Witness to a Century: Encounters with the Noted, the Notorious, and the Three SOBs [Paperback]

This extraordinary book . . . is a reminder . . . of the sins of suppression and untruth that have been and can be committed in the name of American journalism . . . One of the last first-person statements from a generation that included Hitler, Nehru, and Mao . . . and Seldes too. --Columbia Journalism ReviewGeorge Seldes was one of the great muckraking journalists and the author of twenty books, including Witness to a Century. He began his career as a cub reporter for the Pittsburgh Leader, rose to international correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, and founded his own newspaper, which was dedicated to the truth. He died at the age of 104 in 1995.Introduction
 
 
 
“So Many Interesting People …”
 
It is now nearly eighty years since the morning of February 9, 1909, when I was hired for $3.50 a week—apologetically called “lunch money”—as a cub reporter on the Pittsburgh Leader. Apprenticeship under City Editor Houston Eagle and his assistant, Harold Thirlkeld, prepared me for the journey to New York, considered by Americans if not all Europeans the capital of world journalism, then London, Paris, the press department of General Pershing’s army, a decade with the Chicago Tribune Foreign News Service with Berlin to Baghdad as my field, and then five decades of writing books and publishing magazine articles and a weekly newsletter, all in whole or part a criticism of the press.
 
Nineteen hundred and nine probably marked the peak of the great muckraking era, which was dominated by Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker and Will Irwin. Irwin in 1911 published tl£i