Harry Lewis Golden (May 6, 1902 – October 2, 1981) was an American writer and newspaper publisher.
Golden was born Herschel Goldhirsch (or Goldenhurst)[1] in the shtetl Mikulintsy, Austria-Hungary.[2] His mother Nuchama (nee Klein)was Romanian and his father Leib was Austrian.[3]
In 1904 Leib Goldhirsch, a former Hebrew teacher, emigrated to Winnipeg, Manitoba, only to move the family to New York City the next year and "became an editor of the Jewish Daily Forward."
For a time, Harry worked as a newspaper seller on the Lower East Side and could remember shouting out headlines about the Leo Frank case about which he later wrote a book.[4] As a teenager, he became interested in Georgism, and later spoke on its behalf.[1]
He became a stockbroker but lost his job in the 1929 stock market crash. Convicted of mail fraud because he had held onto funds entrusted and thereby caused a loss to investors, Golden served four[5] years in a Federal prison at Atlanta, Georgia and, decades later[6] President Richard M. Nixon gave Golden a full presidential pardon for the mail fraud conviction.[7]
In 1941, he moved to Charlotte, where, as a reporter for the Charlotte Labor Journal and The Charlotte Observer, he wrote about and spoke out against racial segregation and the Jim Crow laws of the time.[8] [9]
From 1942 to 1968, Golden published The Carolina Israelite as a forum, not just for his political views but also observations and reminiscences of his boyhood in New York's Lower East Side. He traveled widely: in 1960 to speak to Jews in West Germany and again to cover the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel for Life. He is referenced in the lyrics to Phil Ochs' song, "Love Me, I'm a Liberal": "You know, I've memorized Lerner and Golden."
His satirical "The Vertical Negro Plan,"[10] involved removing the chairs from any to-be-integrated building, since Southern whites did not mind standing with blacks such as at bank tellers' windows,[11] only sitting with them.
Golden reportedly[11] convinced a southern department store manager to put an "Out of Order" sign by the water fountain marked White; within three weeks all were drinking from the Colored-designated drinking fountain.
Calvin Trillin devised the Harry Golden Rule, which states that "in present-day America it's very difficult, when commenting on events of the day, to invent something so bizarre that it might not actually come to pass while your piece is still on the presses."[12]
Golden's books include three collections of essays from the Israelite and a biography of his friend, poet Carl Sandburg. One of those collections, Only in America, was the basis for a play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. He also maintained a correspondence with Billy Graham.
His Irish Catholic wife, the former Genevieve Gallagher, had predeceased him.[11]
Theodore Solotaroff addressed the "Harry Golden phenomenon" in "Harry Golden & the American Audience" in Commentary magazine, March 1961.[2]
Irving Howe compared Philip Roth's early novel Portnoy's Complaint to For 2¢ Plain in a critical review of Roth's novel in Commentary when Complaint was published in 1969.[13]
See also, "Carolina Israelite: How Harry Golden Made Us Care About Jews, the South, and Civil Rights" by Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett, The University of North Carolina Press, 2015.