Harold Robert Isaacs

Harold Robert Isaacs was an American journalist and political scientist. Born in 1910 in New York City, Harold Isaacs began his newspaper career covering church sermons for The New York Times while still a junior at Columbia College. He worked his way across the Pacific as a bellhop on a luxury liner and as a wiper in the engine room of a freighter. Isaacs went to China in 1930 and became involved with left wing politics in Shanghai and wrote The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, of the Chinese Revolution of 1925-27, first published with a preface by Leon Trotsky. He covered World War II in Southeast Asia and China for Newsweek Magazine. In 1953 he joined the department of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the following years he published Scratches on our Minds: American Images of China and India, American Jews in Israel and The New World of Negro Americans, among others. In 1980, he returned to China with his wife, Viola, and wrote an account of the visit, Re-Encounters in China.