Witness to a Century
by George Seldes Ballantine Books, NY 1987
ISBN 0-345-33181-8
I roared through Witness to a Century, following the suppressed history of the 20th century that George Seldes bore witness to. Ever since I saw the documentary "Tell the Truth and Run" about Mr Seldes, I have owed it to myself to read his story (ask your PBS station to show this movie). George Seldes was a beat reporter in Pittsburgh, a foreign correspondent in Europe, and a media critic in Vermont. He founded the first ongoing publication devoted to media criticism, In fact, which was driven out of business by the FBI, and whose model IF Stone followed when he started his Weekly.
Seldes lived and worked through most of this century and saw it clear. He had a pin-point anger at injustice and unearned privilege and a sense of fairness and integrity that shines through in each of his many stories. He starts his book with a disclaimer, the motto of the Biographie Universelle de France:
We owe respect to the living; to the dead nothing but truth.
Brought up in a cooperative farming comunity, he went to work as a reporter while his brother, Gilbert, went to Harvard. One summer, he convinced Gilbert to spend some time working at the newspaper with him while the next year he spent at Harvard. While there, they both took classes from Charles Townsend Copeland, the kind of man Emerson called a "professor of books." Prof Copeland gave him some very good writing advice:
"Read what you have written out loud to yourself. Read every word, every sentence, the whole day's output just as soon as you have written it. Out loud. Do not be self-conscious. Listen to the words. Make corrections and then read it all again. Out loud. it will make all the difference in your writing."
He had already learned other reportorial techniques from his first City Editor, Houston H Eagle of the Pittsburgh Leader in 1909:
"But," I interrupted, "how do you 'train' a memory?"
"Well," replied Mr Eagle, "take today for instance. When you get home this afternoon, write down as you remember it every word I said and the way I said it. Did I smile? Or did I laugh? Anything. You won't have much success today. But do it again tomorrow - encounters with anyone, everyone, the policeman who made the arrest, the prisoner if they'll let you talk to him, what Magistrate Kirby said, how he said it, or even what the old-timers here tell you every day. I assure you that if you have trained your memory, that pad and paper are a thing of the past."
Seldes trained his memory very well indeed.
Seldes became a war correspondent during World War I and with a few of his colleagues slipped into Germany just after the armistice, an exploit for which they were all nearly shot. The devastation and human despair he saw there changed the way he thought about war. Here is his account of the armistice:
At 10:59 the great rumble from afar, heard in Paris, heard in the towns and villages where the war correspondents lived, which had sounded like millions of men and women drowning in the seven seas, did diminish. For most continental Europeans it had never been artillery shells exploding, machine guns clattering, individual shots heard. For almost five years the sound of war had been this rumbling, drowning-gurgling sound, day and night, titanic but low, universal. The silence that came finally, when all the heroes had finished prolonging the war on a miniature scale, nevertheless was impressive - so impressive indeed it felt like a warning of death to millions of old soldiers - boys who had grown old in two or three years in the trenches.
After the war, he covered the beginning of the Fascist movement with D'Annunzio and Mussolini in Italy. He wrote one of the first books denouncing Il Duce, Sawdust Caesar, and implicated the dictator in political murder. He traveled to Moscow and had a press conference with Lenin, "the only dictator, past or present, who had a sense of humor." One story Lenin told concerned the time he lived in exile in London:
Frequently working mens' delegations who had chosen arbitration rather than going on strike would come to him asking that he represent them.
"On one occasion," said Lenin, "the delegates themselves could not agree on terms. They argued. Several of them shouted. They made a mess of things."
I said, "Go home, come to an agreement on terms, come here again tomorrow, and tell me in a few words."
The delegation returned the next day. The spokesman said: "All we want is world revolution, and better toilets."
In the 30s, Seldes married and returned to the US. Sinclair Lewis, who was then married to Dorothy Thompson, a famous reporter and commentator, helped him buy a house in Vermont. The two couples frequently socialized and one day Thompson told a story over lunch:
In the early 1930s, but after Roosevelt was already implementing the New Deal and making millions of friends among people and thousands of enemies among the powerful and special interests, Dorothy happened to be crossing the Atlantic, Le Havre to New York, and happened to meet Harry F. Sinclair of Teapot Dome fame and infamy, on the boat. He invited her to sit at his table and meet his friends, the most notable of whom was Elisha Walker, a Giannini banker [Bank of America?]; the others were industrialists or corporation heads. Continued Dorothy:
"One day at lunch Sinclair remarked that the big business interests bought the Presidency and controlled American politics no matter which party, Republican or Democratic, won.
'What about FDR?' I asked.
'A slight error there,' replied Sinclair. 'Of course we had our money up on him as well as the opposition, and we expected him to make those talks about economic royalists, money changers, and all that bunk, but we did not expect him to take action.'
I asked Sinclair what his group was planning to do next.
'I do not think we can defeat him [ie FDR in 1936],' he replied, 'but my friends do. It will take more than five million dollars but they say they will raise it easily. Even if it takes twenty million dollars. Make no mistake about it, we buy and control our Presidents. And by we I mean the five men seated here, right here at this table, and our friends back home. We make mistakes sometimes, but usually we win no matter which party wins.'"
Plus ca change, n'est ce pas?
Throughout the 40s, Seldes and his wife Helen published In fact, publishing the stories that weren't being told. He exposed the link between cancer and cigarettes, the American Fascists and fellow travelers, and the "anti-communist" demagogues who arose after WWII. Over 100,000 people, including the young Nat Hentoff and Noam Chomsky, read In fact. Unfortunately, the FBI began to harass his subscribers and the Post Office began to monitor his mailing list. Seldes retired the newsletter and began to travel and write and edit books like The Great Thoughts and Great Quotations instead.
Seldes was dedicated to the facts, to truth, and to history. He ends his memoirs with a conversation he once had with William Allen White, editor of the Emporia Gazette of Kansas:
"As his final word, Mr White said: 'The facts, fairly and honestly presented,' and I added, more in the nature of a question than a statement, the words: 'and truth will take care of itself?'
"White leaped at these words. 'That's it,' he said, 'that is our formula: "The facts fairly and honestly presented; truth will take care of itself."'
"I have thought of these words for more than forty years. I know of no better rule for all newspapers of the world."
And no better rule for ourselves.
first published at AList.Aug2997
100 Years or Izzie Stone
Upton Sinclair's The Brass Check
Conversation with George Seldes