Pointing
out that there were already too many agencies in Washington, D.C., trying to
distribute information to the American public, Davis called for the creation of
a war news organization directed by one person. “Why they are not centralized,
why no unified program is followed, is beyond the private citizen’s
comprehension,” lamented Davis.
The
former journalist turned broadcaster got more than he asked for because of his
verbal assault on the federal government. Acting on a suggestion made by E. B.White in the New Yorker, President Franklin Roosevelt created the U.S. Office of War Information and selected Davis to
run its operations. “He [Davis] will have full authority to eliminate all
overlapping and duplication and to discontinue in any department any
informational activity which is not necessary or useful to the war effort,”
read a White House statement about the appointment. The fifty-two-year-old
Davis had stepped from a $1,000 a week radio job into a $10,000 a year
government position. “As soon as they give me a chair to sit on in Washington,”
he told reporters, “I’ll go to work.”
The
take-charge attitude Davis displayed during his OWI experience in World War II
served the Hoosier writer and broadcaster well a few years later when he
confronted another foe—U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. Amidst the
hysteria generated by the senator’s allegations of Communists infiltrating the
highest levels of government—allegations that often brought ruin to innocent
people—Davis’s “slow, even, Middle-Western voice brought reassurance into
millions of American homes,” wrote his biographer, Roger Burlingame. Davis
offered people hope through what he called his first and great commandment:
“Don’t let them scare you.”
Davis
was born in the southeastern Indiana town of Aurora, which perches on the banks
of the Ohio River, on January 13, 1890. Davis’s father, Elam H. Davis, worked
as a cashier for the First National Bank of Aurora, while his mother, Louise
(Severin), was the principal at the local high school. Reminiscing about his
hometown in an address opening a Library of Congress exhibition on the Indiana
Territory, Davis noted that in “those days [before the automobile] the river
counties were something separate and peculiar; they had little contact with the
classic Hoosier culture up-State, they belonged rather to . . . a culture which
even in the days of the railroad was long dominated by the steamboat.” When the
railroad did make its appearance, Aurora became linked with five other
towns--Lawrenceburg, North Vernon, Seymour, Washington, and Vincennes--through
the B & O Railroad. Each of the six towns “would readily admit that the
other five were hellholes of creation, and could bring up evidence to support
it,” Davis said.
Recalling
his boyhood days in Aurora at a commencement speech for the town’s 1951 high
school graduating class, Davis remembered one thing that distinguished the
community from other towns its size “was the universal interest in music and
the almost universal capacity for performing it.” Universal, that is, except
for Davis. “I was one of the very few people around town who couldn’t sing,” he
told the young graduates. “And to be unable to sing, in Aurora of those days,
was about as much of a deformity as if you’d had both legs cut off by a freight
train.”
Davis
also lacked talent in another arena—athletics. His longtime friend Alex Cobb,
who claimed that the two men “first met in diapers,” noted that the future
broadcaster possessed a keen and inquiring mind. “Elmer was constantly
searching for information about anything and everything,” he said. “Always he
wanted to know, ‘why.’ What he learned he never forgot.” Davis’s physical
agility did not, Cobb noted, match his mental quickness. “He [was] intensely
interested in all sports but at best was awkward in our backyard baseball and
football,” added Cobb. Davis’s mental acumen, however, did allow him to get
close to the games he loved but could not perform well himself. He became the
official scorekeeper for his high school baseball team and “kept perfect box
scores which covered every detail of every play,” said Cobb. Still, according
to another classmate, Davis would have been more than willing to trade his
cerebral skills “for the ability to excel in athletics.”
The
young Davis, however, shined in other areas, especially one that had long been
a part of the region in which he grew up—writing. The river counties, Davis
noted, “set the Hoosier literary tradition,” although not always in
advantageous ways. Aurora was founded by Jesse Lynch Holman who had, before
moving from Kentucky to Indiana, written a book titled The Prisoners of Niagara, or, Errors of Education. “Aurora, if it
was not the place where the Errors of
Education was written, has a more melancholy distinction; it was the place
where the first Indiana novel was destroyed,” Davis said. Believing that his
novel might harm the morals of young people, Holman had tried to buy the entire
edition, which except for two copies, according to tradition, he burned in
Aurora’s public square.
Described
by his childhood chum Cobb as an “avid reader,” Davis began his long career
with newspapers the summer after his freshman year in high school by obtaining
a job as a “printer’s devil” for the Aurora
Bulletin. “Every morning he [Davis] sallied forth in clean overalls and
with lunch pail in hand, returning at night with empty lunch pail and overalls,
shirt, face and hands covered with ink and grease,” Cobb recalled. By the time
Davis was ready to enter Franklin College at age sixteen, however, he had
received his first payment for a newspaper story—$25 from the Indianapolis Star. He continued his
association with the Star through his
school years, serving as that newspaper’s Franklin College correspondent.
