Golden was born Herschel Goldhirsch in the shtetlMikulintsy, Ukraine, then part of Austria-Hungary. His mother Nuchama was Romanian and his father Leib was Austrian. In 1904 Leib Goldhirsch, a former Hebrew teacher, emigrated to Winnipeg, Manitoba, only to move the family to New York City the next year and "became an editor of the Jewish Daily Forward." For a time Harry worked as a newspaper seller on the Lower East Side, and could remember shouting out headlines about the Leo Frank case, about which he later wrote a book. As a teenager, he became interested in Georgist socialism, and later spoke on its behalf. He became a stockbroker but lost his job in the 1929 crash. Convicted of mail fraud because he had held onto funds entrusted and thereby caused a loss to investors, Golden served four years in a Federal prison at Atlanta, Georgia and, decades later President Richard M. Nixon gave Mr. Golden a full presidential pardon for the mail fraud conviction.
Desegregation
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 but also observations and reminiscences of his boyhood in New York's Lower East Side. He traveled widely: 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." His satirical "The Vertical Negro Plan", involved removing the chairs from any to-be-integrated building, since Southern whites didn't mind standing with blacks, only sitting with them. Golden reportedly convinced a southern department store manager to put an "Out of Order" sign by the water fountain marked White; within three weeks all were drinking from the Colored-designated drinking fountain. Calvin Trillin devised the Harry Golden Rule, which states that "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." Golden's 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.
Personal
His Irish Catholic wife, the former Genevieve Gallagher, predeceased him.
Critical attention
addressed the "Harry Golden phenomenon" in "Harry Golden & the American Audience" in Commentary magazine, March 1961. Irving Howe compared Philip Roth's early novel Portnoy's Complaint to For 2¢ Plain in a critical review of Roth's novel in Commentary when Complaint was published in 1969.
