George Seldes - Politics and Later Career

Politics and Later Career

It has been alleged that Seldes had been a member of the Communist Party since well before 1940, valued for his "major connections" in Washington.

Seldes later wrote that In Fact was founded at the instigation of the U.S. Communist Party leadership, but he claimed that the Party worked through his partner Bruce Minton (also known as Richard Bransten) without his knowledge. Seldes wrote that he was unaware that Minton was a Party member who borrowed the funds to start In Fact from Communist Party leader Earl Browder. When Joseph McCarthy investigated his ties to the Party in the 1950s, Seldes vehemently denied Communist Party membership.

Seldes published Tell the Truth and Run in 1953, but otherwise found it difficult to publish his work for a decade.

He developed an anthology called The Great Quotations and received rejections from 20 publishers. It sold more than a million copies when it appeared in 1961.

In a letter to Time magazine in 1974, he appraised the state of American as much improved in his lifetime:

The press deserved the attacks and criticisms of Will Irwin (1910) and Upton Sinclair (1920) and the muckrakers who followed, and it needs today the watchdog and gadfly activities of the new critical weeklies, but all in all it is now a better medium of mass information.... The 1972 Watergate disclosures, it is true, were made by only a score of the members of the mass media, but I remember Teapot Dome when only one of our 1,750 dailies (the Albuquerque Morning Journal) dared to tell the truth about White House corruption. We have come a long way since.

He published Never Tire of Protesting in 1968 and Even the Gods Can't Change History in 1976.

The Association for Education in Journalism gave him an award for professional excellence in 1980. In 1981 he received the George Polk Award for his life's work.

He published his autobiography, Witness to a Century in 1987. He wrote: "And so Gilbert and I, brought up without a formal religion, remained throughout our lifetimes just what Father was, freethinkers. And, likewise, doubters and dissenters and perhaps Utopians. Father's rule had been 'Question everything, take nothing for granted,' and I never outlived it, and I would suggest it be made the motto of a world journalists' association."

In 1981, Seldes appeared in Warren Beatty's Reds, a film about the life of journalist John Reed. Seldes appears as one of the film's "witnesses" commenting on the historical events depicted in the film.

Seldes served on the board of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR).

Martin A. Lee and Norman Solomon used a quote from Seldes as an epigraph for their book Unreliable Sources: "The most sacred cow of the press is the press itself."