Alden Whitman

Alden Rogers Whitman (October 27, 1913 – September 4, 1990) was an American journalist who served as chief obituary writer for The New York Times from 1964 to 1976.

In that role, he pioneered a more vivid, biographical approach to obituaries, some based on interviews with his subjects in advance of their deaths.

Whitman was also the target of a McCarthy-era investigation into communists in the press.

Whitman was born in 1913 on his father's farm in New Albany, Nova Scotia.

From age two, he lived in his mother's native Connecticut, where both parents taught high school.

He showed early interest in journalism, contributing to the local Bridgeport Post-Telegram at 15.

"It was like somebody opening up the heavens," Whitman recalled.

Activism, another lifelong theme, became evident in college.

Whitman began his Harvard studies in 1930 as a member of the Socialist Club and Party, then edged leftward to the communist-led National Student League.

"The zenith of Communist influence in the United States occurred in the years from 1930 to 1946, when ... Mr. Browder's party, laying claim to native radicalism, attained a membership of 100,000 and, through a network of friendly organizations, exerted a considerable effect on American affairs."

Whitman's biography mirrored this history.

He had ventured into communism as a "native" radical contending with the Great Depression, and worked diligently within the "network of friendly organizations."

In February 1933, he eloped, "an act," he later interpreted, "of adolescent revolt."

His parents withdrew financial support and helped him get a job with a local manufacturer.

There, under the sway of union orators, he joined the Communist Party.

After graduating in 1935, Whitman wrote full-time for the Bridgeport Post-Telegram, but was fired that fall "for attempting to organize a chapter of the American Newspaper Guild."

The union-friendly Bridgeport Sunday Herald took him in.

"That was a real writing paper," said Whitman.

"That's where I learned to write."

Eighteen months later, however, his organizing activities ran afoul of a major local employer, General Electric, and he was back on the street.

In 1938, Whitman left his estranged wife and two young children in Bridgeport and followed his future wife to New York City.

There, he worked "hand-to-mouth" for a series of Communist-linked, issue-focused groups.

Internally, these were conceived as a "United" or "Popular Front" embracing multiple, home-grown leftist constituencies.

However, Congress would later label all of the organizations "Communist fronts" and call Whitman to account.

As he outlined in public testimony, Whitman began at the National Committee for People's Rights, a labor advocacy group; then assisted Anna Rochester with a book on farm poverty for International Publishers; wrote anti-Hitler speeches for a veterans organization; raised money on behalf of the North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy; served as press agent at Films for Democracy, which aimed to produce leftist movies with Hollywood appeal; and edited cables for Soviet news agency TASS.

With the Soviet-German non-aggression pact of August 1939, the Communist Party turned against the war, and Whitman followed suit, joining the New York Peace Committee.

Finally, he worked at the American Committee for the Protection of Foreign Born, a legal defense group for immigrants.

When the last of these positions lost funding, in late 1941, Whitman resumed local journalism, this time as a copy editor ("copyreader" was the term at the time ).

He started at The Buffalo Evening News, then, in 1943, joined the New York Herald Tribune, where he remained for more than eight years, often working the overnight "lobster shift."

In 1946, the Communist Party expelled Browder and repudiated the coalition strategy.

In turn, by 1948, anti-communists within the Newspaper Guild pushed Whitman out of his organizing role and the paper's ownership began to root out communist influence in the newsroom.

Under questioning by the United States Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security in 1956, he acknowledged his affiliation with the Communist Party USA but refused to name other party members.

The ensuing eight-year legal battle over contempt of Congress ended with all charges dismissed.

Like many of his colleagues, Whitman remembered the paper, which folded in 1966, with pride: "We got out an intelligent, well-written, well-edited paper—the best in the city, better than the gray Times—and we did it with great professional eclat and had a good time doing it."

Alongside some ten other party members at the Tribune, Whitman also worked behind the scenes, as he recalled, "doing what good Communists were expected to do—to be active in building the union."

But the political mood was changing.

Decades later, in his obituary for former U.S. Communist Party leader Earl Browder, Whitman looked back at the period he himself was most active in the party:

"It was a fully considered step," Whitman stated in 1984, "and one I've never regretted. Through my membership and because of it, I have, I hope, been able to make some contribution to the fulfillment of the promises of the Declaration of Independence."

Upon saving enough to resume college the following year, Whitman wrote his senior thesis on "Strategies and tactics of the Communist Party in the United States."

Whitman's communist beliefs often got in the way of his journalism career.