He met Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Franco, and Hitler, and he was one of the first to warn about the rise of fascism. Seldes also exposed how moguls in the West early on supported the fascists, but the more he revealed, the more he saw his own work being censored.
George Seldes was born into a Jewish family in New Jersey in 1890, and after studying at Harvard he began working as a reporter for the Pittsburgh Leader in 1909. From 1916, Seldes worked for United Press in London, and when the United States entered the First World War in 1917, he served as a war correspondent for the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF). During the war, he interviewed, among others, the German Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg (who later became President of Germany in 1925). The U.S. military, however, blocked publication of the interview, which Seldes later claimed contributed to the strong rise of Nazism. The background was as follows:
According to Hindenburg, the war could have ended in a stalemate, but the balance was broken by the arrival of American troops. The Battle of the Argonne in France between September and November 1918 was decisive, he explained, because when the Americans sent in fresh divisions, the Germans had no choice but to surrender. As a result, the opportunity to negotiate peace was lost and Germany was forced to accept the humiliating Treaty of Versailles. In his autobiography Witness to a Century (1987), Seldes wrote that if the interview had been accepted, it would have been published in many countries and made an impression on millions of people. Instead, the article was suppressed, and stories spread in Germany claiming that socialists, communists, and Jews had betrayed the nation and caused the war’s defeat.¹ This, combined with the extremely harsh conditions imposed on Germany after the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, gave the fascist forces in Germany a massive following.
After the war, Seldes served as bureau chief of the Chicago Tribune’s office in Berlin for nine years. In 1921–22, he was stationed in Moscow, where he also interviewed Lenin. When the communists discovered that Seldes was smuggling out articles about their persecution and murder of dissenters, he was expelled from the country. In 1925, he traveled to Rome and interviewed Mussolini, who declared that “the Italian people need a bloodbath,”² referring to his belief that Italians needed a war to regain their national pride. Mussolini had, however, already begun his own smaller, private bloodbaths at home. His most formidable antagonist was the Italian socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti, who disappeared on June 10, 1925, after delivering a speech against Mussolini’s fascist government, the Lista Nazionale. The year before, Mussolini had formed a group tasked with tracking down and harassing anti-fascists. It was led by the Italian-American Amerigo Dumini, who was known for beating up dissenters on the streets of Rome.
Seldes investigated the murder of Matteotti and concluded that the Minister of Finance Giovanni Marinelli, press chief Cesare Rossi, and the editor of the newspaper Il Corriere Italiano, Filippo Filippelli—all of them fascists—had hired Dumini and his accomplice Albino Volpi, along with a few other thugs, to have Matteotti killed.³ Exactly what happened, however, has never been fully clarified. According to one version, Matteotti was attacked while walking along the Tiber and was then beaten to death.⁴ Testimony from nearby witnesses, however, suggests that he was forced into a car and later stabbed to death.⁵ Before his death, Matteotti is said to have exclaimed: “You can kill me, but you cannot kill the idea.”⁶ Two months later, his mutilated body was found in a forest some distance outside Rome.
After Seldes published an article about the murder, he was expelled from Italy. The attack on Matteotti subsequently triggered fierce criticism of Mussolini, who felt compelled to have Dumini and his gang arrested. The same year, Rossi, Filippelli, and Marinelli were charged with the murder, but the judge dismissed the case. The intense criticism of the government is said to have contributed to Mussolini’s decision to dissolve the opposition and impose a military dictatorship in the country. In 1926, Seldes traveled to Syria, where he covered the French army’s campaign, and the following year he was sent to Mexico, where he wrote critical articles about American companies profiting from the country’s mineral rights. This did not go over well at home, where there was a desire to suppress such information.
Seldes then returned to Europe, and in his reporting he accused newspaper moguls such as William Randolph Hearst of serving fascist interests. Hearst had himself interviewed Hitler in 1934 and afterward described him as “an extraordinary man.”⁷ Seldes revealed that an agreement worth $400,000 per year was concluded between Hitler and Hearst, after which Hearst changed the editorial policy of his 19 daily newspapers to support the Nazis.⁸ Seldes also wrote about how the National Association of Manufacturers assisted Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco alike. Thereafter, his work was increasingly censored, as it did not fit the politically “correct” opinions of the time.
