George Seldes: Tell the Truth and Run

Until I started to look into the life of George Seldes (1890-1995), Am Olam didn’t mean a thing. It’s what brought George Senior to Alliance, N.J., in 1882. This Jewish agricultural immigrant movement from Russia to America was reacting to pogroms and other growing anti-Semitic maneuvers in the increasingly unstable Czarist Empire. Seldes Sr. was—to quote from George Jr.’s marvelous 1987 autobiography, Witness to a Century, written when the "retired" journalist was 97!—"a libertarian, an idealist, a freethinker, a Deist, a Utopian, a Single Taxer, and a worshiper of Thoreau and Emerson . . .also a joiner of all noble causes, and one of them was called Friends of Russian Freedom, of which he was either one of the founders or the secretary." A charwoman mistakenly used Senior’s precious collection of letters from Kropotkin and Tolstoy to start a cold kitchen stove, leaving the bulk of his idealistic endeavors to oral tradition.

Senior’s "utopian" farm in Alliance was "worked" by sons George and Gilbert (1893-1970), while Senior ran a drugstore in Philly at Fifth and Carpenter, whose guest room was used, inter alia, by Emma Goldman as well as Maxim Gorki and his girlfriend Madame Andreyeva, the greatest actress of that era, thrown out of their fancy Philadelphia hotel when the Russian Embassy publicized that they were not married. Mark Twain got in a flap with Father Seldes when he cracked wise to a news service interviewer, "Why, that man might just as well have appeared in public in his shirt-tail." This quip enraged Edgar Lee Masters, who charged that Mr. Clemens’ flip witticism helped sink Gorki’s visit to aid the Russian revolutionaries. The senior Seldes was always inadvertently making such headlines, and Junior claims it’s what motivated him to become a newsman, as well as the one of the most effective investigator reporters of his century.

But until their father settled them in cities (after their mother’s early death)— George in Pittsburgh and Gilbert in Philadelphia (to expedite their access to a university education)— the Seldes bothers were farm boys who "hoed and dug potatoes and picked strawberries at one cent a quart.” In the fall George and Gilbert gladly played hooky to pick grapes "which Grandfather sold to a man named Charlie Welch, the inventor of alcohol-free wine he called grape juice.” Thus their only crop grossed them three hundred dollars a year— which, plus the $16.66 a month their Aunt Bertha earned by keeping the fourth-class post office in Alliance, made their family one of the most affluent in the town of 300 Utopian farmers.

Father George was a tough teacher— no trashy boy’s book for them! Nuts to the likes of Horatio Alger. That got Gilbert (out of Central High) to Harvard on a scholarship. But George had already chosen to write for the Pittsburgh papers. Gilbert did talk George into a semester at Harvard taking the same courses. A high point was their class with Harvard’s legendary writing teacher, Charles Townsend Copeland. Copey must have been a tad tired of the artsy-fartsy papers he was getting from the regulars, including Gilbert’s. At one session, he sneered at the Harvard esthetes "who take three bites to a cherry" and proceeded to read George’s The Black Cossacks, about the coal and iron police who ruled Pittsburgh’s two main industries. Copey pointed at "George Vivian Seldes" and declared, "I like your brother George Henry Seldes". Gilbert never used his middle name again.

Soon George was back writing for newspapers, preparing himself for covering World War I. Gilbert was getting ready to introduce the European avant-garde (Picasso, Joyce, D.H. Lawrence) to Americans by editing The Dial magazine. In a bit of extravagant fraternal hyperbole, he touted brother Gilbert as one of the three greatest American critics of the era (the other two being Edmund Wilson and Walter Lippmann).

At the front, George evaded Black Jack Pershing’s censors as often as he could, going behind the lines to interview Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg. He tracked him down to Kassel, where he got Hindenburg to admit that the Germans lost the war fairly and squarely, thus squashing the "stab in the back" excuse that ultimately justified Hitler’s rise to power. George was thrown out of Mussolini’s Italy, then Lenin’s Russia, until he settled down in Berlin monitoring Europe for the conservative Colonel McCormick’s Chicago Tribune, as odd a journalistic marriage as any in the history of America.

Then there was perhaps the high point of George’s career: his enthusiastic but ultimately failed aid for Republican Spain in the 1930s. He returned to America to publish his weekly In Fact: An Antidote for Falsehood in the Daily Press (a one-man model for the later I.F. Stone’s Weekly). He was convinced that the three greatest sources of newspaper advertising— cars, cigarettes and drugs— kept the press venal. The American newspaper was "free" to evade the truth!

One of the few exceptions was J. David Stern, whose Delaware Valley newspapers supported the "wrong" (i.e., Republican Loyalist) side in the Spanish Civil War. Philly’s Cardinal Dougherty organized a boycott of Stern’s Record in a pastoral letter, even though a Stern poll showed that the majority favored the Loyalists.

His pastoral letter having flopped, in 1937 the cardinal intimidated the department store owners who in turn frightened Stern. Stern, wrote Seldes, “sent a letter of humble apology to the cardinal and enclosed an editorial he was publishing ‘denouncing the Spanish government’s actions against the Catholic Church,’ adding he hoped ‘it would offset any unfriendly impression created by a previous editorial’.” As Seldes put it, "Mr. Stern came to Canossa."

One small town editor-publisher— William Allen White, of Emporia, Kansas— was one of the few newspapermen with the courage to tell the whole truth. Seldes asked White what he would say to the Newspaper Guildsmen, to all reporters, journalists and their editors? The Kansan cited Abraham Lincoln: The country was safe when the people knew the facts "fairly and honestly presented. . . .Then the truth will care of itself.”

Incidentally, when you see how servile the press was in the ‘20s, ‘30s and ‘40s, you understand for the first time the accusations about the liberal bias of the contemporary press. They are simply trying hard to avoid their earlier failures.

George Seldes and his wife Helen returned from Spain broke. But Sinclair Lewis and his wife Dorothy Thompson spotted them $2,000 so they could buy a plain house in Hartland Corners, Vermont. Interestingly, the final chapter of this lively memoir is a tribute to Ralph Nader, in a kind of passing on of the torch ceremony. (Nader’s gadfly career may have been motivated by back copies of In Fact that he found in his high school library.)

If your curiosity about this great Philadelphian is aroused, play Rich Goldsmith’s DVD, Tell the Truth and Run. George Seldes’ exemplary life is too singular to be forgotten in an age when the press in America faces another threat to its intellectual freedom.