Political And Electronic Media Memorabilia
One morning in 1925, a 35-year-old American reporter named George Seldes nervously boarded the Orient Express in Rome. A correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, Seldes had gotten word before dawn that Benito Mussolini had run out of patience with him. Unlike most of the American press corps in Rome, Seldes was given to naming the Italian dictator's assassins in his dispatches. Fearing for his life, Seldes packed his bags and set off for Paris.
Just as the train approached the French border, it made an unscheduled stop. Italian soldiers boarded and began making their way through the cars, yelling, "Where is Seldes?" The reporter realized that he, like others who had spoken out against Il Duce, was not going to be allowed to leave the country alive. So he barged into a compartment occupied by four British Royal Navy admirals. Find the latest Political Memorabilia for the up coming election.
His introduction: "Gentlemen, if I wasn't about to be killed here on this train, I wouldn't break in on you." If the admirals hadn't pretended that Seldes was one of their party, Mussolini's henchmen might have robbed the world of one of the finest and most influential journalists of the past century. And now, through a Freedom of Information Act request, Brill's Content has acquired a stunning cache of FBI files that document Seldes's strange relationship with another nemesis, J. Edgar Hoover, who waged a virulent and often bizarre 24-year campaign to put Seldes out of business -- for good.
Chances are you've never heard of George Seldes, who died in 1995 at the age of 104. His name never quite made it into the history textbooks along with such fellow muckrakers as Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell. But Seldes's 42-year career as a reporter and editor, spanning the first half of the 20th century, changed the face of journalism. As legendary reporter I.F. Stone once put it, Seldes was "the dean and the 'granddaddy' of us investigative reporters." George Seldes was the first to report, in 1941, that cigarettes can kill you.
It was he who exposed religious broadcaster Father Coughlin as a Nazi. Before any of his competitors, he traced how lobbying groups such as the National Association of Manufacturers manipulate Congress. He was the author of 21 books, including 1935's Sawdust Caesar, one of the first biographies of Mussolini. And, most important, Seldes was the first reporter to systematically target his own colleagues: In 1940, he cofounded In Fact, a bimonthly newsletter (it would later become a weekly) devoted to the premise that, as Seldes once put it, "the most sacred cow of the press is the press itself." Find the best Electronic Media books, merchandise and memorabilia.
In Fact essentially invented the genre of press criticism. Seldes threw open the doors of the newsroom for the world to see, an act that has resonated through our culture from The New Yorker's A.J. Liebling (whose heyday at the magazine began in the late 1940s) to Network screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky, from Inside.com cofounder Kurt Andersen to The Insider director Michael Mann. "George Seldes was like the trombone of muckraking journalism," Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff told filmmaker Rick Goldsmith in his 1996 Academy Award nominated documentary, Tell the Truth and Run: George Seldes and the American Press, which paid tribute to Seldes for the legacy of In Fact.
"His voice was so clear, so loud, and so strident, if you like. He took what should be the most honorable term in American journalism -- muckraking -- and made it work again." Goldsmith's documentary, which featured lengthy interviews with Seldes, including his account of fleeing Italy, was critically acclaimed but has been shown in few theaters.
Just as remarkable as Seldes's contribution to journalism, perhaps, is the extraordinary cast of characters that passed through his life. Seldes attended Harvard with John Reed, the author of Ten Days That Shook the World and the subject of Warren Beatty's 1981 epic film, Reds (in which Seldes himself was interviewed as a "witness" whose recollections were intercut with the film's action). He hung out in Greenwich Village with Walter Lippman; he questioned Vladimir Lenin and wrangled Leon Trotsky into posing for American photographers; he listened to Emma Goldman complain over breakfast about women copying her hairstyle; he watched Isadora Duncan, the libertine pioneer of modern dance, drink her troubles away; he attended D.H. Lawrence's funeral along with Aldous Huxley. His brother Gilbert, moreover, served as editor of The Dial, the legendary literary magazine founded by Ralph Waldo Emerson, and published T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. (Gilbert's son, Timothy Seldes, is today one of New York's most successful literary agents, and his daughter Marian Seldes is a highly regarded actress on the New York stage.)
