George Seldes - Freelance

Freelance

Disillusioned, Seldes left the Tribune and went to work as a freelance writer. In his first two books, You Can't Print That! (1929) and Can These Things Be! (1931), Seldes included material that he had not been allowed to publish in the Tribune. His next book, World Panorama (1933), was a narrative history of the interbellum period. In 1932 he married Helen Larkin Wiesman (later Seldes), who died in the late 1970s.

In 1934, Seldes published a history of the Roman Catholic Church, The Vatican. This was followed by an exposé of the global arms industry, Iron, Blood and Profits (1934) and an account of Benito Mussolini, Sawdust Caesar (1935).

Two books on the newspaper business established his enduring reputation as a critic of the press: Freedom of the Press (1935) and Lords of the Press (1938). He took the title of the latter from a speech by Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes: "Our ancestors did not fight for the right of a few Lords of the Press to have almost exclusive control of and censorship over the dissemination of news and ideas." He believed "that advertisers were a far greater threat to journalistic freedom than government censorship." The press and news, he wrote, "are coming more and more under the domination of a handful of corporate publishers who may print such news as they wish to print and omit such news as they do not wish to print." Time was initially positive in its response: "A rambling but effective attack on U. S. newspapers, charging coloring, distortion or suppression of vital news, containing some enlightening instances of journalistic malpractices as George Seldes encountered them during his career as correspondent." Later, Time called him a muckraker, meaning a biased and crusading critic, when it called another writer's work "refreshingly fair and accurate (especially in comparison with muckraking books like George Seldes' Lords of the Press)." Seldes told of his pursuit of a tobacco study that he would make public years later, though the author of the study denied his account and claimed his work had been widely cited in the press.

He also reported on the Spanish Civil War on a freelance basis for three years and later said that American reporters too readily accepted what the Franco side wanted them to believe.

On his return to the United States in 1940, Seldes published Witch Hunt, an account of the persecution of people with left-wing political views in America, and The Catholic Crisis, which sought to demonstrate the close relationship between the Catholic Church and fascist organizations in Europe. When Time reviewed the latter, it noted several of Seldes' works and said he "stuck out his tongue at Benito Mussolini... thumbed his nose at U. S. journalism...and uttered some hoarse Bronx cheers at the Roman Catholic Church." The review complained that his detailed accounts of church activities were "in part damaging" but "not all germane to the subject."