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Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in the History of the Media ((PSHM))

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Abstract

The Depression exposed wide economic disparity in the United States, which radicalized America’s working men and women and drove the calls for reform, which underpinned the New Deal measures. At the same time America’s middle classes were increasingly suspicious of the capacity of the public to understand complex issues and feared that organized labour was preparing citizens for a totalitarian dictatorship. The corporatization of newspapers, the expansion of advertising and public relations (PR), the rise of broadcast and the increase in public commentators created a more complex and confusing public domain and the majority of citizens came to believe that newspaper publishers were working against the public’s interests. Seldes was thrilled with the public’s growing scepticism about the accuracy and truthfulness of the daily press and he refined his critiques about the suppression of news and the corruption of public information in his seminal books Freedom of the Press (1935) and Lords of the Press (1938).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Wendt, Lloyd. 1979. Chicago Tribune: The Rise of a Great American Newspaper. Chicago: Rand McNally & Company; 557. Roosevelt closed the banks to stop people withdrawing all their money.

  2. 2.

    Cottrell, R.C. (1983). Wielding the Pen as a Sword: The Radical Journalist I.F. Stone (Order No. 8314763). Available from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. (303163543). Retrieved from https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.library.uwa.edu.au/docview/303163543?accountid=14681; p. 14.

  3. 3.

    In Fact, November 30, 1942.

  4. 4.

    In his letter to the New York Times Seldes described Lewis as “one of the most important men of our time.” Schorer, Mark. 1961. Sinclair Lewis: An American Life. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company Inc.; 614.

  5. 5.

    This book sold more than a quarter of a million copies and it sought to show how liberals and rational men might be concerned about the right and fascism but this did not make them communists. Yerkes, Andrew Corey. 2010. Biology of Dictatorships: Liberalism and Modern Realism in Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here. Studies in the Novel vol. 42, no. 3; 287–304. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41203474

  6. 6.

    He wrote It’s an Art, a book exposing how advertising and public relations pervert public information.

  7. 7.

    Crosier, Barney. 1974. A description of the intertwining of Vermont and World at Barnard House of Sinclair Lewis. Rutland Herald December 6.

  8. 8.

    For Seldes the failure of democracy was the failure of the media to undertake their role in educating the public, a point originally made by Walter Lippmann. Seldes, George. 1935. Freedom of the Press. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company; 33.

  9. 9.

    Seldes wrote of the “mass meetings and conventions attended by thousands of people” who “applauded attacks on the press and specific charges against certain newspaper owners as agents of fascism and breeders of war” Seldes, Freedom of the Press 1935; ix.

  10. 10.

    Seldes, Freedom of the Press; 150. Moreover, when the press really found out the true state of affairs they failed to report them because they did not wish to erode the confidence necessary for financial recovery.

  11. 11.

    Kenneth Olson, review of Freedom of the Press by George Seldes. In Journalism Quarterly (September 1935); 320.

  12. 12.

    According to a typed note in the column of the editorial the review was cut to one-third of its original size and run on November 15. Seldes Collection.

  13. 13.

    Seldes to Ralph Ingersoll Editor of PM on January 18, 1941. Seldes Collection.

  14. 14.

    Murphy, R. 1936. Freedom of the Press (Book) Quarterly Journal of Speech 22 (3); 484, viewed May 8, 2019, https://search-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.library.uwa.edu.au/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ufh&AN=9225286&site=ehost-live. p. 485.

  15. 15.

    Chamberlain. John. (1935, September 9); 17. Books of the Times. New York Times (1923–Current File). Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/101352436/

  16. 16.

    Seldes cites the La Follette Senate Civil Liberties Committee, which in January 1938 investigated the use of violence by employers against unionists, and Seldes saw these elements as comparable to Mussolini’s Blackshirts.

  17. 17.

    African Americans were often employed in the industries with the most appalling conditions and thus drawn to unionization.

  18. 18.

    Seldes writes that publishers resisted efforts to pay a minimum wage to children by claiming the measure would lead to the “sovietisation of American youth.” This was despite the fact that the Government’s Department of Labour investigations into child labour showed that boys under the age of 12 selling newspapers in 1934 made 82 cents for 18 hours of work per week. Seldes, George. 1938. You Can’t Do That. New York: Modern Age Books; 90.

  19. 19.

    Seldes wrote in You Can’t Do That: “Given a free press, a country would have the instrument with which to convert the entire people to the great program of the cooperative commonwealth, the practical utopia. The warmongers, the merchants of death, the exploiters of human labour, the parasites who live on the toil of others, the reactionaries and the Fascists with all their present power and their control of the instruments of force, would not long endure” (228).

  20. 20.

    O.W. Reigel review of You Can’t Print That by George Seldes in Journalism Quarterly 15 (September 1938):298.

  21. 21.

    Lords of the Press, 1938; 331.

  22. 22.

    Seldes quotes the publication Christian Century suggesting that a vote for Roosevelt was a “vote against newspapers in general” (331).