Seldes was at the center of the menagerie -- yet he seemed like neither a swashbuckling reporter nor an avatar of high society. With his slight figure and close-trimmed mustache, he looked more like a librarian than the rabble-rouser he was. He was an ardent leftist and antifascist, and his preferred style -- on the page and off -- was loud, strident, and indignant. Before Mussolini chased him out of Italy, Seldes was impertinent enough to chastise the dictator in writing for his censorship of the press: "We are required to give facts, to relate happenings, not viewpoints of foreign governments." Seldes concluded his lecture to the leader of the country in which he was a guest by writing, contemptuously, "I hope I have made myself clear."
That sort of unyielding and impolitic righteousness earned Seldes more than his fair share of powerful enemies over the years -- he liked to boast, for instance, that his name had been banned from the pages of The New York Times after he offended Edwin L. James, its managing editor at the time, by testifying against the paper in a 1934 lawsuit brought by the Newspaper Guild. (There is no direct evidence of such a blacklist, but a New York Times spokeswoman confirms that Seldes's name does not appear in the paper's archives after the late 1930s; the earliest contemporary mention of Seldes that Brill's Content could find in the paper occurred in 1981.)
But by far Seldes's most enduring enemy was FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Brill's Content has obtained a never-before-published record of Hoover's obsession: the FBI's 1,700-page Seldes file. The documents, which consist of FBI memos, case reports, copies of In Fact, and Hoover's correspondence relating to Seldes, stand knee-high and tell the story of the unlikely relationship -- by turns comical, chilling, seedy, and even poignant -- that developed over a quarter-century between the FBI director and the legendary reporter.
In Hoover, Seldes could not have had a more implacable, vicious, or paranoid foe. If Seldes embodied the bookish look of the intellectual leftist, Hoover was the polar opposite. He had the face of a boxer, with a thick neck to match, and was often described as dressing like a dandy -- all fine suits and wide-brimmed G-man hats. By 1940, Hoover had been director of the FBI for 16 years and had cemented his power with a vault of secret dossiers on almost every person of public prominence. No tidbit was too prurient, too underhanded, too irrelevant, or too unreliable to be excluded. Homosexuality, alcoholism, sympathies for African-Americans, and -- most of all -- communist leanings were grist for Hoover's rumor mill, to be logged until they proved useful. He could ruin almost anyone he chose.
Hoover chose Seldes in November 1940, launching a chain of events that would bring together shadowy communists, inept FBI agents, the most powerful gossip columnist in the world, and the Nazi sympathizers who once ran Reader's Digest. Hoover's relentless vendetta would span five presidencies and two wars and would wind its way from New York to Texas to Vermont to Mexico to Europe and back again.
In the autumn of 1912, at the urging of his brother Gilbert, Seldes took time off from his fledgling career to study for a year as a "special student" at Harvard, where he met John Reed. By the end of World War I, he was in Europe as an Army press correspondent (in those days, war correspondents were actually employed by the Army rather than by news agencies, and each wore an officer's uniform and followed orders) and worked alongside Edwin L. James, the future New York Times managing editor with whom Seldes would later have a falling-out.
After the war Seldes became the Chicago Tribune's European correspondent, making headlines in the U.S. in 1923 when he was kicked out of Moscow -- where he had been covering the fifth anniversary of the Russian Revolution -- for refusing to obey the censorship laws. In 1925, Seldes's Orient Express adventure made headlines again.
