Joseph Fels Barnes

Joseph Fels Barnes (1907-1970) was an American journalist.

Career

Barnes graduate from Harvard University in 1927. He was managing editor and president of the Harvard Crimson. He studied at the London School of Slavonic Studies.^[1]

He worked on staff in Russia and China at the Institute of Pacific Relations from 1932 to 1934. He was a journalist for the New York Herald Tribune based in Moscow, Berlin, and New York from 1934 to 1948, interrupted by service as director of the Office of War Information overseas branch and Voice of America radio show (1941-1944). He became part-owner (with Bartley Crum) and editor of PM, which soon went out of business, replaced by the New York Star, where he continued as editor until it folded in 1949.^[1]

Later, Barnes worked as an editor of Simon & Schuster and was a faculty member at Sarah Lawrence College^[2]

Often affiliated with left-wing causes, Barnes was identified as a Communist Party member by several witnesses during the Communist trials of the 1950s, but the charge was never proven. For instance, Whittaker Chambers testified about his communist affiliation in 1951:

Whittaker Chambers, confessed former Communist courier, said that a Red leader in 1937 told him that Joseph Barnes, a member of the faculty of Sarah Lawrence College, was a member of a Communist underground cell in New York.

Mr. Chambers identified his informant as J. Peters...

Mr. Barnes, former foreign editor of the New York Herald Tribune and former secretary of the American Institute of Pacific Relations who is now an editor of Simon & Schuster, New York publishers, denied the accusation -- as he has on three previous occasions...^[2]

References

1. "Reminiscences of Joseph Fels Barnes : oral history, 1953". WorldCat. Retrieved 13 May 2012.
2. "Chambers Labels Barnes a Red and Receives a Prompt Denial" (PDF). Herald Statesment. 17 August 1951. Retrieved 13 May 2012.