George Seldes
Henry George Seldes was an American investigative journalist, foreign correspondent, editor, author, and media critic best known for the publication of the newsletter In Fact from 1940 to 1950. He was an investigative reporter of the kind known in early 20th century as a muckraker, using his journalism to fight injustice and justify reform.
Influenced by Lincoln Steffens and Walter Lippmann, Seldes's career began when he was hired at the Pittsburgh Leader at the age of 19. In 1914, he was appointed night editor of the Pittsburgh Post. In 1916, he went to the United Press in London. In 1917, during World War I, he moved to France to work at the Marshall Syndicate, where he was a member of the press corps of the American Expeditionary Force. After the War, Seldes spent ten years as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune. In 1922, he interviewed Vladimir Lenin. He was twice expelled from countries he was reporting from: in 1923 from the Soviet Union, along with three colleagues, for disguising news reports as personal letters, and in 1925 from Italy, for implicating Benito Mussolini in opposition leader Giacomo Matteotti's murder. He would leave the Tribune when he battled with its owner and publisher, Robert R. McCormick, over the paper altering his 1927 articles on Mexico criticizing the use of their mineral rights by American companies, which he considered to be censorship.
In 1929, Seldes became a freelance reporter and author, subsequently writing [|a series of books] [|and criticism] about his years as a foreign correspondent, and the issues of censorship, suppression and distortion in the press. During the late 1930s he had one more stint as a foreign correspondent, on a freelance basis, in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. In 1940, Seldes co-founded a weekly newsletter, In Fact, where he attacked corporate malfeasance, often using government documents from the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission. He exposed the health hazards of cigarettes and attacked the mainstream press for suppressing them, blaming the newspapers' heavy dependence on cigarette advertising. He cited J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI for anti-union campaigns, and brought attention to the National Association of Manufacturers' use of advertising dollars to produce news stories favorable to its members and suppress unfavorable ones.
[|Having both staunch admirers and strong critics], Seldes influenced some younger journalists. He received an award for professional excellence from the Association for Education in Journalism in 1980 and a George Polk Award for his life's work in 1981. Seldes also served on the board of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
Early years
Henry George Seldes, named after economist Henry George, was born on November 16, 1890, to Jewish émigrés from Russia in Alliance Colony, an agricultural community in rural southern New Jersey. His mother, Anna Saphro, died in 1896 when he and his younger brother, Gilbert, were still young. George's father, George Sergius Seldes, was a pharmacist and a strongly opinionated and radically philosophical man who was a libertarian and corresponded with Leo Tolstoy and Peter Kropotkin, being interested in the latter's ideas on mutual aid. He influenced every aspect of his sons' lives, pushing them to "read books that you will reread—and that you will never outgrow," and refusing to force religion upon children who were "too young to understand it," instilling a free-thinking attitude in his sons.When he was 19, Seldes went to work at the Pittsburgh Leader. An early scoop of his for this paper was when three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan expelled Seldes from Bryan's hotel room. He also interviewed a saleswoman who had filed a rape complaint against the son of the owner of a large department store, but the story was not published, and Seldes became outraged when the advertising department of the newspaper blackmailed the owner into buying more advertising. In 1914, he was appointed night editor of the Pittsburgh Post. As a young journalist, he was influenced by the investigative journalism of muckraker Lincoln Steffens, whom he met in 1919; he was also influenced by Walter Lippman. Just before World War I, he'd study for a year at Harvard University, at the instigation of his brother Gilbert.
World War I
In 1916, Seldes moved to London where he worked for the United Press. When the United States joined the First World War in 1917, Seldes was sent to France where he worked, first briefly as the managing editor of the Army edition of the Chicago Tribune, based in Paris, then as the war correspondent for the Marshall Syndicate. He became a member of the press corps of the American Expeditionary Forces in France, section G-2D, and as such was commissioned as an officer, as were all journalists in that group.At the end of the war, he obtained an exclusive interview with Paul von Hindenburg, the supreme commander of the German Army, in which Hindenburg supposedly acknowledged the role America had played in defeating Germany. "The American infantry," said Hindenburg, according to Seldes, "won the World War in battle in the Argonne." Seldes and the others were accused of breaking the Armistice and were court martialed. They were also forbidden to write anything about the interview and it never appeared in American news media. Seldes believed that blocking publication of this interview proved tragic. Unaware of Hindenburg's direct testimony of Germany's military defeat, Germans adopted the Dolchstoss or stab-in-the-back myth that Germany had only lost the war because it was betrayed at home by "the socialists, the Communists and the Jews," which served as Nazism's explanation for Germany's defeat. "If the Hindenburg interview had been passed by Pershing's censors at the time, it would have been headlined in every country civilized enough to have newspapers and undoubtedly would have made an impression on millions of people and became an important page in history," wrote Seldes. "I believe it would have destroyed the main planks on which Hitler rose to power, it would have prevented World War II, the greatest and worst war in all history, and it would have changed the future of all mankind."