By 1929, he was living in Paris and making the scene in the city's cafe society. It was at a party during his first year in Paris that Seldes met an American student at the Sorbonne named Helen Larkin. She told him that she intended to go to Moscow to work for the Soviets. Seldes tried hard to dissuade her, describing how impoverished the conditions were in Russia at the time. "I don't think I ever want to see you again, Mr. Seldes," she said to him. Three years later, in 1932, they ran into each other at another cocktail party, also in Paris. Larkin had not gone to Russia.
They were married within weeks. Helen and George briefly returned to the States before traveling to Barcelona in 1936 to cover the Spanish Civil War for the New York Post. They returned to the U.S. in 1937 and settled in Norwalk, Connecticut. By then, Seldes had already written two books -- You Can't Print That and Freedom of the Press -- accusing the commercial press of self-censorship. In 1938, he wrote another, Lords of the Press, in which he systematically detailed the conflicted relationships between the owners of America's major news chains and big business, from Harry Chandler, publisher of the Los Angeles Times, to William Randolph Hearst. In it, Seldes insulted virtually every potential employer he had.
Fortunately, in 1940 Seldes's friend Bruce Minton proposed that they start a newsletter together, to be based in New York City. It would be called In Fact, and it would critique the news and highlight the stories that the commercial press ignored. Minton told Seldes he had friends who would raise $3,000 in start-up funds if Seldes would only lend his name -- which was already famous for his exploits as a journalist in Europe -- to the masthead. Seldes agreed.
In Fact was a weekly, four-page news sheet with cheap homes attached, with two columns of very compact type per page. Its motto was "For the Millions Who Want a Free Press." Victor Weingarten, 84, who was an associate editor at In Fact, says, "You could read it in five minutes." The newsletter enjoyed a broad readership, from communists to trade unionists to America's liberal elite. In Fact subscribers, of which there were nearly 180,000 at its peak, included Eleanor Roosevelt, several members of Congress, and every justice on the U.S. Supreme Court -- Justice William Douglas bought all his colleagues subscriptions, according to Weingarten. Also on the mailing list were such celebrities as Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn.
In Fact's combination of facts and vitriol was pure Seldes. When it broke the tobacco story in 1941 -- with the headline "Tobacco Shortens Life" -- In Fact not only reported the results of a Johns Hopkins University study that found shorter life expectancy among smokers but also excoriated the media for having failed to cover it. "The facts...constitute one of the most important and incidentally one of the most sensational stories in recent American history, but there is not a newspaper or a magazine in America (outside scientific journals) which has published all the facts," Seldes wrote. Reading old copies, one senses the stop-the-presses drama with which In Fact was produced. The headlines spin off the page as if they were in a Cary Grant movie: "Sugar Scandal" (Pepsi-Cola hoarding sugar during wartime rationing); "Standard Oil's Treason" (Standard Oil entering into a pact with Nazi Germany to slow down synthetic rubber production in the U.S.); and "Fascist Crackpot" (a congressional committee failing to act on death threats sent to In Fact by a fascist organization).
Seldes saw the world in black and white, and his hyperbole sometimes obstructed his reporting. Weingarten remembers that much of his job involved tempering Seldes's rants. "I had to qualify almost everything," Weingarten says. The sentences Seldes submitted would typically begin with something like "This is the worst example of..." It was Weingarten's job to change that to "This is one of the worst examples...." Regardless, In Fact's tone was, like Seldes, consistently left-wing, strident, and aggressive. Seldes was clearly happiest when denouncing people.
On November 25, 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's press secretary, Stephen Early, wrote a one-sentence memo to J. Edgar Hoover, preserved in Seldes's FBI file: "Respectfully referred to J. Edgar Hoover for investigation and report." Enclosed was a copy of the 14th issue of the fledgling In Fact. Early presumably thought the newsletter merited the Hoover treatment because the lead story was a left-wing polemic against FDR's policies on labor unions and minorities, and it included a swipe at the FBI: "[T]he J. Edgar Hoover outfit...is attacking labor" by infiltrating unions and spying on "practically all liberals, progressives, intellectuals, and non-conformists."
