Benjamin Stolberg (1891–1951) was an American journalist and labor activist.
Stolberg worked as associate editor of The Bookman, as well as a columnist for leading US newspapers, such as The New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune'.
Stolberg was a member of the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky and served on the Dewey Commission investigating the Moscow Trials.
Stolberg wrote for the Saturday Evening Post – and from 1939 to 1945 he and its publisher, the Curtis Publishing, defended themselves from a libel suit brought against them by Jerome Davis for the September 2, 1939, article "Communist Wreckers in American Labor." Stolberg had called Davis a "Communist and Stalinist." Davis brought on ACLU co-founder Arthur Garfield Hays as his lawyer. Stolberg hired Louis Waldman, an "Old Guard" Socialist and anti-communist labor lawyer. The case went before the New York Supreme Court, with Justice John F. Carew presiding.[1][2][3]
On December 4, 1939, Davis brought a $150,000 libel suit in Manhattan against Curtis Publishing and Stolberg.[4] The trial included testimony from American Federation of Labor president William Green,[5] former YMCA president Sherwood Eddy,[3] Reverend Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick and Rabbi Stephen Samuel Wise of the American Jewish Congress,[6] former CPUSA head Earl Browder,[7] former Saturday Evening Post editor William W. Stout and American Federation of Teachers vice president John D. Connors,[7] AFL vice president Matthew Woll,[8] American Mercury editor Eugene Lyons,[9] and Georgetown University president Dr. Edmund A. Walsh.[10] Davis' attorney Hays added $100,000 to the suit.[11] On June 9, 1943, a New York Supreme Court discharged the jury for failing to reach a verdict, and Justice Carew ordered the jury not discuss their deliberations.[12] On June 14, 1943, New York Supreme Court Justice Louis A. Valente denied a second motion for immediate retrial and set October 1, 1943, as date to assign retrial action.[13] Finally, on January 18, 1945, Davis settled with Curtis Publishing and Stolberg in court for $11,000 of his $250,000 libel suit before Supreme Court Justice Ferdinand Pecora.[14]
Benjamin Stolberg's papers are housed at Columbia University in New York City.[15]
Stolberg wrote histories of the labor movement, including: