STERN, JULIUS DAVID

STERN, JULIUS DAVID (1886–1971), U.S. newspaper publisher. Stern, who was born in Philadelphia, worked as a reporter on several newspapers during 1908–10, and in 1911–12 was general manager of the Providence News. Stern purchased the New Brunswick, New Jersey, Times in 1912 and acted as its president until 1914; he then bought the Springfield, Illinois, News and Record and served as publisher of both from 1915 to 1919, when he bought the Camden, New Jersey, Evening Courier. His fast-paced, honest Memoirs of a Maverick Publisher (1962) begins with his purchase of the Camden Morning Post in 1926, to which he added the Philadelphia Record in 1928. Purchasing the New York Post in 1933, when it was losing $4,000 a day, Stern determined to make it the most liberal New York newspaper. He installed Ernest *Gruening as its editor, and then Henry Sayler, a long-time associate. Using puzzle competitions and low-priced book offers as well as more conventional features, he restored the paper's circulation before selling it in 1939. An advocate of crusading liberal journalism throughout his newspaper career, Stern supported Franklin D. Roosevelt before Roosevelt's first Democratic presidential nomination in 1932, and in 1940 and 1944 he produced a newspaper for the Democratic National Committee. Stern served as general chairman of the Publishers and Advertisers Division of the United Palestine Appeal in 1936, which raised $1,500,000. In his novel Eidolon: A Philosophical Phantasy Built on a Syllogism (1952), Stern pursued the theme of the compatibility of science and religion as paths to truth.