Word: pearsons
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...recent censorship of radio commentators Drew Pearson and Walter Winchell exemplifies the inconsistency of high-sounding speeches proclaiming the sanctity of civil liberties with unjustified limitations on those liberties. Last Sunday night Blue Network officials stood over these two men during their broadcasts and handed them copies of musty, almost forgotten statutes forbidding "Derogatory remarks concerning members of Congress, the Cabinet, or any Federal agency." The mere reference to such legal atrocities is sufficient to recall vividly the quickly repealed Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 and the notorious redbaiting of the Palmer Raids...
...Pearson's script was definitely blue-pencilled. Out of the text was removed a charge that Senators Wheeler and Nye have opposed the impending trial of 33 alleged conspirators, a disclosure that Willkie is writing a book condemning the State Department for "selling democracy short in North Africa," and an unfavorable reference to taxwizard Beardsley Ruml. It was also made known that Senator Wheeler is chairman of the committee that handles radio legislation in the Senate...
...American radio public suffered no great loss by missing a few sentences of what Pearson and Winchell had planned to say. The particular situation which led to the sudden strictness may not, in itself, be significant. But the unheralded censorship of nation-wide commentators by an unknown hand could lead, particularly in wartime, to the abolition of all unfavorable criticism of the government, deserving or not. At present, the radio stations are in no position to stand up for their "freedom of speech," for they well realize that too-strong insistence may cause the revoking of their licenses...
...your Aug. 14, 1939, issue, "Background for War," you outdrew Pearson, not by days, not by months, but by years...
Biographies. Bulkiest biography published in 1942 was Douglas Southall Freeman's massively academic Lee's Lieutenants ($5), first of a projected three-volume study of the men who fought the battles of the South's lost cause. Most amusing was Hesketh Pearson's G.B.S. A Full Length Portrait ($3.50), which recorded many unfamiliar details of George Bernard Shaw's childhood and lovelife. Others were Esther Forbes's conscientious, overlong Paul Revere and the World He Lived In ($3.75); Hugh 1'Anson Fausset's erratic but illuminating Walt Whitman ($3); Poetess Muriel Rukeyser...