Hoover demanded that his agents investigate Seldes, and they quickly zeroed in on Bruce Minton, who had cofounded In Fact and served as its associate editor under Seldes. On January 23, 1941, Hoover's agents filed the first of dozens of FBI case reports on Seldes. The report, revealed here for the first time, concluded that "MINTON is regarded as being a member of the Communist Party at present time. SELDES, although not a Communist of his own admission, is regarded as a close follower of the Communist doctrines." The FBI had only one source for the information: Victor Riesel, a journalist who would become a syndicated columnist for Hearst's New York Mirror. Riesel specialized in uncovering mob influence and corruption in the union movement -- years later, he was blinded in an acid attack attributed to the mob. Riesel had told the FBI that "the Communist Party purposely furnished the necessary funds to SELDES to start out the publication."
Although In Fact was Minton's idea, his time at the newsletter was brief. Seldes thought Minton editorialized too much, and within a year Minton had cut ties entirely from the paper, leaving the enterprise to Seldes. Riesel's statement to the FBI, however, fueled Hoover's belief over the next two decades that the Communist Party had funded In Fact, that the party had gotten its money from the Soviet Union, and that Seldes should be prosecuted as an agent of foreign influence (simply being a communist, even in the days of the Red Scare, was not illegal). The problem was that there was no evidence to support Riesel's claim. Seldes, at this point, had no clue he was of interest to Hoover's FBI.
In its early years, In Fact quickly became notorious, as indicated by the volume of letters concerned citizens sent to the FBI asking the bureau's opinion of this new and potentially subversive newsletter. It was not uncommon for members of the public to write to Hoover. They asked his advice, inquired as to whether their neighbor was a communist, turned in their friends as Reds, and occasionally wrote proclamations of innocence if they believed (usually wrongly) that they might be suspected of something. Seldes and In Fact triggered a stream of complaints.
One person -- the name is blacked out in the file -- wrote on letterhead from The Pennsylvania State College's architecture department to let Hoover know that he was receiving In Fact against his will: "As I did not like the looks of the publication and prefer not to have anything enter my home in which Seldes is connected, I wrote and asked that my name be removed from the publication's mailing list." Apparently it did no good, and In Fact kept arriving. "In case of any eventuality I wish to state now that I have never subscribed to IN FACT, nor to any other publication of that ilk." Hoover's reply, included in the file, assured the worried academic, "You may be sure that your letter will be made a matter of permanent record."
In May 1941, the file discloses, Hoover received a note from gossip king Walter Winchell, who often swapped tips with Hoover. It sparked a war of words that would change Seldes's life. Winchell had enclosed a letter from a reader of his column asking Winchell's opinion of In Fact. Winchell replied to the reader, a New Yorker named Thomas A. Murphy, that he had passed the query to Hoover. "I am not familiar with Mr. Seldes's publication as I do not see it," Winchell added. (That statement was probably false, as Winchell's assistant was in the habit of passing stories to In Fact that Winchell rejected if she thought they deserved to be published.)
Murphy's letter to Winchell concerned a May 1941 In Fact article about Harry Bridges, a labor leader the FBI had accused of exhorting the violent overthrow of the government. The article was an inflammatory defense of Bridges and accused Hoover and his agents of conducting an unprincipled campaign against the labor movement with no regard for civil liberties.
Hoover appears to have lost his cool when he saw the letter. He sent a two-page response, a copy of which is included in the file, directly to Murphy condemning Seldes and his scandal sheet. Hoover wrote that the sources of In Fact's information were the Communist Party, "elements of the underworld" (meaning organized crime), and "individuals who have been misled and misinformed." He accused Seldes of publishing "a collection of lies and falsehoods."
What Hoover didn't know was that Murphy, whom Hoover had evidently mistaken for one of his concerned citizen correspondents, was actually an In Fact subscriber who had simply asked Winchell, a staunch Hoover ally, for his thoughts on the Bridges story. No doubt surprised by Hoover's angry letter, Murphy forwarded it to Seldes. On July 21, Seldes wrote a challenge to Hoover, preserved in the file.