In
1910 Davis received a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford. Described by his biographer
as “a sort of financial hypochondriac,” Davis managed to concoct a scheme
whereby he obtained free passage overseas for himself. Since the forty-eight
Rhodes scholars who were journeying to England that fall had to leave from New
York, Davis had the idea that if he could get them all on one ship, the company
that owned the vessel might be willing to give him free passage for his effort.
It worked; the American Line approved Davis’s scheme and he and the other
scholarship winners sailed to Oxford aboard the Haverford, whose main cargo consisted of cattle.
The
Hoosier scholar’s initiation to British education did not go smoothly at first.
Arriving at Oxford on a Sunday with Charles Zeek, a Rhodes scholar from
Louisiana, Davis and his new friend were greeted at the gate by a well-dressed
man in a top hat. “I’m Elmer Davis, sir,” Davis said, “and I suppose you are
the president of the college.” “No sir,” the man replied, “I am the college
porter.” Davis did, however, flourish at the English institution, winning
attention, as he had back home in Indiana, for his sharp intellect and
ineptitude in sports. “It seems to me that his usual exercise was an afternoon
walk adorned with some of his characteristic brilliant conversation,” noted H.
Garey Hudson, an Oxford student at the time. “His keen observations and dry wit
were well known.”
Although
Davis’s time at Oxford was cut short due to the illness and eventual death of
his father, he managed to make frequent trips to the European continent,
gathering information that would serve him well in coming years. While
traveling in Europe he also met a woman from Mount Vernon, New York, Florence
MacMillan, whom he married in 1917. Returning to the United States in 1913,
Davis found few job prospects back home in Aurora and took an editorial
position with Adventure magazine in
New York at a salary of $10 per week. A year later, the New York Times hired Davis as a reporter, a job he held for the
next decade.
During
his Times career Davis covered a
hodgepodge of stories, everything from the 1923 champion boxing match in
Shelby, Montana, between Jack Dempsey and Tom Gibbons to political conventions
(for which he created the popular Hoosier political commentator Godfrey G. Gloom
from Amity, Indiana) and religious rallies. His coverage of meetings organized
by evangelist Billy Sunday in the summer of 1916 brought Davis not only
front-page coverage, but financial success as well. Samuel T. Williamson, a
fellow Times reporter, noted that
journalists of those days were not paid salaries but according to the space
occupied by their articles—$8 for a column and as much as $10 for an exclusive
story. “When a reporter was assigned to a story like Billy Sunday . . . which
produced columns of speeches and the like,” said Williamson, “the reporter
temporarily struck gold.” Davis, he added, aided his cause through his facility
with the English language that “made it possible for him to write a long story
so phrased that a copy reader couldn’t cut it much.”
Davis
gradually made his way up the ladder to success at the Times, becoming an editorial writer for the newspaper. Assigned the
task of censoring the editorial page during America’s involvement in World War
I, Davis joked that his job involved perusing the proof and throwing out “(a)
anything I don’t like; (b) anything I think the owner wouldn’t like; (c)
anything I suspect any one of our 400,000 readers might not like.” In December
1923 Davis left his secure job at the “Great Gray Lady” for the insecure career
of a freelance writer. Carr Van Anda, Times
managing editor during Davis’s tenure at the newspaper, remarked that he seldom
saw the Hoosier writer. “Davis was so able,” said Van Anda, “that I did not
need to see him.”
Liberated
from the daily grind of churning out copy for a newspaper, Davis rejoiced at
his freedom, writing a friend: “Can you conceive the relief, after ten years of
writing for tomorrow’s paper, of cutting loose for once and trying to see if
you can do something good? With the awful peril of the abyss, of course, in
case you find that even with everything perfect you can’t do anything more than
hack work.”
To
keep himself from falling into the abyss, Davis busied himself with writing
fiction and nonfiction for such publications as the Saturday Review of Literature, the New Republic, and Harper’s.
He also continued to churn out popular fictional books—a habit he began in 1913
with the release of The Princess Cecilia.
“He told me while still living in New York that he wrote [political and social
articles] for Harpers for fun, but
when the bank account needed replenishing he could always write and sell
fictional stories to Liberty Magazine
and Colliers,” said Cobb.
Enjoying
his success as a writer, Davis purchased a summer home in Mystic, Connecticut.
Busy writing a serialized mystery novel for the Saturday Evening Post in Mystic in August 1939, Davis received a
telephone call from Paul White, news department director for the Columbia
Broadcasting System. White asked Davis to come to New York to fill in as a news
analyst for popular broadcaster H. V. Kaltenborn, who was on assignment
covering the unsettled situation in Europe. “I had done some broadcasting at
odd times over the past dozen years, had sometimes even pinch-hit for
Kaltenborn during his absences; but to fill in for him in such a crisis as this
was a little like trying to play center-field in place of Joe di Maggio,” Davis
said.
