Ernest Gruening

Ernest Henry Gruening was born in New York City on 6th February, 1887. His father, Emil Gruening, was a German immigrant who had served in the Union Army and fought in the Battle of Five Forks and was present when General Robert E. Lee signed the surrender at Appomattox Court House. After the war he became one of the country's leading ophthalmologists.

Gruening entered Harvard University in 1905 where he met Franklin D. Roosevelt. He later wrote in his autobiography: "A most attractive member of the senior class... welcomed the freshmen at Phillips Brooks House, the university's social-religious center. His name was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His warmth and charm made us feel - as he bade us feel - at home, as he told of Harvard's great past, its present objectives and its promise for the future. He made clear that we had every right to be proud to be Harvard men, and suggested our responsibility to cherish and maintain Harvard's high standards and traditions."

Gruening also attended Harvard Medical School. As he recalled in Many Battles (1973): "I had found medicine absorbing, but not to the exclusion of everything else. In fact, I was already dabbling in journalism (at the Boston Evening Traveler)... I was also following national and international events. Would I be able to take care of my professional responsibilities and still keep abreast of what was happening in the world?" Inspired by journalists like Lincoln Steffens, Gruening joined the Boston American in 1912.

Soon after joining the newspaper he interviewed Helen Keller: "She had never before been interviewed for publication, so I communicated with her teacher-companion, Anne Sullivan Macy, and on securing assent went to their home in Wrentham... Helen Keller who, besides being deaf since infancy, was also blind. Miss Keller's voice was high-pitched with a peculiar metallic ring, but her speech was remarkably clear.... Miss Keller came out of the porch to greet me and, asking me to sit beside her, told me to put the fore and middle fingers on her right hand on my lips. By that means she could understand everything I said. She spoke with enthusiasm of her aspirations to help others who were deaf and blind, and revealed that she was a socialist, repeatedly referring to socialism as the cure for the nation's ills."

Gruening also worked for the Boston Evening Traveler before becoming managing editor of the Boston Journal. Gruening argued in the newspaper that the United States should become involved in the First World War and urged President Woodrow Wilson to declare war on Germany. "The war in Europe was going badly for the Allies. The toll of their shipping taken by Germany's U-boat campaign was mounting disastrously... We supported America's increasing participation in the war effort fervently, and when war was declared, we accepted unquestioningly Woodrow Wilson's dictum that 'the world must be made safe for democracy'. But we were outspoken against the violations of democratic practices at home and opposed Wilson's efforts to impose censorship of the press and the activities of his Postmaster General Omar Burleson in suppressing newspapers and magazines."

Gruening also refused to publish stories of German atrocities. He argued in the newspaper: "There are not and never have been Belgian children maimed by the Germans. The best proof thereof lies in the negative evidence that there never have been any photographs of such children. Had any mutilated children existed their pictures would have been Exhibit A in the case against Germany... No intelligent people credit those stories any more. Even the official British propaganda has given up trying to make use of them, relying on the horrors which can be substantiated."

Under the leadership of Gruening, the Boston Journal developed a reputation for supporting progressive causes. This included women's suffrage and when the Nineteenth Amendment was passed into law, Alice Paul of the National Woman's Party, wrote to Gruening thanking him for his role in the campaign. Gruening also defended Margaret Sanger in her attempts to distribute birth-control literature.

He also attacked the decision of Columbia University for sacking James McKeen Cattrell after speaking out against conscription. He also campaigned against the Espionage Act that in 1918 resulted in the journal, The Masses being prosecuted. It was claimed by the authorities that articles by Floyd Dell and Max Eastman and cartoons by Art Young, Boardman Robinson and H. J. Glintenkamp had undermined the war effort. The legal action that followed forced the journal to cease publication.

Gruening left the Boston Journal in 1918. Stuart Chase wrote to him about his time at the newspaper: "You did a wonderful job... You gave us a taste of what a real newspaper ought to be and these thousands of us who have drunk on that cup will neither forget it nor be permanently satisfied until you have more of it. Your day is dawning, but it will probably be some years before the sun will shine as brightly as it ought. But I think you have driven a wedge into journalism that will widen and widen."

Garet Garrett appointed him as executive editor of the New York Tribune. Gruening later recalled: "Garrett, despite his birth and lifetime residence in the United States, spoke with something resembling a British accent... Garrett had pretty well inculcated the idea in the staff that the conduct of the war was being bungled by President Wilson, and that somehow it was the Tribune's function to correct this."