"If you will point out one statement or one word in In Fact which is not true or honestly reported, I will print your correction," Seldes wrote. "You cannot brush off these charges by yelling 'reds.'" The episode was the first indication Seldes had that he was being scrutinized by Hoover. Before Hoover had a chance to reply, Seldes struck again, on the front page of the July 28, 1941, In Fact: "FBI's head, J. Edgar Hoover, writes an angry letter to an In Fact reader [and is] smearing all his critics as reds, criminals or misinformed and ignorant persons."
Seldes, always game for a fight, rankled Hoover with this last broadside. Hoover was incensed, and his anger can be measured in the 15-page, single-spaced memo -- typed entirely in italics -- that he sent to Seldes on August 27. The letter, which is included in Seldes's file, offered a point-by-point reply to the Bridges story, calling one accusation -- that Hoover's regime was so heavy-handed that FBI clerks' visits to rest rooms were timed -- "a malicious lie." "I shall now observe with interest the action which you will take since being advised of the facts, and of course, I shall be very glad for you to quote my letter," Hoover told Seldes. "I have taken you at your word." Seldes wrote back to Hoover promising to print an edited version of his letter, but on October 4 Hoover replied: "I must insist that if the letter is published that it be published in its entirety." (The exchange is contained in the file.) Seldes chose to print none of it, a decision he would come to regret.
By the late 1940s, the FBI's investigation had taken on a Keystone Kops quality. Hoover's agents, desperate to please their boss, were frantically following every lead, no matter how silly. In 1950, the FBI noted a bizarre theory from one of its informants that In Fact was being used to plant communist moles inside Reader's Digest, the largest-circulation magazine in the country and a bulwark of right-wing values. One FBI memo in the Seldes file records this allegation from the unnamed source, who apparently had infiltrated the Communist Party: "[In Fact], as I know from discussions in the Politburo, was established to reach a wide group of people, particularly in the educational system, but [copies of In Fact were] also planted in the Pleasantville [N.Y.] area in order that its staff and associated Communists might infiltrate the staff of the Reader's Digest. The Party leaders considered that a very important task at that time." But the only discernible "connection" between Reader's Digest and Seldes was a 1947 In Fact report that named three "fascist" employees at Reader's Digest -- and a number of U.S. congressmen -- who had associated with convicted Nazi spy George Sylvester Viereck during World War II.
Seldes's former colleague Victor Weingarten, who lives in Manhattan and is retired from a career in public relations, remembers the story well. Weingarten occasionally spends time in the midtown office of his defunct PR firm, where he was interviewed by Brill's Content. Though he has occupied the office for years, the place still looks like he just moved in. Weingarten also spent 25 years working at the Institute of Public Affairs, a think tank that advised the federal government on social policy, and served as its president before it closed, in the early 1980s. A signed photo of Richard Nixon, thanking Weingarten for his efforts, hangs on a wall.
In 1943, Weingarten says, the Justice Department ordered a study of Nazi sympathizers in the U.S., including Reader's Digest editors, which it decided to keep secret. This did not please its author, a Justice Department official named O. John Rogge, whom Weingarten persuaded to leak the report to In Fact. The story came out while Rogge was traveling. His plane made an unscheduled stop in Spokane, and he was kicked off the flight. Then two FBI agents approached Rogge in the terminal, removed him of all Justice Department property, and fired him on the spot.
The episode characterizes the relationship between Weingarten and Seldes -- the FBI referred to Weingarten as Seldes's "leg man." "George was in charge of indignation and I was in charge of information," Weingarten says. Though he hasn't made an effort to obtain it, Weingarten probably has his own FBI file inside the bureau's vaults. One memo in the Seldes file has a sinister handwritten note from Hoover on the bottom: "Also we ought to get a line on Weingarten."
