Witness to a Century

March 31, 1987
Former correspondent for the Chicago Tribune in a career that spanned 70 years, Seldes had a knack for getting the story. Field Marshall Hindenburg, for example, whom Seldes interviewed just after Armistice Day, broke down and cried as he admitted that the Germans were beaten fair and square on the battlefield. This entertaining journalistic memoir is packed with such telling anecdotes. Emma Goldman, at breakfast, chats with Seldes about how she introduced bobbed hair to women in America, and Theodore Dreiser debates Alexander Kerensky over whether there is a special Russian soul. We get firsthand glimpses of Ralph Nader, Tito, Ring Lardner, George Patton, H. G. Wells, Sinclair Lewis, Oskar Kokoschka, William Jennings Bryan, Freud, Trotsky. Seldes, now 96 and living in Vermont, also writes of the McCarthy era when his own magazine, In fact, was red-baited and destroyed. His fear that the press is ever in danger of serving special interests informs this lively chronicle.