On this date in 1890, crusading journalist Henry George Seldes was born in Alliance, New Jersey, to a freethinking, deistic Russian immigrant father and a Russian immigrant mother who died when George was 6. Emma Goldman and other radicals often stayed in the Seldes spare bedroom in Pittsburgh. Seldes as a cub reporter for the Pittsburgh Leader in 1909 earned $3.50 a week. He became night editor of the Pittsburgh Post five years later and was hired by United Press to report in London in 1916.
Seldes became an accredited war correspondent for the Edward Marshall Syndicate in 1917 in Paris and managing editor of the Army edition of the Chicago Tribune in 1918. He spent a decade reporting in Europe and interviewed Trotsky and Lenin before being expelled from Russia. He was also expelled from Italy for writing about Mussolini. In the 1930s he went to Spain to report on the fascist Gen. Francisco Franco.
Seldes married Helen Larkin Weisman in 1932. They bought a home in Woodstock, Vermont, thanks to a $5,000 loan from neighbor Sinclair Lewis (another journalist neighbor was Dorothy Thompson). Seldes published the newsletter In Fact, devoted to press criticism, from 1940-50. At its peak, circulation was 176,000. Seldes was the first to report the link between cancer and cigarette smoking. He wrote 21 books, including You Can’t Print That! (1929), Can These Things Be! (1931), The Vatican: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow (1934), Iron, Blood, and Profits: An Exposure of the World-wide Munitions Racket (1934), Sawdust Caesar (about Mussolini, 1935), Freedom of the Press (1935), Lord of the Press (1938), The Catholic Crisis (examining church ties to fascism, 1940) and Witch Hunt (1940), about red-baiting.
At least 20 publishers rejected his anthology The Great Quotations before it saw print. It sold over a million copies in 1961. Witness to a Century (1987), his final book, at age 96, detailed his 80 years in journalism. (The accompanying photo shows him typing at age 98.) Until his death at 104 in 1995, he was the oldest member of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. The 1996 documentary film “Tell the Truth and Run” featured interviews with Seldes and was nominated for an Academy Award.
*Note: “The Three SOBs” mentioned in the quote source below were Italian fascist poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, actor Errol Flynn for a 1937 hoax he staged in war-torn Spain to promote his movie, and (“Reader’s Choice”) either of three reactionary journalists who defended Sen. Joe McCarthy: Fulton Lewis Jr., Westbrook Pegler or George Sokolsky.
