Wednesday, July 3, 2019

Elmer Davis: Defender of American Liberties

The nationwide radio audience that tuned into its sets on the evening of March 2, 1942, received quite an earful from CBS commentator Elmer Davis. The Aurora, Indiana-born Davis blasted the government’s ability to inform the public about the war’s progress. “Most of us would feel happier,” he told his listeners, “if we got a little more news about what is going on, provided that news did not tell the enemy something he did not know already.”

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.”


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