side of Manhattan. When he lost, he moved to San
Francisco, where he founded the magazine Socialist Revolution,
later renamed Socialist Review, and a bookshop called Modern
Times. In 1974, he moved briefly to England and taught at the
University of Warwick, but he finally settled on Chicago as the
best place for his efforts. San Francisco was too, well,
Californian, and New York too sectarian.

Weinstein arrived in Chicago at a time when the city's politics
were being transformed by the breakdown of Mayor Richard Daley's
Cook County machine and the advent of the black mayor Harold
Washington. Weinstein soon became the only white member of the
elite African American Original 40 Club.

One of his great themes was that the US had many "little lefts"
but no left. Critics admired his 1967 study, The Decline Of
Socialism In America, as brilliant and original. Christopher
Lasche said it "cast the entire history of the American leftwing
in a new light". Weinstein and many others considered his last
book,
The Long Detour (2003), to be his best.

In it, he delved into the early history of American radicalism in
self-help associations of many kinds, and in the progressive
tradition of resistance to corporate dominance. He argued that
the collapse of communism in Europe had made it possible to
recreate a broad based and realistic American radical movement
that could bring together concerns about corporate
account-ability, environmental dangers and human rights.

At the time of his death, he was working on plans for a leftwing
think-tank, and shortly before he died he received the Studs
Terkel Award, commemorating his friend Studs, who said, "We need
people like Jim Weinstein more than ever because we must remember
the past in order to understand the future".

Weinstein is survived by his wife Beth Maschinot, and by two
children of an earlier marriage.

[James Weinstein, socialist, journalist and publisher, born July
17 1926; died June 16 2005.]