Marguerite Young

Marguerite Young (1905 – 1995)

Background

Marguerite Young was born Marguerite Keller in 1905, one of two girls and five children.

Career

Associated Press

Young wrote for the Baton Rouge State-Times and New Orleans Item-Tribune before she was hired for Associated Press in November, 1928. According to the Ruston Daily Leader, Young had arrived in Washington from New Orleans with Seymour Waldman.

Kent Cooper, head of the Associated Press, had hired her among a pool of the newswire's first-ever women reporters. Over the next 18 months, she worked under editors, including Byron Price, Clarke Salmon, and Jim Williams.

New York World-Telegram

Investigative journalist Paul Y. Anderson, associated with The Nation magazine, recommended to Young that she leave AP to get a byline at a newspaper."

Young first considered resigning from the Daily Worker when Hathaway ran a piece of hers he had assigned, then published a retraction of it the next day. "I telephoned Clarence Hathaway. He was sorry, very, very sorry. That was all... I had never encountered anything like this when I had worked for the 'bourgeois' press."

Noel Field

In 1934, Young's name appears in connection with Soviet spies Hede Massing and Noel Field: "Mrs. Massing claims that the introduction to Field was arranged through Marguerite Young, the Washington, D. C., correspondent for the Daily Worker," a fact cited by numerous studies on Noel Field.

Hede Massing stated during testimony:

New Deal setbacks

Young remained on staff throughout 1935. She met John L. Lewis, whom she described as a "principal force pushed Franklin D. Roosevelt left." She noted the dismissal of Brain Trust member Rexford Tugwell and the rise of younger New Deal figures Thomas Corcoran and Benjamin W. Cohen. She noted a conflict on the "left" of FDR and how Harry Hopkins seemed to thrive in the discord—reported by the New York Times as having said, "We'll tax and tax and spend and spend and elect and elect." She filed three stories with the Daily Worker on Smedley D. Butler: three weeks later, HUAC announced that Butler had received an offer to command a "Fascist" army to overthrow the government (which he had declined).

Also in 1935, she notes with apprehension the U.S. Supreme Court's "knocking down" of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration and the National Recovery Administration – the latter supported by congressmen Robert F. Wagner, George W. Norris, and Fiorello H. La Guardia. She covered the Nye Committee hearings and notes that Alger Hiss was serving as legal counsel. She met Hiss: "...stepping over to a staff table and asking for and examining documents in the hands of the Committee's bony, intense, little chief aide who would become a mastery man of the twentieth century–Alger Hiss." She covered the Social Security Act hearings. As a Louisiana native, she made particular note of the assassination of the state's U.S. Senator Huey Long: she was personally acquainted with his assassin, Dr. Carl Weiss.

In 1936, after the Daily Worker fired her, the New Masses picked her up. Judging by the dates of her aritlces for the magazine, the firing occurred in the summer of 1936, as her articles suddenly proliferate as of August 1936 and continue with some regularity into 1938.

Robert Minor asked her to ghost write a book by Viola Ilma (which must refer to Ilma's second book of 1938 entitled A Political Virgin, as her first book And Now, Youth! had already come out in 1934).

Odd jobs

There is a gap in Young's memoirs from 1936 to 1939. From articles she published in the New Masses, it seems she worked there from summers 1936 to 1938, with a final article in tribute to friend Paul Y. Anderson in December 1938. (See "Work - Articles" sub-section, below.)

The memoir of Hope Hale Davis recounts that, as of September 1937, a Soviet agent called "Young" began to visit her Washington, DC, apartment to files.

By 1939, it seems from her memoirs that Young was working in the press office of the Ford Motor Company, as she was taking assignments for Fred Black (formerly of The Dearborn Independent) and George Pierrot, both closely associated with Henry Ford. She worked with Black for the New York World's Fair for two periods: February 18–October 29, 1939, and May 4–November 1, 1940. During that period, she lived in Dearborn, Michigan.

After work for Ford, from 1940 to 1941, Young took jobs with the Salvation Army and Macy's. Then, she took over a job from radio personality "Martha Deane" (Mary Margaret McBride, whom Young refers to first as "Marian Young" and then "Martha Dean") at a Scripps-Howard syndicate that she call "National Enterprise Association" or NEA.

Young's roommate was Martha Dalrymple. Colleagues and acquaintances included: Bess Furman Armstrong, Barbara Giles, Harold Brayman of the New York Post, Harvey O'Connor, Jesse Lloyd O'Connor, U.S. Representative Maury Maverick, and TASS reporter Kenneth Durant. She calls National Labor Relations Board chair Ellinore Herrick a friend, as well as long-time CPUSA official Robert Minor and his wife Lydia Gibson. Soviet American spy Martha Dodd was another friend.

Correspondence with Young appears in the papers of Joseph Freeman, a New Masses editor.

Young dated Robert F. Wagner, U.S. senator from New York. ) In her memoir, Young studiously avoids mention of any "husband"–until, suddenly, she moves back to New York City to work for the New Masses and happens to mention her desire to divorce: "I asked the lawyer, could I be divorced from a young man I'd married some four years earlier."

Confusion with Marguerite Vivian Young

Several sources have mistaken Young with the contemporary novelist Marguerite Vivian Young (1908–1994). In 2012, literature professor Alan M. Wald wrote "one cannot entirely rule out that this Marguerite Young is the same well-known Marguerite Young (1908–1994) who authored Miss Macintosh, My Darling (1965) and who also wrote on utopian socialism and Eugene V. Debs", but noted that all biographical material place the latter in Chicago and Indianapolis during the period the former was based in Washington D.C. and New York. In 2000, the error reappeared in American Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide from Colonial Times to the Present (Gale Group Inc., 2000) and then appeared online in Encyclopedia.com.

Legacy

Her name appears in publications as one of the first American women journalists of note. Nothing but the Truth (1993) "Whose Congress?" (January 2, 1934) "The Little Poison Flower" (February 27, 1934) "Senator Nye Shadow-Boxes War" (October 9, 1934) "Washington – Jim-Crow Capital" (May 21, 1935) "Congressman Amlie Sees Red" (August 13, 1935) "The Guild Cracks Down" (December 17, 1935) "Is the U.S.A. Preparing?" (March 10, 1936) "Mr. Roper Sees the Seamen" (May 5, 1936) "Elephant into Fox" (Jun 16, 1936) "The Cleveland Plot," (June 22, 1936) "Where is the G.O.P.?" (June 23, 1936) "Jim Farley's Festival" (June 30, 1936) "Roosevelt's Convention" (July 7, 1936) "Steel Gets Hot" (July 21, 1936) "Steel-Town Politics" (July 28, 1936) "Steel's G.O.P. Vigilantes" (August 4, 1936) "Weirton: 'Feudal Domain'" (August 11, 1936) "Steel's Frankenstein Monster" (August 25, 1936) "Sex in the Cit Room" (October 20, 1936) "Terre Haute: Second Round" (November 3, 1936) "The Champion of the Gorilla" (January 12, 1934) "Is the Democratic Party Splitting?" (June 29, 1937) "New Hope for the New Deal" (February 1, 1938) "Washington Watches the Depression" (March 15, 1938) "Machine Politics and Relief" (April 12, 1938) "The Great Debate: Which Way to Peace?" (May 3, 1938) "Washington Weighs La Folette" (May 31, 1938) "We Popped in on Garner" (June 21, 1938) "Whose Politics in Relief?" (June 28, 1938) "Ickes on Self-Defense" (July 26, 1938) "Paul Y. Anderson" (December 21, 1938)