Harry Golden

Harry Golden

Harry Lewis Golden (May 6, 1902–October 2, 1981) was an American Jewish writer and newspaper publisher. He was born Herschel Goldhirsch in the shtetl Mikulintsy, Ukraine, then part of Austria-Hungary. His mother was Romanian and his father Austrian.

In 1904 his father, Leib Goldhirsch, emigrated to Winnipeg, Manitoba, only to move the family to New York City the next year. Harry became a stockbroker but lost his job in the 1929 crash. Convicted of mail fraud, Golden served five years in a Federal prison at Atlanta, Georgia. 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.

From 1942 to 1968, Golden published The Carolina Israelite as a forum, not just for his political views (including his satirical "The Vertical Negro Plan", which involved removing the chairs from any to-be-integrated building, since Southern Whites didn't mind standing with Blacks, only sitting with them), but also observations and reminisces of his boyhood in New York's Lower East Side. He traveled broadly: 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." In 1974, he received a presidential pardon from Richard Nixon.

Calvin Trillin devised the Harry Golden Rule, which states that, according to Trillin, "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."

His 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.