James Rorty


James Rorty was a 20th-century American radical writer and poet as well as political activist who addressed controversial topics that included McCarthyism, Jim Crow, American industries, advertising, and nutrition, and was perhaps best known as a founding editor of the New Masses magazine.

Background

James Hancock Rorty was born March 30, 1890, in Middletown, New York. His parents were Irish immigrants Octavia Churchill and Richard McKay Rorty. His father was a political refugee with Fenian and anarchist affiliations from County Donegal, Ireland. In 1913, he earned a BA from Tufts College. He pursued graduate studies at New York University and The New School for Social Research.

Career

In 1913, he began his career with work in the advertising industry. He also worked in settlement houses.
During World War I, Rorty served as a stretcher bearer on the Argonne front, an experience that led him to become a "militant pacifist."
Rorty worked as a journalist and poet for more than sixty years. He considered himself "the last of the muckrakers," as a combatant against social injustice in America.
During World War I, Rorty moved to San Francisco to continue his career in advertising and to write experimental poetry.
In 1925, Rorty moved to New York City, where he was a founding editor of the New Masses, a Communist literary magazine, which launched the following year. However, Rorty left that next year when fellow editors rejected his publication of Robinson Jeffers's poem "Apology for Bad Dreams."
In 1927, Rorty was one of many arrested during protests against the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti.
To earn money, he also worked as an editor, journalist, advertising copy writer, and consultant for the Tennessee Valley Authority.
In 1932, he supported and then quit the campaign to support William Z. Foster for U.S. president.

Personal life and death

Around 1919, Rorty married Maria Ward Lambin; they were divorced in 1928. The same year, he married writer Winifred Rauschenbush ; they had one son, philosopher Richard Rorty.
He suffered from depression.
Rorty died at age 82 on February 26, 1973, in Sarasota, Florida.

Works

In the mid-1950s, Rorty co-authored with Moshe Decter a book attacking McCarthyism called McCarthy and the Communists, supported by the American Committee for Cultural Freedom.
Books include:
  • What Michael said to the census-taker
  • The Intruders
  • Where Life is Better: An Unsentimental American Journey
  • Children of the sun, and other poems
  • End of Farce
  • Order on the air!
  • Our Master's Voice: Advertising
  • Where life is better : an unsentimental American journey
  • American medicine mobilizes
  • Brother Jim Crow
  • Tomorrow's food; the coming revolution in nutrition N. Philip Norman MD
  • Tennessee Valley Authority: Soil... people and fertilizer technology
  • Engineers of world plenty
  • McCarthy and the Communists with Moshe Decter
  • We Open the Gates: Labor's Fight for Equality with Harry Fleischman
Poems in Harper's include:
  • "Bread, and the stuff we eat"
  • "Memorandum to a tired bureaucrat"
  • "Starting from Manhattan"
  • "Return of the native "
Articles in Harper's include:
  • "Tortillas, beans, and bananas"
  • "Go slow on fluoridation!"

    Awards

  • 1918: Distinguished Service Cross
  • 1923: The Nation prize for poetry

    External sources

Category:1890 births
Category:1973 deaths
Category:Writers from New York
Category:American people of Irish descent
Category:Tufts University alumni
Category:American military personnel of World War I
Category:20th-century American writers
Category:20th-century American journalists
Category:American pacifists
Category:20th-century American male journalists