Mike Gold (Irwin Granich) and Mike Folsom papers, 1901-1990, and undated (majority within 1930-1967)

Summary

Creator:

Gold, Michael and Folsom, Michael

Extent:

13 Linear Feet (13 record boxes and 1 oversize box)
Photographs are found in Box 12. This collection also includes three reels of microfilm and two paintings.

Language:

The material is in English, with some Russian, French, and Spanish materials.

Authors:

Processed by and finding aid prepared by Jean Jansen and Jeffrey Powell, 2001, Laura Barrett, 2002, Robbie Bolton, 2003. Encoded by Joan Huang using ArchivesSpace and Excel EAD template, 2017.

Background

Scope and Content:

The Mike Gold (Irwin Granich)/Mike Folsom Papers date from about 1901 to 1990, and measure about thirteen linear feet. They are divided into twelve series: Correspondence (1901-1990 and undated); Writings (1904-1989 and undated); Biographical Materials (1954-1969 and undated); Individual Files (1905-1978 and undated); Periodicals (1913-1958 and undated); Newspaper Clippings (1924-1980s and undated); Events and Activities (1935 1972 and undated); Notes and Journals (1906-1962 and undated); Personal (1930s-1967 and undated); Miscellaneous (1935-1970s and undated); and Visual Materials (1923-1960s and undated).

The first series, Correspondence, contains items dating from 1901-1990, and measures 1.5 linear feet. It includes correspondence materials from both Mike Gold and Mike Folsom, as well as some materials written between two other outside parties which it seems that Folsom used in his research and writing. It also includes letters to and from Gold and his wife, Elizabeth, as well as their sons, Carl and Nick. There are a variety of prominent figures included in the correspondence, including such persons as Theodore Dreiser, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Joseph Freeman, Ernest Hemmingway, Walter Lowenfels, Lewis Mumford, and Upton Sinclair, along with a host of others. Of particular interest is the early correspondence between Sinclair and Gold, the H.L Mencken correspondence (on microfilm), Folsom's correspondence with Gold and other literary figures and writers in the 1960s and 1970s, and the topical folders on Gold's application for a Guggenheim fellowship in 1928-1929 and 1935-1936, and on the Estate and Papers of Mike Gold, which provides some insight into the history of the papers themselves. It should be noted that in particular during the 1960s it is often difficult to distinguish between the correspondences of Gold and of Folsom because many letters are simply addressed, "Dear Mike".

The second series, Writings (1904-1989 and undated) is the largest series at about 7 linear feet. It primarily contains manuscript and published materials by Mike Gold, including books (no manuscripts), fiction (including many manuscripts), drama (including manuscripts), poetry (including many manuscripts), song lyrics (mostly published), columns and articles (mostly published, also including some manuscripts), and other writings (some manuscripts and some published materials). Also included in the series are the writings of Mike Folsom (including manuscripts and published materials), and the writings of other people (including his wife), such as dissertations, published articles, and a number of manuscripts.

The third series, Biographical Materials (1954-1969 and undated) includes about 0.75 linear feet of materials. There are some of Gold's manuscripts for the autobiography/memoir book he was working on towards the end of his life, as well as transcripts from interviews with Mike Folsom and some notes, and a few published items relating to Gold's life. Most of the items in this series seem to have been produced by Gold and Folsom during the time they were working together on Gold's autobiography/memoir, although a few items dated earlier suggest that Gold had been working on and off on the project himself for some time before collaborating with Folsom.

The fourth series, Individual Files (1905-1978 and undated) measures about 0.25 linear feet. This series is composed of folders relating to a specific individual, including a number of prominent people as well as some lesser-known figures. The materials included in the series are mostly notes and articles, although in some cases there are other items such as pamphlets and images included in the folders. Most of the people included in the series figured prominently into Gold's life (either personally, professionally, or both), or into Folsom's own research on Gold or other proletarian writers.

The fifth series, Periodicals (1913-1958 and undated) also measures about 0.25 linear feet. It includes mostly small collections of such titles as The Flame, The Liberator, The Masses, The New Masses, The Oakland Post Enquirer, and The Scarsdale Inquirer, for which Gold wrote over a period of years or months. These contain published versions of Gold's writings (some under the name Irwin Granich) and give an idea of how his writings appeared to readers at the time of their original publication.

The sixth series, News Clippings (1924-1980s and undated) includes 0.5 linear feet of folders containing dated and undated news clippings. These appear to be items clipped by Gold (to 1967) and Folsom, sometimes used for research or to write an article, or for personal interest. A few of the folders are somewhat topical within a time frame, such as pertaining to the H-bomb and McCarthyism, but most contain articles on a variety of subjects.

The seventh series, Events and Activities (1935-1972 and undated) is about 0.25 linear feet in size. It includes materials from events Mike Gold attended as well as a number of events held in his honor, and materials from his national speaking tour in 1954 in honor of his sixtieth birthday, including manuscripts.