Leaving
his mystery serial unfinished, Davis spent the next few weeks reporting on the
European crisis, working up to eighteen hours a day, but broadcasting for no
more than one hour on any single day. Writing about his experience in Harper’s magazine, Davis noted that he
missed the war’s actual outbreak after finally being able to go back to his
apartment for some needed rest. “One of my superiors called me up at a quarter
past three on September 1st [the day Germany invaded Poland] and told me the
news; but having got to bed only a couple of hours before . . . I only remarked
somewhat drowsily, ‘What do you want me to do about it?’ and he laughed and
said, ‘Nothing—get some sleep.’”
Back
in the newsroom that day, Davis recalled hearing about the eruption of another
world war in the New York Times city
room on August 1, 1914, and it struck him “that of all the men in the room . .
.I was the only one who had worn long pants in 1914. Most of my present
colleagues, then, had not even been born.”
Despite
his age difference with his younger radio coworkers, Davis became a hit with
listeners. According to fellow broadcaster Edward R. Murrow, Davis managed to
survive his years at Oxford “with accent and outlook unimpaired”—something that
helped endear him to the nationwide radio audience. The former Hoosier
believed, when pressed to explain his success as a broadcaster, it was because
he had the accidental advantage of having a voice sounding like “back home.” Reviewing
his career after his death, his former employer, the Times, had other reasons for Davis’s achievements as a radio
personality: “News broadcasting in those days was heavily larded with pomposity
and unction. Mr. Davis had neither. But he loved facts, unadorned facts, and he
had an incisive, analytical mind.”
Over
the next few years, Davis’s reports on the war news became a daily listening
habit to millions of radio listeners. Radio veteran Murrow, fast becoming a
celebrity through his broadcasts from wartime London, wrote and told Davis that
he was proud to be working with him on CBS. “I have hopes that broadcasting is
to become an adult means of communication at last,” said Murrow. “I’ve spent a
lot of time listening to broadcasts from many countries . . . and yours stand
out as the best examples of fair, tough-minded, interesting talking I’ve
heard.”
Davis’s
ability to reach out and grab hold of the American public’s attention was
clearly evident in his March 1942 broadcast urging the federal government to
create one organization to be responsible for coordinating war news. E. B.
White, writing in The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” column,
went Davis one better by proclaiming: “Of the twelve steps we would like to see
taken in this war without further delay, the first is the unification of the
information bureaus and the appointment of Elmer Davis to head them up. Mr.
Davis, on the air the other night, presented the best case for unification and
the strongest indictment of the present mess. In our opinion not only is he
right but he is the man to sit on the desk.”
Although
he received White’s wholehearted support, Davis thought others might be more
suitable for such a position; he wrote presidential adviser Harry Hopkins to
suggest Murrow, William L. Shirer, or Rex Stout as possible choices. President
Roosevelt, however, selected the man he described as the broadcaster “with the
funny voice. Elmer . . . Elmer something.” On June 13, 1942, the government
announced the creation of the Office of War Information with Davis as its
director. The new agency consolidated the functions of the Office of Facts and
Figures, the Office of Government Reports, the division of information in the
Office for Emergency Management, and the foreign information service of the
Office of Co-Ordinator of Information.
As
a rookie administrator, Davis seemed to be at a loss as to what to do on his
first day as OWI director. After seeing a perplexed Davis rifle through a stack
of organizational charts, a helpful secretary asked if he wanted to dictate
anything. “No, I can’t dictate,” he replied. “And I can’t understand all this.
I never could understand charts. But look, do you suppose there’s a typewriter
around? Could I have one?”
With
a familiar typewriter by his side, Davis finally had the means to get the OWI
on its feet and operating. Still, the former journalist had some doubts about
his ability to oversee such an important government operation. At a meeting
with Cobb, who worked in the Treasury Department’s War Bond Division, Davis
asked his Aurora friend: “What in hell am I doing here? I’m not an
administrator, I’m a writer.”
Davis
presided over what one observer called “the most powerful information agency
this country has ever known,” with a budget topping out at approximately $25
million. The agency’s approximately 30,000 employees included newspaper
editors, editorial writers, advertising experts, publicists, playwrights,
poets, film directors, lawyers, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists
and diplomats.
Despite
his lack of administrative skills, Davis managed to wield this disparate group
into an effective information agency. The director spelled out his philosophy
for all to see in a sign posted in the OWI’s offices in the Library of
Congress, Social Security Building, and U.S. Information Building: “This is a people’s
war, and the people are entitled to know as much as possible about it.”