  23. 23.

    Pollard, James E. 1945. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Press. Journalism Quarterly 22 (3) September; 203.

  24. 24.

    Seldes, George. 1933. World Panorama. London. Hamish Hamilton Ltd; 377.

  25. 25.

    Malcolm Cowley described New York’s 1930s literary world in this way. Schorer, 1961; 536.

  26. 26.

    Seldes, George. 1938. Lords of the Press; 402.

  27. 27.

    McChesney, R., and Scott, B. 2004. Our Unfree Press: 100 Years of Radical Media Criticism. New York: New Press; 20.

  28. 28.

    Laetitia Bolton of Modern Books wrote to George Seldes on May 9, 1938, advising him that the book had been ignored by all the New York Dailies and the majority of Weekly Reviews.

  29. 29.

    The Pilot February 3, 1939.

  30. 30.

    W.L. White review of Lords of the Press by George Seldes, in the New Republic (November 30, 1938).

  31. 31.

    Biographer of the Chicago Tribune History Lloyd Wendt criticized Seldes’ book as an “example of over-statement, misstatement, half-truth and innuendo” (569).

  32. 32.

    Willey, M. 1939. Seldes, George. Lords of the Press (Book Review). American Sociological Review. Albany, N.Y.: American Sociological Association. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/1289802943/

  33. 33.

    Drummond, J. 1939. Seldes, George. Lords of the Press (Book Review). Public Opinion Quarterly. Princeton, N.J.: Public Opinion Quarterly, Inc. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/1296902512/

  34. 34.

    Seymour Waldman review of Lords of the Press by George Seldes in Daily Worker November 25, 1938.

  35. 35.

    George Seldes, Non Conspiracy of Silence in the Press Exposé. February 1954; 3.

  36. 36.

    Blanchard, Margaret A. 1977. The Hutchins Commission, the Press, and the Responsibility Concept Journalism Monographs 49; 1–59.

  37. 37.

    Emery, Edwin. 1972. The Press and America: An Interpretative History of Journalism. Second Edition. Prentice-Hall Inc. Englewood Cliffs, NJ; 712.

  38. 38.

    Linda J. Lumsden, 2002. Press Criticism. In American Journalism: History, Principles and Practices ed. W. David Sloan and Lisa Mullikin Parcell. Jefferson, NC: McFarland; 58.

  39. 39.

    Gordon, Lynn D. 1994. Why Dorothy Thompson Lost Her Job: Political Columnists and the Press Wars of the 1930s and 1940s History of Education Quarterly 34, no. 3; 291.

  40. 40.

    By 1945 approximately half of the newspapers published in 1915 still operated: only 1744 newspapers in comparison to the 2600 in 1915 https://www.encyclopedia.com/education/news-and-education-magazines/journalism-1929-1940

  41. 41.

    Frank Luther Mott, 1947. American Journalism: A History of Newspapers in the United States through 250 years 1690–1940. New York: Macmillan. Mott claimed that by 1929, American newspapers had a combined national circulation figure of 40 million and this generated advertising revenue of up to $860 million. Further consolidation of newspapers occurred after 1929 when growing competition for declining advertising dollars saw many smaller newspapers driven out of business or merged into chains.

  42. 42.

    “Editor James A. Wechsler recalled the early 1930s as a time of ‘democratic despair’ and a ‘querulous pessimism about the democratic future’” (Schudson 1978, 122). Journalist Vincent Sheean noted that during the 1930s that democracy had “glided onto lower levels of ineptitude” (1935; 63). William Allen White admitted that he no longer knew what was right and Ray Stannard Baker wrote in 1936 that he did not understand the complex problems confronting the nation (Schudson 1978, 126).

  43. 43.

    Lippmann, Walter. 2008. Liberty and the News. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press; 2.

  44. 44.

    Neal Gabler (1994) describes the 1920s as the most “self-consciously epochal period in American history, a decade during which many of the social, economic, political and demographic forces that had been building momentum since before the turn of the century finally tipped the national balance and during which a style was devised to signify the changes” (47). The Bolshevik Revolution created a deep fear of a united working class in the minds of the middle class and this fear was exploited by Mussolini and Hitler who advocated for dictatorship.

  45. 45.

    Schudson, Michael. 1978. Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers. New York: Basic Books Inc.; 128.

  46. 46.

    Walter Lippmann expressed this re-conceptualization in The Phantom Public (1925), which examined the decline in voting and he argued that it was not the fault of the citizen but the unrealistic expectation of the citizens’ capabilities. Lippmann did not believe that people could understand all the information they needed to make sense of the world and “for the most part people were just not sufficiently interested in the world beyond their own doorstep to bother” qtd. Schudson, Michael. 2008. Why Democracies Need an Unlovable Press. Malden, MA: Polity Press; 4.

  47. 47.

    Schudson, 1978; 129.

  48. 48.

    Gabler (1994) notes that tabloid journalism was introduced into America by Joseph Medill Patterson in 1919 who had been inspired by the tabloid newspapers of Fleet Street (73).