On 7th June 1918, Robert Benchley wrote an article in praise of African-American regiments on the Western Front. Gruening later explained in his autobiography, Many Battles (1973) what happened: "On Sunday, June 7, he scheduled a half-page picture of a contingent of Negroes of Colonel Hayward's 169th Infantry which had distinguished itself in recent engagements in France, and two of whom - their pictures were shown separately - had been decorated with the Croix de Guerre for bravery in action. As the page was being made up, Bob received a photograph of the lynching of a Negro man in Georgia being witnessed by a large crowd. Bob thought that running these pictures together might prove useful as a plea for racial tolerance and I agreed." Many Battles

The photograph of the lynching in Georgia with the article on the soldiers who had won the Croix de Guerre caused problems for Benchley and Gruening with Garet Garrett. Benchley's son, Nathaniel Benchley, later pointed out: "The page went to press.... and the first copy hadn't been upstairs more than three minutes when there was a dropping of pencils, a ringing of bells, and then a great clanking sigh of the presses ground to an emergency stop. Robert was summoned down to the office of Garet Garrett and there he found Garrett, Rogers and Ogden Reid, the Editor in Chief standing in a semi-circle and looking with frozen horror at the lynching picture. He was told it was pro-German, that it was a terrible thing to run "at this time" and that he would damned well get another picture to replace it because the Alco Company had already been notified to make a new press cylinder."

Gruening and Benchley continued to have problems with the executive editor of the New York Tribune. "Garrett began to criticize Robert's choice of pictures with remarkable vigor... He and Gruening had a long argument about a picture of the Kaiser that Robert had run, Garrett maintaining that to show the Kaiser as a normal human being, walking down the street, tended to weaken the public's hate for him. The policy was that any picture that showed a German not cutting off a child's hand was a bad picture. Gruening disagreed and told Garrett exactly what he thought of such a policy, but it had no effect. Three days later Garrett pounced on a picture Robert had scheduled... showing a U-boat crew picking up survivors of a ship they had torpedoed. This, it seemed, was as good as a pro-German picture, because they weren't machine gunning the survivors." As a result of this interference, Benchley and Gruening resigned from the newspaper.

In May, 1921, Oswald Garrison Villard appointed Ernest Gruening as managing editor of The Nation. He employed a wide-range of contributors including Mary Heaton Vorse, Henry Nevinson, Henry L. Mencken, John A. Hobson, Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, William DuBois, Theodore Dreiser, Edmund Wilson, Sherwood Anderson, Robert Herrick, Anatole France, Lewis Stiles Gannett, Arthur Gleason, Irita Bradford, Carl Van Doren and Mark Van Doren. Gruening also recruited Art Young: "Another new feature was the cartoons of Art Young, a pink-faced, rolypoly cherub with a delicious and irreverent sense of humor. Along with Max Eastman and other editors of The Masses, he had been a target of Postmaster General Burleson and was tried for dissent from America's participation in the war."

Gruening employed several Europeans to write about foreign affairs. He wrote in Many Battles (1973): "The Nation also made a continuing effort to establish understanding with the new regime in Soviet Russia. A brilliant, two-part article by Bertrand Russell, based upon his own first-hand experience, was as fine and balanced a guide to the truth about Russia as could be found in any American publication, at a time when misrepresentation and distortion prevailed."

Gruening also returned to the struggle over the right of Margaret Sanger to distribute birth-control literature. When Patrick Hayes, the Archbishop of New York, condemned Sanger's attempts to hold a meeting in the city on the subject, he commented that "I am confident that in this great city of ours the majority of the women are too pure, clear-minded and self-respecting to want to attend or hear a discussion of such a revolting subject."

In the next edition of The Nation Gruening argued: "The Archbishop has furnished the birth control movement with advertising worth thousands of dollars. He has given all anti-clericals definite and specific evidence of clerical interference in government and hostility to the fundamental American rights of free speech which will be used in those anti-Catholic campaigns which The Nation has deplored."

Gruening invited William R. Inge, Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in London, to write an article on birth-control, which began: "The control of parenthood is perhaps the most important movement in our time. It is not only universal in the civilized world, but the degree to which it is practiced is a very fair gauge of the position of that country in the scale of civilization." Gruening added: "I continued my own activities in behalf of the birth-control movement which for the next third of a century continued to be opposed by the same forces against which Margaret Sanger had battled so indomitably."

During the 1932 Presidential Elections, Gruening supported the campaign of Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1934 Roosevelt appointed him as Director of the Division of Territories and Island Possessions of the Department of the Interior. This was followed by the post of Administrator of the Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration (1935–1937) and the Alaska International Highway Commission in 1938. The following year he was appointed Governor of the Territory of Alaska, and served in that position for fourteen years.

Gruening, a member of the Democratic Party was elected to the United States Senate in 1958. He was a strong critic of the administration foreign policy. On 7th October, 1963, discussed the situation in Vietnam. "We have been and are heavily engaged in Vietnam to the extent of 12,000 advisors. They are supposedly technicians, but of course they are troops, and it is sheer hypocrisy to pretend they are anything else. It is only costing us a million dollars a day, but far more serious, it has cost us the lives of 100 American young men."