Obtaining
the information from the necessary sources, however, proved to be a major
headache for Davis. He had constant battles with armed forces officials
regarding the release of war news to the public. Asked by a reporter upon
Davis’s appointment whether the OWI had the power to oversee military
communiqués, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson brusquely replied: “Is Mr. Davis
an educated military officer?” Although Davis tried to balance the need for
military secrecy with the public’s right to know, his disagreements with
high-ranking army and navy officers frustrated him at times. Looking back over
his wartime experiences, Davis’s biggest headaches were often caused by Admiral Ernest J. King, chief of naval operations. The OWI director “always suspected
that Admiral King’s idea of War Information was that there should be just one communiqué. Some morning we would
announce that the war was over and that we won it.”
Along
with battling the military, Davis in his three and a half years in office also
had to weather complaints from politicians that he was working to promote not
the war, but Roosevelt and the New Deal; infighting among various OWI
employees; and wild accusations that he was a Communist stooge. His continued
efforts to acquaint the public with the war’s progress came to an end in
September 1945, when, with World War II’s end, the OWI ceased to exist. In
announcing the agency’s liquidation, President Harry Truman complimented Davis
and his staff for their “outstanding contribution to victory.” Freed from his
OWI responsibilities, Davis returned to radio, offering news commentary for the
American Broadcasting Company.
Davis
may have left behind his wartime battles, but he was soon engaged in another
struggle aimed at informing the American public—a battle against the Communist
“witchhunt” begun by Republican Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy. At a February
9, 1950, speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, McCarthy proclaimed that he held in
his hand a list consisting of 205 known Communists in the State Department.
Although a special Senate committee headed by Maryland Senator Millard Tydings
found little or no evidence to back McCarthy’s charges, the Korean War’s outbreak
in June 1950 helped to heighten American fears about the possibility of
Communist-sponsored subversion in this country.
McCarthy’s
wild, spurious charges—he claimed Owen Lattimore, a State Department expert on
China, was the top Russian spy in the United States and termed Secretary of
Defense and World War II hero George Marshall a traitor—created a climate of
fear and suspicion that spawned a new term: McCarthyism. The hysteria prompted
by the Wisconsin senator’s charges reached such a pitch that when Davis
appealed for calm in one radio broadcast, arguing “we had better wait and see
if the evidence justified conviction,” an aggrieved listener wrote him: “We
cannot wait for convictions; what we want is confessions.”
Throughout
the McCarthy years, Davis, in his radio broadcasts and books like the 1954
best-seller But We Were Born Free,
appealed to the better nature of the American citizen, becoming one of the
strongest spokesman for reason during those troubled times. “I regret that I
have to mention McCarthy; I regret that he exists,” Davis wrote. “But he does
exist, and not to mention him would be as if people in a malarial country
refused to mention the anopheles mosquito. (There is a quinine that can
neutralize his [McCarthy’s] venom; it is called courage It does not seem to be
widely distributed in the upper ranks of our government.)”
Davis’s
strong stance against the senator prompted letters of both praise and censure.
One outraged listener wrote a letter to ABC’s president (who passed it on to Davis
for his amusement) charging that Davis acted as “the propagandist for the wild
radicals and Communists but as far as I know never joined the party.”
The
firm grip McCarthy enjoyed on the American public came apart in the spring of
1954 with the famed Army-McCarthy hearings, which were viewed by a nationwide
television audience. The hearings were organized to investigate charges that
McCarthy and his chief counsel, Roy Cohn, had pressured the Army to obtain
special privileges for a recently drafted aide, David Shine. After more than a
month’s worth of hearings, the national audience, noted historian Arthur
Schlesinger Jr., “well trained by TV westerns to distinguish between white hats
and black hats, had little trouble deciding to which category McCarthy
belonged.” On December 2, 1954, the Senate voted to censure McCarthy for his
actions.
The
battles Davis fought on behalf of freedom and fair play, although bloodless,
did have an impact on his health. He suffered a stroke in March 1958 and became
a patient at George Washington University Hospital in Washington, D. C. Davis
died at the age of sixty-eight on May 18, 1958.
The
final paragraph of his book, But We Were
Born Free, offers a fitting epitaph on Davis’s life and career. In it, he
offers for his readers’ consideration the tale of the Philistines at the Battle
of Ebenezer, who feared they were faced with a hopeless cause. “But then,
realizing that nobody else was going to deliver them,” Davis wrote, “they said
to one another, ‘Be strong and quite yourselves like men; and fight.’ And they
did fight, and delivered themselves. So may we; but only if we quit ourselves
like men. This republic was not established by cowards; and cowards will not
preserve it.”
No comments:
Post a Comment