Robert S. Allen participant of World War I
Background
Robert Sharon Allen was born on July 14, 1900, in Latonia, Kentucky to Harry and Lizzie (Elizabeth) Greenberg. Robert's given name was Herman Greenberg. He changed his name and lied about his age in order to join the military on September 6, 1916. His father officially changed his name to match his son's in 1918, saying that there was a German "taint" to the last part of his name and he desired a real American name. After that time all the family except his brother Isador used the name.
Allen married fellow journalist Ruth Finney in 1929, and they remained married until her death in 1979. He later married Adeline Sunday (1921–2017), his former secretary.Career
Allen joined the army, lying about his age in order to do so, and served in the cavalry during the Pancho Villa Expedition of 1916–17 and in France during World War I.After the war, he graduated from the University of Wisconsin and took up reporting.  He joined the Ku Klux Klan in order to write an exposé about them, and was studying in Munich at the time of Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch (1923).  It was at this time he became a foreign correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor.In 1931, Allen was the Washington bureau chief for the Christian Science Monitor.  Because the magazine would not publish content critical of Herbert Hoover, Allen and Drew Pearson anonymously co-wrote the book Washington Merry-Go-Round, an exposé of the Hoover administration.  After Hoover tracked down their identities, both authors were fired.  In 1932 the two journalists published a sequel, More Merry-Go-Round, and wrote a nationally syndicated column titled "Merry-Go-Round".In 1933, Allen worked as a Soviet agent (Sh/147) for $100 a month.  According to John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev in their 2009 book Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, this was legal for Allen to do, being prior to the passage of the 1938 Foreign Agents Registration Act, and his motivation is unknown.