Louis Fischer
Louis Fischer, the son of a fish peddler, was born in Philadelphia on 29th February, 1896. After studying at the Philadelphia School of Pedagogy (1914 to 1916) he became a school teacher.
In 1917 Fischer joined the Jewish Legion, a military unit in Palestine. On his return to the United States Fischer worked for a news agency in New York. In 1921 Fischer went to Germany and began contributing to the New York Evening Post as a European correspondent. The following year he moved to Moscow and in 1923 began working for The Nation.
While in the Soviet Union Fischer published several books including Oil Imperialism: The International Struggle for Petroleum (1926) and The Soviets in World Affairs (1930). He also covered the Spanish Civil War and for a time was a member of the International Brigade fighting General Francisco Franco. In 1938 Fischer returned to the United States and settled in New York. The following year he published Stalin and Hitler (1939) on the
Fischer continued to work for The Nation and wrote his autobiography, Men and Politics (1941). He left the journal in 1945 after a dispute with the editor, Freda Kirchway, over the journal's sympathetic reporting of Joseph Stalin. His disillusionment with Communism, although he was never a member of the Communist Party, was reflected in his contribution to The God That Failed (1949). Fischer now wrote for anti-Communist liberal magazines such as The Progressive.
Other books by Fischer include The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (1950) Stalin (1951), Hitler (1952) and Lenin (1964). Louis Fischer also taught about the Soviet Union at Princeton University until his death on January 15, 1970.
Primary Sources
(1) Louis Fischer resigned from The Nation after a dispute with the editor, Freda Kirchwey, over the reporting of the situation in the Soviet Union. Kirchwey replied to this charge in the journal published on 2nd June 1945.
We assume that he is charging The Nation with a bias in favor of Russia and of communism. We suppose he considers that to be our "line." We suppose he is charging us with ignoring, out of "expediency," the bad behavior of the Soviet Union; of failing out of policy to denounce the Soviet power for suppressing "small, weak states". We can only answer quite flatly that he is wrong. We say what we believe. What we believe is very different from what Mr. Fischer believes. We believe Russian policy is primarily a security policy, not an imperialist one; it can become dangerous to the world, therefore, only if Russia decides that the other major powers are plotting against it. It would be dishonest to pretend that we think Russia's foreign policy is as great a threat to the basic purpose of destroying fascism and its political and economic roots as is the foreign policy of Britain and the United States.