The eighth series, Notes and Journals (1906-1962 and undated) contains both 0.75 linear feet of foldered materials and two boxes of card files. There are a large number of Gold's notebooks and notes, a diary, as well as some address books and address and business cards, and a childhood autograph book. Also included are Folsom's loose and topical notes (although Folsom's notes, where possible, have been kept with the materials with which they were found in the papers) and a notecard file housed in two small shoebox-sized boxes. Most notebooks and notes are not labeled or dated, making it difficult to distinguish what they are about and when they were written.

The ninth series, Personal (1930s-1967 and undated) is the smallest series at about 0.1 linear feet. It contains folders on such subjects as Gold's family, medical and financial information (mostly social security), and his death, including articles and obituaries.

The tenth series, Miscellaneous (1935-1970s and undated) measures about 0.65 linear feet. It includes some topical files on subjects, a variety of items on various social, political, and scholarly interests, and some folders relating to Folsom's own interests and activities, particularly after Gold's death, and general materials which did not fit in elsewhere in the papers.

The eleventh, Visual Materials (1923-1960s and undated), measures about 0.5 linear feet and is housed in a separate smaller box. It includes photographs, microfilm, and a few illustrations. Most of the items are undated, except the microfilm. The photographs date from Gold's childhood to the end of his life, but most appear to be from the 1920s through the 1940s. A number of photographs are from Gold's visit to Ernest Hemingway's home in Florida, where Gold vacationed and went fishing in about 1929- 1930. There are also some unlabeled and unidentified photographs, and some photographs which have been removed from other items in the collection (such as correspondence) for preservation purposes.

The twelfth and final series, FBI File, measures about .75 linear ft. In 1978 Mike Folsom requested Mike Gold's FBI file under the Freedom of Information Act. He received photocopies of the documents in Gold's file with some information blacked out by the FBI to protect the privacy of informants and other individuals. In 2002 Nick Granich offered the Labadie copies of his copies of Mike Gold's file. Since the Labadie's copies are at least third generation some information is obscured, but for the most part the documents are legible. The documents were left in the order in which the Labadie received them. The organizational scheme is primarily topical and chronological. If any records did seem out of place, they were left as is to preserve the original order. The FBI reports cover the years 1941 to 1967 with additional correspondence between Mike Folsom and the FBI in 1978.

Biographical / Historical:

Mike Gold was born Irwin (Itzok) Isaac Granich on April 12, 1893 in New York City. He was the first of three sons born to Charles and Kathe (Kate) Granich, Jewish immigrants from Romania and Hungary, respectively. The family resided on the Lower East Side in a Chrystie Street tenement slum, a block away from the infamous Bowery. It was this tumultuous environment that had the most profound influence upon Gold's personal life and political beliefs.

One of three sons born to Charles and Kate, Irwin left school to begin working at a gas mantle factory when he was about twelve or thirteen years old. He worked for a number of years in such jobs as night porter, driver for an express company, carpenter's helper, and clerk, then returned to school in 1912-1913 to study journalism at New York University.

In April 1914 Granich attended an unemployment demonstration in Union Square which greatly influenced him and the direction his life took from that point forward. He had been exposed to some ideas about the socialist movement through his younger brothers George and Manny, who were active in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), but it was not until he attended the 1914 Union Square demonstration that these ideas truly took hold of Granich and gave him direction. That same year, he began to have his work published in The Masses and in the fall, he attended Harvard University as a special student and was involved with Van Kleek Allison and The Flame. He only remained at Harvard for a year, however, and then returned to New York. From 1914- 1917 he continued to write for The Masses, and for the New York Call in 1916-1917.

From 1918-1919, Granich resided in Mexico, where he had fled to avoid the draft. He continued to write while abroad, and returned to New York in 1919. Around that time, Granich began using the pseudonym "Mike Gold" to protect himself during the Palmer Raids of 1919-1920. He took the name from a U.S. Civil War veteran who inspired Gold to fight for his own dream of the liberation of workers throughout the world. In January 1921 Gold became an editor for the Liberator, the successor to The Masses, but in 1921-1922 again left New York. He went to Oakland, California to work for Fremont Older's San Francisco Call and the Oakland Post Enquirer. In 1925, he traveled to Europe and the Soviet Union for the first time. Inspired by the theater activity he saw in the Soviet Union, he returned to the United States and began to write plays and had a key role in founding a number of radical theater groups. His own works were produced by groups such as the New Playwrights' Theater (which produced Hoboken Blues), and the Provincetown Playhouse (which produced Fiesta). The New Masses was established as a monthly publication in 1926 in the spirit of the old Masses, which had died years earlier and given way to the Liberator. In 1928, Gold and several other New Masses editors pulled the magazine back together and set out to reconstruct it into "a magazine of workers' art and literature." It lasted until the summer of 1933 and reappeared in January 1934 as a weekly until its final issue in 1949, at the onset of the Cold War. Later it became the quarterly, Masses and Mainstream, which lasted into the mid-1950s.