However, it was Hindenburg himself, who in a hearing before a committee of the German National Assembly investigating the causes of the World War and Germany's defeat, on November 18, 1919, a year after the war's end, declared, "As an English general has very truly said, the German Army was 'stabbed in the back'," grossly misrepresenting General Frederick Maurice's book, The Last Four Months. It was particularly this testimony of Hindenburg that led to the widespread Dolchstoßlegende in post-World War I Germany.
Seldes claimed that the Battle of Saint-Mihiel never happened. In his account, General Pershing planned to capture the city, but on September 1 the Germans decided to remove their forces from Saint-Mihiel to reinforce other positions. Seldes claimed no shots were fired as the first Americans, he among them, entered the city on September 13 to be greeted as liberators before General Pershing, Pétain, and other high-ranking officers arrived. The thousands of German prisoners captured, he wrote, were taken as they mistakenly arrived at the train station days later to relieve the German troops that had left days earlier.
Lenin and Mussolini
Seldes spent the next ten years as an international reporter for the Chicago Tribune. At the instigation of war correspondent Floyd Gibbons, he dropped the name "Henry", and started covering international affairs, despite originally being relunctant to do so. He interviewed Lenin in 1922. He and three other reporters were expelled in 1923 when Soviet authorities, who routinely censored foreign reporters' telegraphed dispatches, found articles by the four reporters, disguised as personal letters, being smuggled out in a diplomatic mailpouch to avoid censorship. The expulsion was facilitated, according to Seldes, after his publisher and owner, "Colonel" Robert R. McCormick, failed to show sufficient respect when writing to the Soviets to protest censorship.In 1925, the Chicago Tribune sent him to Italy where he wrote about Benito Mussolini and the rise of fascism. He investigated the murder of Giacomo Matteotti, the head of the parliamentary section of the Italian Unitary Socialist Party. His article implicated Mussolini in the killing, and Seldes was expelled from Italy. He wrote an account of Italian censorship and intimidation of American reporters for Harper's Magazine.
In 1927, the Chicago Tribune sent Seldes to Mexico, but his articles criticizing American corporations for their use of that country's mineral rights were not well received. Seldes returned to Europe, but found that his work increasingly censored to fit the political views of the newspaper's owner, McCormick.
Freelance
Disillusioned, Seldes left the Tribune and went to work as a freelance writer. In his first two books, You Can't Print That! and Can These Things Be!, Seldes included material that he had not been allowed to publish in the Tribune. His next book, World Panorama, was a narrative history of the interbellum period. In 1932 he married Helen Larkin Wiesman, who died in the late 1970s.In 1934, Seldes published a history of the Roman Catholic Church, The Vatican. This was followed by an exposé of the global arms industry, Iron, Blood and Profits and an account of Benito Mussolini, Sawdust Caesar.
Two books on the newspaper business established his enduring reputation as a critic of the press: Freedom of the Press and Lords of the Press. He took the title of the latter from a speech by Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes: "Our ancestors did not fight for the right of a few Lords of the Press to have almost exclusive control of and censorship over the dissemination of news and ideas." He believed "that advertisers were a far greater threat to journalistic freedom than government censorship." The press and news, he wrote, "are coming more and more under the domination of a handful of corporate publishers who may print such news as they wish to print and omit such news as they do not wish to print." Time was initially positive in its response: "A rambling but effective attack on U. S. newspapers, charging coloring, distortion or suppression of vital news, containing some enlightening instances of journalistic malpractices as George Seldes encountered them during his career as correspondent." Later, Time called him a muckraker, meaning a biased and crusading critic, when it called another writer's work "refreshingly fair and accurate." Seldes told of his pursuit of a tobacco study that he would make public years later, though the author of the study denied his account and claimed his work had been widely cited in the press.
With his wife Helen, he also reported on the Spanish Civil War on a freelance basis for three years and later said that American reporters too readily accepted what the Franco side wanted them to believe. His disgust at the American press for their Civil War coverage motivated him to start his own newsletter, In Fact. The Seldeses saw the Civil War as a "dress rehearsal" for what came to be World War II.
On August 4, 1939, Seldes, along with 400 other writers and intellectuals, signed a letter condemning anti-Soviet attitudes in the United States, called for better relations between the two countries, described the Soviet Union as a supporter of world peace, and said, "The Soviet Union considers political dictatorship a transitional form and has shown a steadily expanding democracy". The letter was published in September 1939, shortly after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact had become known in the United States, and later in September, same month that the Soviet invasion of Poland began.
On his return to the United States in 1940, Seldes published Witch Hunt, an account of the persecution of people with left-wing political views in America, and The Catholic Crisis, which sought to demonstrate the close relationship between the Catholic Church and fascist organizations in Europe. When Time reviewed the latter, it noted several of Seldes' works and said he "stuck out his tongue at Benito Mussolini... thumbed his nose at U. S. journalism... and uttered some hoarse Bronx cheers at the Roman Catholic Church." The review complained that his detailed accounts of church activities were "in part damaging" but "not all germane to the subject."