While the FBI was bungling, Seldes was indignant about the continuing probe against him. In 1945, for example, he wrote to Hoover to complain that his wife, Helen, was being harassed by the Feds: She had been questioned and searched while traveling to and from Mexico, and mail addressed to her at their Norwalk home was being opened at the local post office at the behest of the FBI.
According to bureau memos in the file, Hoover checked into Seldes's claims, and most of them turned out to be true. The FBI had requested that "SIS [Special Intelligence Service] agents in Mexico City" follow Helen while she was across the border, and her baggage had been searched by U.S. customs agents when she returned from Mexico. In addition, FBI agents had searched her hotel room in Fort Worth, Texas, during the trip, finding "negative results except for an empty rum bottle and three empty packages of cigarettes," one memo states.
Hoover's reply to Seldes's allegations, included in the file, was a masterpiece of half-truth: World War II was still raging during Helen's trip, he wrote, and travelers had to put up with certain inconveniences. "[N]either I nor any of the personnel of the Federal Bureau of Investigation can be held responsible for the 'loitering'...of 'native Mexicans,'" Hoover wrote in a September 10, 1945, letter to Seldes. He then went on to reassure Seldes that he was trying to find out whether anyone had been authorized to screen Helen's mail, and if anyone had "you may rest assured that instructions will be issued for the immediate discontinuance of such coverage."
For some reason, Seldes spared Hoover the humiliation he would have faced if Seldes had explained precisely how he knew that Helen's mail was being monitored. The FBI had required the Norwalk post office to record the name and address of each of Helen's correspondents and periodically to mail the information to the New Haven office of the bureau. It appears that a Norwalk postal worker had accidentally dropped one such report into a letter addressed to Helen and resealed it at the post office. The bureau was nonplussed. "Apparently a 'leak' has developed somewhere in the post office at Norwalk," an internal report in the file states. Oral instructions were issued to stop the mail tap.
Though Hoover's crusade against Seldes was often comically inept, it became increasingly vicious as the Cold War began, and the FBI eventually had a hand in putting In Fact out of business.
In January 1948, during President Harry Truman's term, Representative Clare Hoffman of Michigan contacted the FBI, trolling for information about communists that he could use to his political advantage. According to one file memo from the agent who spoke to Hoffman, the congressman "stated he felt called upon to start the new year right by exposing George Seldes of In Fact....He would not attribute anything to the bureau."
Hoover sent Hoffman a hefty dossier that summarized what the bureau knew about Seldes. It included an abstract of the 15-page response to the Bridges saga, which had transpired seven years earlier. This was most likely illegal, since at the time the FBI was forbidden to release its files without the consent of the attorney general. Hoffman turned around and read the entire tract into the Congressional Record. It contained no evidence that Seldes was a communist but plenty of guilt by insinuation.
By leaking the file to Hoffman, Hoover ensured that the red-baiting media -- almost all of the newspapers in the country -- was at last able to report what the FBI considered to be the dirt on Seldes. The Chicago Tribune, once Seldes's employer and by now staunchly conservative, seized upon Hoffman's allegations. One of its wire service stories was headlined "Seldes Dubbed Goose-Stepper for Red Press"; another was titled "Seldes Lies and Vilifies, House Told; Warned He Has Perverted Mind." Life magazine joined in with a feature story: "Dupes and Fellow Travelers Dress Up Communist Fronts." The article was accompanied by photographs of Seldes and other prominent "communists," such as Langston Hughes, Albert Einstein, and Lillian Hellman.
When the innuendo contained in Hoover's investigation was made public, the tide began to turn against Seldes. His liberal subscribers, alarmed at the growing witch hunt, began to cancel in droves. But In Fact was also getting pinched by the communist left: In 1948, Seldes had taken a trip to what was then called Yugoslavia and interviewed Marshal Tito for In Fact. Seldes was impressed with Tito and publicly supported his split from Joseph Stalin and his push toward "democratic socialism" in Eastern Europe. The pro-Tito, anti-Stalin stories Seldes published angered those subscribers who were actual communists, and the party ordered its members to cancel their subscriptions. "[We were] John Steinbeck leftists," Weingarten says. "We got run down by traffic from both sides."