In early 1930, Gold published what became his most popular work, a book entitled Jews Without Money. A semi-autobiographical novel about his childhood in the turn-of-the-century slums of New York, the book struck a chord with a nation that had just entered the Great Depression and went through at least a dozen printings in its first year. In September of 1930 Gold openly attacked the novels of Thornton Wilder in the New Republic and created a literary maelstrom, further bringing himself to the attention of the national and international literary and socialist worlds. In that same year, he also traveled to the first significant international leftwing writers' conference in the Ukraine where he was received with great praise. However, this prominent period was to be the high point of his long literary career, a career which also included such books as The Damned Agitator (1924) and The Hollow Men (1941), and such anthologies as 120 Million (1929), Change the World (1935), and The Mike Gold Reader (1954) and innumerable columns and articles from about 1914 to 1966.

In 1933 he began to write regular (often daily) columns for the Daily Worker, a work he continued on and off for the next thirty-three years in that paper and others in the Communist press, including the People's World. His columns quickly gained a following for their simple, humanistic approach to the struggle for the cause in everyday life. Gold also remained active in protests and demonstrations, as well as speaking engagements and other social events in the Communist community.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Gold and his wife and children lived in France. Upon his return to the United States, he found the nation in the throes of McCarthyism. The movement in which he had previously been so active had become smaller and, in many ways, unraveled from what it had been even a few years earlier. A national speaking tour was launched in recognition of his sixtieth birthday in 1954, but Gold realized his audience was disappearing, and what was left of it was quickly aging along with him. Accordingly, he retired in 1957 to San Francisco and resumed writing columns for the weekly People's World.

Because of his increasingly failing health and eyesight, and continuing work on memoirs and autobiography project, Gold reluctantly announced his retirement from journalism in July 1966. For the next year he worked closely with Michael Folsom, an English professor from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with whom he had been collaboratively working on his memoirs. In April 1967 he died in San Francisco, his memoirs unfinished, and unfortunately, unpublished to date.

Throughout his professional life, Gold was known for his deep commitment to the Communist cause in the United States. He served as one of its most prominent literary figures during the movement's peak as well as later, when support and interest began to drop off, particularly in the mid-century after the Second World War. Throughout his career he aroused strong feelings in the press and public, as well as individuals he came into contact with. He was both despised and adored by the American public, and loathed and praised by many of his literary and cultural contemporaries. Although he associated with, and was publicly affiliated with, many famous figures during the period of his greatest popularity in the 1920s and 1930s, most of his relationships with these people eventually dropped off, due to personal disagreements, or changing beliefs and pursuits which were not in keeping with what Gold viewed as the driving forces for proletarian literature. An example of this is his relationship with Upton Sinclair, which was once quite congenial and marked with frequent correspondence in Gold's early years of writing. Eventually, relations grew hostile as Gold perceived Sinclair to be betraying the ideals he had once advanced through his work, particularly The Jungle. These sometimes jovial, sometimes tenuous relationships can be traced through materials in the papers such as correspondence, autobiographical materials, and some of Gold's manuscripts and published writings. The papers provide a variety of different ways to approach Gold's life and work, and taken with Folsom's own writings and papers included here, allow for an opportunity to gain insight into Mike Gold, the Communist writer, as well as Mike Gold, the man.

Michael Brewster Folsom was born in New York City in 1938. After graduating from Antioch College in the early 1960s, he published several essays in Studies on the Left as well as a "Shakespeare: A Marxist Bibliography" for the American Institute for Marxist Studies. In the 1960s Folsom met Mike Gold and began tape recording Gold's recollections. Folsom transcribed these tapes, but Gold insisted on having the originals destroyed out of fear of harassment if the tapes fell into the wrong hands. In 1972 Folsom edited Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology. Folsom later abandoned his efforts to write Gold's biography, and instead became a museum exhibit designer, editor of books on industrial history, and co-author of children's books with his wife and mother. He died on December 12, 1990.

Sources: Folsom, Michael. Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology. New York: International Publishers, 1972. Encyclopedia of the American Left. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Biographical Dictionary of the American Left. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1986. Various materials in collection. Wald, Alan (from his memorial essay about Mike Folsom).

Processing information:

Jean Jansen and Jeffrey Powell, 2001; Laura Barrett, 2002; Robbie Bolton, 2003.

Because the materials in the collection include both the papers of Gold and a variety of Folsom's own papers and working materials, this collection is referred to as the Mike Gold and Mike Folsom papers. The papers of both men were originally interspersed upon arrival. Although some efforts have been made to separate and identify the works and papers of the two men within the collection, the various materials of each man became enmeshed during their collaborative efforts in ways that have been preserved through the processing effort in order to fully convey the meaning of the work and exchanges which took place between them. The papers are difficult to identify and separate at a number of points, particularly in the correspondence materials because the two men shared the same first name. However, the coexistence of the two men's works in the same collection operates well overall because Folsom came to know Gold better than any other scholar or writer in the field, and became the authority on Gold after his death, often serving as the reference point for others interested in Mike Gold and his works.

Rules or Conventions:

Describing Archives: A Content Standard

Related

Additional Descriptive Data:

Notes

The corrected typescript and galley proofs of Jews Without Money resides at the Special Collections Library at New York University, as well as a first edition of the book itself.

Subjects

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Subjects:

Communism--United States.
Politics and literature--United States--20th century
Authors and publishers -- United States -- 20th century.