page_title: Alan Barth
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Alan Barth / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: Eugene Meyer, publisher of the Washington Post and Chairman of the Federal Reserve
context_page_description: Alan Barth was a 20th-century American journalist and author, specializing in civil liberties, best known for his 30-year stint as an editorial writer at The Washington Post as well as his books, particularly The Loyalty of Free Men.
context_section_description: In 1936, Barth worked on the Beaumont Enterprise in Beaumont, Texas, where he had grown up. In 1938, he went to Washington, DC, as a reporter for the McClure Newspaper Syndicate.  In 1941 during World War II, he worked first in the Treasury and then the Office of War Information.
  In 1943, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, a fellow New Dealer, recommended Barth to Eugene Meyer, publisher of The Washington Post publisher at that time. Meyer hired him as an editorial writer for a paper. In 1945, Barth denounced a threat by white drivers of buses in Washington, DC, who threatened to strike if the city started to hire black drivers:  "To bar men from serving in these jobs because of their race or color is at once to hamper the war program and to subvert the principles for which the war is being waged." In the 1950s, he challenged the investigations of U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy. In 1950, he defended the performance Earl Browder (former head of the Communist Party of the USA, by McCarthy's Congressional investigating committee for "refusing to identify and stigmatize certain persons whose names were presented to him." By that time, the Post had come under fire as being "pro-Communist."
  Barth also contributed to The New York Times Magazine and Book Review.
  He retired in 1972.
caption: Eugene Meyer hired Barth to The Washington Post
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