On October 2, 1950, two years after Hoover's baseless allegations against him became public, Seldes published the last edition of In Fact. It consisted entirely of an editorial from Seldes denying that he was a communist and explained that, because of a decline in subscriptions, he had been "forced to announce [In Fact] is suspending publication, temporarily."
The suspension, of course, became permanent. In 1950, at the age of 60, Seldes retired to Vermont. At this point, one might reasonably have expected Hoover to give up his crusade and allow Seldes to enjoy his retirement as the man who made it okay to print bad things about the news business (not to mention the FBI). Not a chance.
In July 1953, as the Korean War was ending, Seldes was summoned from Vermont by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations to be questioned by Roy Cohn, Senator Joseph McCarthy's lieutenant. It had been 13 years since the FBI director had targeted the bespectacled reporter, and Seldes was finally able to confirm for Hoover the very "evidence," such that it was, he had sought all along -- and to dodge prosecution one last time.
"Are you a member of the Communist Party?" Cohn asked Seldes in a closed session, according to the congressional transcript. The question began a verbal dance that was all too familiar at the height of the McCarthy era. "No," Seldes replied. "Have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?" Again: "No." "Do you know any Communist Party members?" Cohn asked. At this point in the transcript, Seldes appears to have become a little flustered. "Well, look, do I know them or -- Well, look, for instance -- I want to tell you this frankly." The committee chairman chided Seldes for talking faster than the stenographer could type. "I have ulcers and am sort of the nervous type," Seldes joked. "I started a weekly newsletter with another man. His name on the letterhead was Bruce Minton. I swear I had no idea he was a Communist. He was expelled from the Communist Party, I think, 1945....If I know any Communists? I know Bruce Minton [but] I didn't know it until he had left my publication and was thrown out of the Party."
Seldes had received a 4,500-word letter from Minton earlier that year, which Minton called a "confession" and Seldes published in his 1968 book, Never Tire of Protesting. The letter, which describes Seldes in glowing terms and exhibits precisely the sort of puffery that Seldes might have railed against in the complacent mainstream press of his day, confirmed that the Communist Party had, through Minton, attempted to use Seldes and In Fact as a front to popularize communist ideas. But Seldes, according to Minton's letter, had proved too independent and intractable, and when Minton left In Fact after less than a year, the party's involvement with the publication ended. "To the horror and disappointment of the Party," Minton's letter read, "Mr. Seldes proved to be beyond the usual methods of persuasion; his integrity, his personal honesty and forthrightness, his convictions were such that the Party was helpless."
Was Seldes really unaware of the Communist Party's connection to In Fact? Or was this a clever subterfuge devised after the fact by Minton to clear Seldes with McCarthy? After all, Minton was already living in exile abroad and was facing more than one grand jury investigation in New York for his political activities. He was well situated to serve as a fall guy for Seldes. "I have no grounds to doubt Minton's account of the beginnings of In Fact," says the filmmaker Goldsmith, "nor to doubt that Seldes knew nothing of the intentions of Minton as a Communist Party member."
Seldes's niece, the Tony Award winning actress Marian Seldes, concurs that her uncle had no clue about Minton. "Knowing my uncle's history, if he said something was true, it was true," she says. Marian, 72, will appear in January in a New York production of Edward Albee's The Play About the Baby. "I cannot imagine him bluffing or lying or dissembling." This was, after all, the man who had risked his life to expose Mussolini's death squads.