After a brief marriage to a countess named Dursilla Ladine Young de Martino, Seldes remarried in 1932 to Helen Larkin Weisman, whom he had met several years earlier in Paris while she was studying chemistry. Helen later became his assistant, and when the couple covered the Spanish Civil War, their hotel was hit by artillery fire. They escaped unharmed. Around that time, they also became acquainted with Ernest Hemingway, who was likewise working as a correspondent. Seldes wrote a number of controversial books on journalism, politics, and religion, including You Can’t Print That! (1929), Can These Things Be? (1931), The Vatican: Yesterday–Today–Tomorrow (1934), Iron, Blood and Profits (1934), Freedom of the Press (1935), Lords of the Press (1938), You Can’t Do That! (1938), and Facts and Fascism (1943).
In 1940, Seldes launched In Fact, an independent weekly newsletter that refused to accept advertising. Seldes called the newsletter “an antidote to the lies of the daily press” and attacked, among other things, corporate abuses of government power, often using official documents from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). He also accused the press of suppressing important news, such as information about the dangers of smoking and the intense lobbying behind cigarette advertising campaigns—something that shows just how far ahead of his time Seldes was. He further accused the FBI and its director, J. Edgar Hoover, of anti-union campaigns, which prompted Hoover to have the Seldes couple surveilled in an attempt to determine whether they were members of the Communist Party.⁹ Hoover also instructed his agents to attack Seldes’s views in newspapers.
It is true that a colleague who had helped Seldes launch In Fact, Bruce Minton, was a member of the American Communist Party and had received money from it, but none of this was known to Seldes. During the witch hunts for suspected communists in the United States in the 1950s, Seldes was summoned to appear before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s committee in 1953. Seldes vehemently denied being a member of the Communist Party, and the committee cleared him. However, Seldes had by then angered not only the megaphones of power in the media and various liberals, but also the country’s socialists. His newsletter began to lose readers, and In Fact was eventually shut down.
Seldes subsequently found it difficult to get his work published throughout the 1950s, but an old friend and colleague named I. F. Stone suggested that they start a small independent paper together devoted to investigative journalism. Thus, I. F. Stone’s Weekly was born, and Seldes was able to continue publishing important, socially critical articles. He later wrote an anthology called The Great Quotations, but it was rejected by twenty publishing houses before finally being published. The book went on to sell one million copies, yet Seldes was still viewed with suspicion by the country’s cultural establishment. The Association for Education in Journalism did, however, award him a prize for professional competence in 1980, and the following year he also received the George Polk Award for his lifetime achievement.
In an interview Seldes gave at the age of 95 in 1985, he spoke about how he was otherwise frozen out by the media and the literary establishment.¹⁰ Most of the time, his books were not reviewed at all, and when they were, the assessments were usually negative. This was the price he paid for being “uncouth” enough to tell it like it was, instead of trying to fit into the political “correctness” of the day. “I believe that history is largely written incorrectly,”¹¹ he said during the interview—and Seldes knew what he was talking about after nearly 90 years as an investigative journalist. His wife passed away in 1979 at the age of 73. George himself remained active to the very end and died in 1995 at the age of 104. Some newspapers published brief notices about his passing, while others did not mention it at all—undeniably ironic, considering what a journalistic giant Seldes truly was.
Michael Delavante, Awakened Pioneers – George Seldes: A Journalistic Giant
Sources:
(1) George Seldes. Biography. http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org, See also: George Seldes, ”Witness to a Century: Encounters with the Noted, the Notorious, and the Three SOBs”, Ballantine Books, 1987, (page 100)
(2) Meeting Hitler and Lenin: George Seldes Interview, American Investigative Journalist.
(3) Meeting Hitler and Lenin: George Seldes Interview, American Investigative Journalist.
(4) R. J. B. Bosworth , ”Mussolini’s Italy: Life Under the Fascist Dictatorship, 1915-1945”, Penguin Books; Reprint edition, 2007, (page 211)
(5) Hamish Macdonald, ”Mussolini and Italian Fascism”, (page 22)
(6) Joseph Bornstein, ”The Politics of Murder”, Sloane, 1951, (page 57)
(7) Ian Mugridge, ”View from Xanadu: William Randolph Hearst and United States Foreign Policy”, McGill -Queen university Press, 1995, (page 21)
(8) In Fact: An Antidote for Falsehood in the Daily Press, Volym 20–22, 1950. See also: Ian Mugridge, ”View from Xanadu: William Randolph Hearst and United States Foreign Policy”, McGill -Queen university Press, 1995, (page 120-21)
(9) Secrecy Fragments. George Seldes doc. https://bkofsecrets.wordpress.com/tag/george-seldes/ See also: Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the 80:th Congress, Volume 93, Part 10, (page A-1080)
(10) Meeting Hitler and Lenin: George Seldes Interview, American Investigative Journalist
(11) Meeting Hitler and Lenin: George Seldes Interview, American Investigative Journalist
