William Lindsay White

William Lindsay White (born June 17, 1900 in Emporia , Kansas ; † July 26, 1973 ibid.) Was an American journalist , publisher and writer who supported the Republican Party with his publications .

Life

William Lindsay White was the only son of the journalist and publisher William Allen White and his wife Sallie. He had a younger sister who was fatally injured in a riding accident when she was 16. Even as a schoolboy he wrote articles for the local press in his hometown Emporia. When he was 18 years old, he accompanied his father to Versailles , where he reported from the peace conference as a journalist .

He then studied journalism, initially at the University of Kansas before moving to Harvard and graduating there. He worked in the "Emporia Gazette", which belonged to the regional press publisher set up by his father. He moved from Kansas to the East Coast, first in the editorial office of the Washington Post and then of Fortune . His wife Kathrine, whom he married in 1931, worked for Time magazine . In 1940/41 he reported as a war correspondent for a network of 40 American newspapers from Europe. The following year he became an editor on Reader's Digest .

After the death of his father, he took over the management of his press publishing house in Kansas, but spent several months each year in New York and Washington, DC. He wrote a total of 14 non-fiction books on current political topics, including on the Soviet Union in World War II (“Report on the Russians ”, 1945) and defeated Germany in the post-war years (“ Report on the Germans ”, 1947).

Political positions

Like his father, William Lindsay White was also involved in the Republican Party; he represented ideologically conservative positions. He supported Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 and Richard Nixon in their presidential campaigns in 1960 and 1968 .

White dealt critically with publicists who described developments in the Soviet Union positively, sometimes even euphorically. In the summer of 1944 he traveled to the Soviet Union for six weeks with representatives of the US Chamber of Commerce . During this time in Moscow he also held talks with several American correspondents, including Richard Lauterbach , (" Time ") and William H. Lawrence (" New York Times )".

On the basis of the impressions he gained during his travels and his conversations with Soviet citizens and Americans working in Moscow, he wrote the book "Report on the Russians", several chapters from it first appeared in late autumn 1944 as a series in "Reader's Digest".

In it he described Soviet society as a dictatorship that was characterized by repression and fear in the population. He used three examples to describe the mechanisms of Soviet censorship to which the US correspondents in Moscow were subject: the panic in the Soviet authorities and in the population during the advance of the Wehrmacht on Moscow in autumn 1941, the bombing of the US Air Force's bomber fleet In 1944, the Poltava military airport used by the German Air Force and the Katyn massacre . White described that the correspondents had to file their reports with the Soviet censors before being telegraphed to the home offices. Without exception, the correspondents were convinced of the German perpetrators before their trip to Katyn in January 1944 for a presentation by the Burdenko Commission , the Kremlin's panel of experts. However, several of them had come to the conclusion that the presentation had been manipulated, although they could not have written it because of the censorship.

The book sparked a heated controversy over the evaluation of the Soviet Union under Stalin. 16 left-wing journalists and publicists accused White of a completely skewed account: “ White's book aims to reinforce ancient myths and prejudices against a great ally whose victims in this war have saved us priceless bloodshed and destruction. “The signatories included Moscow correspondents Jerome Davis , Richard Lauterbach , Edmund Stevens and Alexander Werth , war reporter John Hersey and China expert Edgar Snow . But several prominent authors praised the book, including the historians William Henry Chamberlin and Michael Karpovich and the novelist John Dos Passos .

Works

• What People Said , 1938 *
• Zero Hour , 1940
• Journey for Margaret , 1941
• They Were Expendable , 1942
• Queens The Proudly , 1943
• Report on the Russians , 1945
• Report on the Germans , 1947
• Lost Boundaries , 1948
• Land of Milk and Honey , 1949
• Bernard Baruch , 1951
• Back Down the Ridge , 1953
• The Captives of Korea , 1957
• The Little Toy Dog , 1962
• Report on the Asians , 1969

literature

• E. Jay Jernigan: William Lindsay White, 1900-1973: In the Shadow of His Father. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press 1997 ISBN 978-0-8061-2902-0 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ W. Allen White, 77, Kansas Editor, dies, in: New York Times , Jan. 30, 1944.
2. ^ Jean Folkerts, Report on the Russians: The Controversy Surrounding William Lindsay White's 1945 Account of Russia, in: American Journalism, July 3, 2015, Vol. 32 (3), p. 308.
3. ^ William L. White, Writer, 73, Dead, in: New York Times , July 27, 1973.
4. ^ Jean Folkerts, Report on the Russians: The Controversy Surrounding William Lindsay White's 1945 Account of Russia, in: American Journalism, July 3, 2015, Vol. 32 (3), p. 313.
5. ↑ William L. Oneill: A Better World: Stalinism and the American Intellectuals. New Brunswick NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1990, p. 91.
6. ^ The Poltava Debacle Air Force Magazine , March 2011.
7. ^ Jean Folkerts, Report on the Russians: The Controversy Surrounding William Lindsay White's 1945 Account of Russia, in: American Journalism , July 3, 2015, Vol. 32 (3), p. 312.
8. ^ William Lindsay White: Report on the Russians. London 1945, pp. 105-109.
9. ↑ White's book is calculated to prolong the oldest myths and prejudices against a great ally, whose sacrifices in this war have saved us incalculable bloodshed and destruction, quoted from: Jean Folkerts, Report on the Russians: The Controversy Surrounding William Lindsay White's 1945 Account of Russia, in: American Journalism, July 3, 2015, Vol. 32 (3), p. 318.
10. ↑ Jean Folkerts, Report on the Russians: The Controversy Surrounding William Lindsay White's 1945 Account of Russia, in: American Journalism, July 3, 2015, Vol. 32 (3), pp. 322-324.

Web links

William Lindsay White University of Kansas - School of Journalism and Mass Communications