Minton was independently wealthy, which may explain Seldes's ignorance of his motives -- it would have come as no surprise to Seldes that Minton had ready access to money. Minton used two names: Richard Bransten, his given name, and Bruce Minton, his communist nom de plume; he and his wife, Ruth McKenney, were relatively well known in literary circles as champagne socialists. McKenney, in fact, was the author of a wildly popular collection of New Yorker short stories called My Sister Eileen, which was made into a 1955 film of the same name starring a young Jack Lemmon. Minton and McKenney were ousted from the Communist Party in 1946 (for "revisionism," as one FBI memo in the Seldes file put it) after they had turned over most of their money. Minton met a dismal end. After he left In Fact and was kicked out of the party, he settled in England, presumably to avoid the reach of American authorities. In 1955, he killed himself with an overdose of sleeping pills.
Marian's brother Timothy Seldes, a 74-year-old New York literary agent (he owns the Russell & Volkening agency, which represents Nadine Gordimer, among others), does allow that his uncle may have turned a blind eye to Minton's scheme if it meant he could get his own publication. "If Bruce Minton came on to him as a passionate believer" in the mission of In Fact, says Timothy, then that, coupled with "George's need for money, made him not think about it. I think he must have suspected."
Certainly, Minton's influence on In Fact was brief and, in the end, negligible. "I've read at least part of every [issue] of In Fact," says Goldsmith, "and they all unmistakably bear Seldes's imprint....It's clear that the paper is Seldes's and not Minton's."
In 1958, the Bridges story -- in which In Fact had criticized Hoover for his attacks on labor leader Harry Bridges 17 years earlier -- resurfaced. Hoover had written a book called Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It. Seldes had read it and, out of the blue, wrote Hoover a letter, which is included in the file, extending a warm hand of apology through the Cold War frost. "Dear Mr. Hoover: You may (or may not) remember me: when I was editing and publishing In Fact, a weekly newsletter, we had some correspondence and I have frequently thought of it," Seldes wrote.
He congratulated Hoover on the book and then raised the subject of the Bridges story and Hoover's long response to the allegations: "It was my intention to publish it with a rebuttal by the man who wrote the article [a researcher who joined In Fact after Minton left] but he 'resigned,' and nothing else appeared. I may say that in my 49 years of journalism this failure to set the record straight is the only item that fills me with regret."
The apology to Hoover for not printing his letter in full, after the FBI had hunted him for nearly 18 years, was typical Seldes. He'd spent ten years holding the press accountable when it was unfair, and he did not let himself get away with the lapse on the Bridges story. On the advice of his colleagues, Hoover did not reply to the letter. "Though Seldes now feigns friendship for the Bureau, it is believed that he might in the future utilize a letter from the Director for his own personal advantage," one FBI functionary concluded in a memo contained in the file. Hoover added in his own scrawl, "I agree."
Later that same year, Seldes wrote to Hoover again, this time to request his permission to reprint something that Hoover had once said in a book Seldes was writing, The Great Quotations (which was, as its title suggests, a collection of quotations). The FBI had an internal debate, chronicled in file memos, over whether it should reply. The agents concluded, as before, "that the attached letter from Seldes not be acknowledged." But then Hoover changed his mind. "On 12-4-58 the Director advised [his agent] that Seldes' letter should be acknowledged." Hoover replied, "Thank you for your letter....The quotations which you attributed to me are accurate, and I appreciate your courtesy in giving me the opportunity to confirm them."
But that was as courteous as Hoover was prepared to be. The FBI kept tabs on Seldes and his wife for six more years, going so far as to monitor their European vacations. On December 1, 1964, 24 years after it had been opened, the final memorandum in the file reads: "The case is being returned to Closed status."
On November 16, 1990, George Seldes made headlines when he announced on his 100th birthday that he was finally getting rid of his 70-year-old typewriter, a Royal manual. The Nation sent a reporter to ask him why. He figured he'd already written everything there is to write, he replied. Timothy Seldes rescued the typewriter upon which every missive to Hoover had been written, in addition to some of the biggest stories of the century. It sits in his New York office today