JAMES WEINSTEIN, 79 Leftist adopted Chicago as home, started In These Times magazine Advertisement
By Stephen Franklin Tribune staff reporter
In the 1970s James Weinstein had a dream for a socialist magazine unlike any other in the country, a magazine that would speak to average people. But he wasn't sure where to launch it.
New York was too tainted by the old and the New Left. And California was too California.
So, he came to Chicago, a place where he had no roots but which appealed to him because of its heartland nature, its rich social and populist history and people of all kinds who might heed his message.
Thus, In These Times magazine was born in Chicago in 1976 in a classic display of Mr. Weinstein's personal quest not to fit any mold.
A former member of Communist front groups in the 1950s, he preferred to call himself more of a Groucho Marxist influenced as much by "Duck Soup" as "Das Kapital," according to Miles Harvey, a former managing editor of In These Times.
Indeed, Mr. Weinstein thrived on humor, a gift that sometimes baffled his more intense colleagues, some of them said.
He was a respected historian of the American left, who argued in several books that socialism is as American as any other ideology, a reason why he borrowed several words from the Pledge of Allegiance to use on his magazine's masthead.
He liked to take long trips across the country to clear his head, and he was a fierce devotee of poker who wasn't picky about who played beside him.
He was also very proud of being the first white asked to join the Original 40 Club, an elite African-American men's organization.
Mr. Weinstein, 79, died on Thursday, June 16, after a long bout with brain cancer in his home on the North Side.
"He thought that democratic socialism wasn't alien to American history," said David Moberg, who has been a writer with In These Times since its founding. As for socialism's future, Mr. Weinstein was ever hopeful, and that, Moberg noted, was a theme of Mr. Weinstein's fifth and last book, "The Long Detour."
"For him, the demise of the Soviet Union meant the demise of this long detour, not the end of the possibilities for socialism," Moberg said.
One of a handful of struggling leftist publications in the U.S., the magazine, under Mr. Weinstein, became a graduate school for new and young writers, a bulletin board for leftists, and a place to try out new ideas, even if they didn't coincide with Mr. Weinstein's.
"He took pride in letting his editors do their work. Once he hired you, he treated you like an adult," said Harvey, who spent some time with Mr. Weinstein in recent months to collect his thoughts.
Though the magazine never gained the larger circulation that Mr. Weinstein sought, he continually championed its cause, raising money for it as well as contributing from his own pocket. Coming from a wealthy family, he leaned heavily on his inheritance to finance the magazine, said Moberg. Mr. Weinstein retired from the magazine in 1999.
Born in New York City, he started to study at Cornell University in 1944, but left to serve 19 months in the U.S. Navy. Upon his return, he graduated from Cornell and then started classes at Columbia Law School, but he quit after a year to begin working at a string of factories, where he promoted unions.
In the early 1950s, he became active in the Communist Party but quit in 1956, when he returned to Columbia University as a graduate student in American history. In 1960, he moved to Madison, Wis., where he became an editor for Studies on the Left, a publication begun by University of Wisconsin students.
He moved to San Francisco in 1967 and founded the Socialist Review and later the Modern Times bookstore. He taught for several years at the Centre for the Study of Social History in Covington, England, before coming to Chicago.
As for his decision about Chicago, Harvey said, Mr. Weinstein recently told him that he had never regretted it.
"Chicago," he told Harvey, "is the place to be."
He is survived by his wife, Beth Maschinot; a daughter, Lisa; a son, Joshua; and a sister, Lois Sontag.
No date has been set yet for memorial services.