Allan James Aronson, known professionally as James Aronson, was born in Roxbury, Massachusetts, on March 26, 1915. He attended the local public schools, graduating from Boston Latin School and, in 1936, from Harvard College. Influenced by his older brother Earl Aronson, a newspaperman, Aronson enrolled at Columbia University School of Journalism, and graduated in 1937.
Aronson began his professional career with the Boston Evening Transcript, moving to the New York Herald Tribune in 1938 and two years later to the New York Post. While working for the Post, Aronson married Frederica Reinisch. Their daughter Mary (later Mary Aronson McCormick) was born in 1941. The Aronsons later divorced. In 1952 Aronson married Blanche-Mary Grambs, an artist and illustrator professionally known as Grambs Miller. They had a daughter Maggie (later Maggi Aronson Saunders).
In 1945 Aronson took a leave of absence from the Post to serve as a press officer with the Army's Information Control Division in Germany. In this capacity he licensed journalists untainted by Nazism and assisted in launching a free press in West Germany. Aronson returned to New York in 1946, and in the fall moved to the New York Times as a special writer for the “Week in Review” section. He also edited Frontpage, the newsletter of the New York Newspaper Guild.
In 1948 Aronson resigned from the Times and, with Cedric Belfrage and John T. McManus, he launched the weekly progressive newspaper, the National Guardian. Under Aronson, Belfrage, and McManus, the National Guardian gave expression to all forms of liberal American thought, and it defended the civil rights and civil liberties of many individuals and groups when it was unpopular to do so. The paper was particularly known for its defense of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and Alger Hiss and its opposition to the Korean and Vietnamese wars. In 1953 Belfrage and Aronson were summoned to testify before the Senate Subcommittee on Government Operations about alleged Communist associations. After invoking the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination, Belfrage, a British national, was eventually deported. Because of his employment by the leftist newspaper, Aronson was protected to a degree from the effects of the McCarthy era, but he and the National Guardian were objects of ongoing government surveillance.
Throughout its history the National Guardian experienced much internal turmoil, and because of this in 1967 Aronson resigned and turned his stock in the newspaper corporation over to the remaining staff. Neither he nor the staff spoke publicly about the precise reasons for the split, but ten years later in Something to Guard: The Stormy Life of the National Guardian, 1948-1967, which Aronson wrote with Belfrage, he seemed to confirm the general public interpretation of the division as a split between the Old Left and the younger members of the staff, who as members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), represented the New Left.
After leaving the National Guardian, Aronson, then 52, explored other career possibilities. In 1970 he published The Press and the Cold War, which argued that the establishment press had become a propaganda tool for the government. Other books published during this free-lance phase of his career included Packaging the News (1971) and Deadline for the Media (1972). Aronson also wrote numerous journal articles, a regular media column for the Antioch Review, and edited the Bill of Rights Journal of the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee. He also accepted several adjunct teaching assignments at Long Island University and the New School for Social Research. In 1974 Aronson was appointed a professor in the Journalism Department at Hunter College, and continued to teach there until his retirement in 1985. During the year prior to his retirement, Aronson was honored with an appointment to one of the school's first Thomas Hunter professorships. He also received a lifetime achievement award from the School of Journalism at Columbia University.
In 1979 Aronson was invited to teach journalism in China, the first American to do so following the resumption of diplomatic relations with the United States. This invitation was repeated in 1981, and afterwards Aronson often spoke publicly and wrote about journalism in China. Aronson died as a result of prostate cancer on October 21, 1988. In 1990 Hunter College honored his memory with the creation of the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism.