  49. 49.

    According to Walter Benjamin this type of journalism was the “product of fully developed capitalism” and its primary characteristic is that it “lays claim to prompt verifiability” and providing the appearance of plausibility. Schudson 1978; 89. These newspapers stressed that they provided the facts and their information was seen as more reliable than tabloid papers—even though tabloids had the largest circulations.

  50. 50.

    Schudson, 1978; 90.

  51. 51.

    Gabler, 1994; 74.

  52. 52.

    Tabloid journalism attracted nearly 40% of the newspaper readers in New York. Gabler, 1994; 74.

  53. 53.

    In Freedom of the Press Seldes wrote that only a “very small minority … reads books, magazines, weekly reviews (and) understands the aims and methods of the opposing systems well” and that the decision in America between communism and fascism “will be made by the masses whose emotions, rather than minds are worked on by the indirect power” of the foreign news bureaus (1935: 245).

  54. 54.

    Seldes objected to tabloids and the ways in which they turned news and celebrities into commodities for public entertainment. He also objected to the way tabloids eroded the dignity of the individual by collapsing the divisions between public and private and he saw how tabloids’ fabricated news and sensationalized facts had contributed to the wide misinformation in public life.

  55. 55.

    Most readers were drawn from the working class and almost one-third were women (Gabler 1994; 77).

  56. 56.

    Schudson cites the work of George Herbert Meade, who sees these newspapers as providing readers with aesthetic experiences that help them to “interpret their own lives and to relate them to the nation, town, or class to which they belong” (1978; 89). These newspapers still get the facts and still “act as a guide to living” but they do it by selecting and framing the facts. Schudson also notes that by 1900 the “United States had 26 million citizens who were immigrants and 10 million who were immigrants themselves—46 per cent of the country’s population” (97).

  57. 57.

    Eldridge, David. 2008. American Culture in the 1930s. Edinburgh University Press; 5.

  58. 58.

    Seldes also wrote that during the 1930s “literature became almost as important in New York as a prize fight” (1935: 350) and he noted that a group of American writers including Dreiser and Dos Passos went to Kentucky to investigate the AP reporting of a strike and they were subsequently “indicted for criminal syndicalism to overthrow the government” (1935; 370). Seldes believed the Sacco-Vanzetti case “brought a new group of radical writers to the fore” and he believed this was apparent when Sherwood Anderson, Malcolm Cowley, Theodore Dreiser and John Dos Passos all signed letters of support for the communist candidate.

  59. 59.

    The Nation August 12, 1944; 172.

  60. 60.

    Mowrer, 1928 notes that during the 1920s the United States enjoyed financial prestige in Europe because it was seen as a successful capitalist model that had developed largely unimpeded and was central to political stability. It also appeared to be a nation capable of providing its citizens with “satisfactory material conditions” (164) and dispending wealth to its European neighbours in the form of significant “investment and loans” (164).

  61. 61.

    Mowrer, 1928; 167. Mowrer explains how this reputation emerged out of America’s role as financier of Europe in the post-First World War period. America kept several European economies afloat through loans and as a result the United States gradually emerged as a global power.

  62. 62.

    Wendt, 1979; 562–563. McCormick compared Roosevelt to Mussolini and Hitler in an editorial on July 2, 1934.

  63. 63.

    Publishers particularly objected to the right of journalists to collectively bargain allowed under the Wagner Labor Relations Act, and lobbied against the imposition of taxes upon employers designed to build up unemployment insurance and pension funds.

  64. 64.

    Johnson, Gerald W. 2008. Freedom of the Newspaper Press. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 200 (938); 64. It was this fear of government regulation of free speech that saw more than 1200 daily newspapers out of 1900 opposing the 1936 election of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

  65. 65.

    Historian Daniel Bell has argued that a national economy emerged between 1910 and 1930 and Roosevelt was trying to establish the institutions necessary to manage it. Wendt, 1979; 568.

  66. 66.

    Wendt, 1979; 568.

  67. 67.

    Opposition to the National Recovery Administration (NRA) was widespread (Wendt 1979; 572). Gies also noted the resistance; small business thought it fostered monopolies; big business resented the labour provisions, “consumers objected to the price increases and liberals disliked the suspension of anti-trust laws” (Gies 572). This unhappiness was evident in an appeal to the Supreme Court in May 1935 which found the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) unconstitutional. However, new legislation was drafted in 1936 which replaced some of these measures. Gies. Joseph. 1979. The Colonel of Chicago New York: E.P. Dutton; 132.

  68. 68.

    Blanchard, Margaret A. 1977. The Hutchins Commission, The Press and the Responsibility Concept. Journalism Monographs 49: 3.

  69. 69.

    This was a consortium of unions that increased the leverage of a union strike.

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Fordham, H. (2019). Critic. In: George Seldes’ War for the Public Good. Palgrave Studies in the History of the Media. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30877-3_5

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