[1] Alsberg suffered from lifelong digestive problems, possibly related to an incident in his teens when his appendix ruptured in the middle of the night.

[7] Uninterested in finishing his graduate studies at Harvard or practicing law, Alsberg moved back to New York City to write.

Alsberg took charge of the embassy's efforts to aid Armenians and Jews, which put him in contact with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC).

When the U.S. declared war on Germany in April 1917, Turkey broke off diplomatic relations and the American embassy officials left.

A mission to Turkey consisted of Morgenthau and Felix Frankfurter (then an assistant to the Secretary of War), with Alsberg advising them on conditions and issues.

[9] In 1917, Alsberg taught a course on the socialist-inspired cooperative movement at the Rand School of Social Science, while again writing for Evening Post and The Nation.

While there, Alsberg reconnected with the JDC which needed volunteers to assess and provide relief to destitute Jews in Central and Eastern Europe.

Alsberg described the period after the Russian Revolution and World War I as "the emergence of many minor nationalities, all imbued with grand imperialistic passions, fighting for their independence in a condition of economic wretchedness and moral degradation".

Alsberg also continued his reporting for The Nation, the London Herald, and the New York World, bringing the anti-Semitism he was observing to international attention.

Some of his articles were noticed by American authorities for their sympathy to Bolshevik, anarchist, and radical ideas, and he was observed for some time by Allied military intelligence.

[2] In January 1920, Alsberg traveled north, intending to make his way to Moscow; "a believer in the utopia promised by a classless society, [he] wanted to witness and write about those ideals made manifest".

In August, he accompanied Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman (both of whom had been deported to Russia from the United States the previous year) on a six-week expedition to collect historic materials for the Museum of the Revolution.

Their accommodations and treatment by the Soviets were luxurious and opulent, but Alsberg was able to get away from the controlled tours to see the disparity between what they were being told and the conditions of the general public.

Arriving at the police station in Moscow carrying the agent, Alsberg set the unconscious body on the desk and said, "Here is the man you sent out to find me.

J. Edgar Hoover, head of the newly formed Bureau of Investigation (now the FBI), received voluminous reports on Alsberg due to his involvement with the Bolsheviks, his friendship with Goldman and Berkman, and because he was a Jew.

He was in Moscow during the Kronstadt rebellion, an event which brought him to condemn the Bolshevik regime in the article "Russia: Smoked Glass vs. Rose-Tint" in The Nation.

Although it was never published, Susan Rubenstein DeMasi wrote: "it still remains as perhaps the most exhaustive account of pre-World War II Central and Eastern European Jewry ever written.

Alsberg contributed many documents to and edited Letters from Russian Prisons, and insisted that the title page list all committee members without singling out any individual contributors.

[25] Novelist Vincent McHugh classified Alsberg in an elite group: "men with a public sense, a feeling for broad human movements and how people are caught up in them."

Baker described Alsberg to an associate as "An anarchistic sort of a fellow incapable of administration but one with a great deal of creative talent".

[4] Alsberg came to the Writers' Project with a "visionary sense of its potential to join social reform with the democratic renaissance of American letters".

"Although the first books in the American Guide Series published under the auspices of the project—Idaho, Washington: City and Capital, and Cape Cod Pilot—were met with praise, the furor that accompanied the release of Massachusetts damaged the reputations of the project and Alsberg.

[31] Ralph M. Easley, representing a group called the National Civic Federation, complained in a letter to President Roosevelt that the Writer's Project was "dominated by Communist sympathizers whose principal interest was political agitation".

Knowing the Writers' Project was a target of the Dies Committee, Alsberg abandoned the magazine effort and also ended the creative writing program.

[32] In Alsberg's testimony, he emphasized his anti-Communist views and stated that he had to "clean up" the Writer's Project, going so far as to threaten to shut it down at the mention of strikes.

The FWP was then investigated by Clifton Woodrum's House subcommittee on appropriations, which attacked a letter to the editor Alsberg had written ten years previously about conditions in prisons.

The Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1939 cut funding and required the FWP, now renamed the Writers' Program, to obtain state sponsorship for its projects.

[27] After leaving the Writers' Project, Alsberg went on a speaking tour for the American Association of Colleges, presenting "Adventures in Journalism and Literature".

He continued with his political writing, including a piece calling for "an all-out effort to defeat the Axis", and worked on a book that would never be published.

In 1943, Dies made a speech in the House of Representatives demanding forty "subversive" employees be fired, naming Alsberg in particular.