President Lyndon Baines Johnson showed more interest than President John F. Kennedy in committing troops to defend South Vietnam. Gruening advised Johnson to "disengage immediately, to relieve all our military of combat assignments and bring them home at once." On 10th March, 1964, Gruening made a speech where he argued: "I consider the life of one American boy worth more than this putrid mess. I consider every additional life that is sacrificed in this forlorn venture a tragedy. Someday.... if this sacrificing is continued it will be denounced as a crime."

Along with Wayne Morse of Oregon, he voted against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which authorized an expansion of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Gruening pointed out in Many Battles (1973): "I detailed my objections to the resolution on the second day of the debate, and again on the third. But the resolution was adopted by eighty-eight yeas to two nays, that of Senator Morse and mine... What none of the senators and representatives knew, however, was that they had been misled about the Tonkin Gulf incident. The facts would not be fully revealed until four years later when, on February 20, 1968, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee reopened an investigation into what actually had or had not happened in the Tonkin Gulf. But even before these subsequent disclosures, Senator Fulbright publicly and repeatedly expressed regret for his sponsorship and support of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. He said he had been deceived. The Congress had been bamboozled into giving the President the unlimited power he sought to wage war in Southeast Asia. Had the Congress not been misinformed by the executive branch, the resolution would never have been adopted."

Gruening was challenged by Mike Gravel in 1968. Gruening was now 81 years old and Gravel did not run on policy differences but on the question of age. Gruening was defeated by but ran in the general election as an independent, taking third place, behind Gravel and the Republican Party representative, Elmer E. Rasmuson.

Ernest Henry Gruening died on 26th June, 1974.

Primary Sources

(1) Ernest Gruening, Many Battles (1973)

On Sunday, June 7, he scheduled a half-page picture of a contingent of Negroes of Colonel Hayward's 169th Infantry which had distinguished itself in recent engagements in France, and two of whom - their pictures were shown separately - had been decorated with the Croix de Guerre for bravery in action. As the page was being made up, Bob received a photograph of the lynching of a Negro man in Georgia being witnessed by a large crowd. Bob thought that running these pictures together might prove useful as a plea for racial tolerance and I agreed.

(2) Nathaniel Benchley, Robert Benchley: A Biography (1955)

The page went to press.... and the first copy hadn't been upstairs more than three minutes when there was a dropping of pencils, a ringing of bells, and then a great clanking sigh of the presses ground to an emergency stop. Robert was summoned down to the office of Garet Garrett and there he found Garrett, Rogers and Ogden Reid, the Editor in Chief standing in a semi-circle and looking with frozen horror at the lynching picture. He was told it was pro-German, that it was a terrible thing to run "at this time" and that he would damned well get another picture to replace it because the Alco Company had already been notified to make a new press cylinder...

Garrett began to criticize Robert's choice of pictures with remarkable vigor... He and Gruening had a long argument about a picture of the Kaiser that Robert had run, Garrett maintaining that to show the Kaiser as a normal human being, walking down the street, tended to weaken the public's hate for him. The policy was that any picture that showed a German not cutting off a child's hand was a bad picture. Gruening disagreed and told Garrett exactly what he thought of such a policy, but it had no effect. Three days later Garrett pounced on a picture Robert had scheduled... showing a U-boat crew picking up survivors of a ship they had torpedoed. This, it seemed, was as good as a pro-German picture, because they weren't machine gunning the survivors.

(3) Ernest Gruening, speech (7th October, 1963)

We have been and are heavily engaged in Vietnam to the extent of 12,000 advisors. They are supposedly technicians, but of course they are troops, and it is sheer hypocrisy to pretend they are anything else. It is only costing us a million dollars a day, but far more serious, it has cost us the lives of 100 American young men.

(4) Ernest Gruening, Many Battles (1973)

I detailed my objections to the resolution on the second day of the debate, and again on the third. But the resolution was adopted by eighty-eight yeas to two nays, that of Senator Morse and mine... What none of the senators and representatives knew, however, was that they had been misled about the Tonkin Gulf incident. The facts would not be fully revealed until four years later when, on February 20, 1968, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee reopened an investigation into what actually had or had not happened in the Tonkin Gulf. But even before these subsequent disclosures, Senator Fulbright publicly and repeatedly expressed regret for his sponsorship and support of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. He said he had been deceived. The Congress had been bamboozled into giving the President the unlimited power he sought to wage war in Southeast Asia. Had the Congress not been misinformed by the executive branch, the resolution would never have been adopted.