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Not So Wild a Dream: The Legacy of Eric Sevareid
A Public Humanities Symposium
September 30 – October 3, 2010
Bismarck, North Dakota
Program Description
As a scholarly commentator, Eric Sevareid’s built his career on the premise that a free media is
vital to the health of American democracy. His creed became, “Never underestimate your
listener’s intelligence, or overestimate your listener’s information.” He believed that broadcast
news was primarily meant to be an educational vehicle independent of market forces and
political bias. Fair debate, thoughtful analysis, and open minded reason, were the hallmarks of
Sevareid’s broadcasts. The Sevareid Legacy Project sought to illuminate the vision of one of
North Dakota’s most famous native sons by providing a discussion forum for historical and
contemporary issues in public policy and news broadcast.
Bob Schieffer delivered the keynote address on Thursday, September 30, at Bismarck’s Belle
Mehus Auditorium. Schieffer, who hosts CBS’s Face the Nation, worked with Sevareid.
Schieffer is regarded as one of the most entertaining and insightful public speakers in national
media. Mr. Schieffer used his closing monologue to talk about the NDHC and the Sevareid
Legacy symposium on Face the Nation October 3, 2010.
Dan Rather, who was one of Eric Sevareid’s favorite protégés, engaged in an informal
conversation, “Knowing Eric,” Saturday evening (October 2) with Emmy-winning commentator
and contributor to American Life TV Nick Clooney.
Former NPR Morning Edition host Bob Edwards spoke about his admiration for Edward R.
Murrow and the Murrow Boys. Edwards is the author of Edward R. Murrow and the Birth of
Broadcast Journalism.
Former CBS broadcaster Marvin Kalb joined the symposium by telelink, and Alan Bjerga,
president of the National Press Club, delivered a talk that was live-streamed on the National
Press Club’s website.
The symposium was free and open to the public.
The symposium also featured Sevareid’s biographers, his widow Suzanne St. Pierre, young men
who re-created Sevareid’s canoe trip from St. Paul to Hudson Bay, and such well known regional
scholars as Tom Isern and Mark Strand.
A special edition of the NDHC’s magazine On Second Thought was released in September. It
included essays about Sevareid, extended quotations, and a chapter from Sevareid’s remarkable
autobiography Not So Wild a Dream. In addition, the Dakota Institute interviewed symposium
speakers and is in the process of creating a full length documentary film on the legacy of Eric
Sevareid as America’s first philosopher journalist.
The full symposium was broadcast live online. After the symposium the full events was
archived online and is currently being rebroadcast across the state on cable access television.
Biographical Information
Eric Sevareid was one of the earliest of a group of intellectual, analytic, and sometimes
controversial newspapermen, hand-picked by Edward R. Murrow as CBS radio foreign
correspondents.
During World War II, Sevareid "scooped the world" with his broadcast of the news of the French
surrender in l940, joined Murrow in covering "The Battle of Britain," was lost briefly after
parachuting into the Burmese Jungle when his plane developed engine trouble while covering the
Burmese-China theater; he reported on Tito's partisans; and he landed with the first wave of
American troops in Southern France, accompanying them all the way to Germany.
In l946 after reporting on the founding of the United Nations, Sevareid wrote Not So Wild a
Dream, which appeared in 11 printings and became a primary source on the lives of the
generation of Americans who had lived through the Depression and World War II.
Serving as CBS's roving European Correspondent from l959-61, Sevareid contributed stories to
CBS Reports as well as serving as moderator of series such as Town Meeting of the World, The
Great Challenge, Where We Stand, and Years of Crisis. In addition, he also participated in the
coverage of every presidential election from l948 to l976.
From l964 until his retirement Sevareid appeared on the CBS Evening News with Walter
Cronkite. There his somber, eloquent commentaries were praised as lucid and illuminating as
well as criticized for sounding profound without reaching a conclusive point. Those two-minute
commentaries earned Sevareid three George Foster Peabody Awards (1950, 1964, and 1976),
three Emmy Awards, two Overseas Press Club Awards, the Harry S. Truman Award, and others.
Eric Sevareid died July 10, 1992, of stomach cancer at age 79.
Not So Wild a Dream:
The Legacy of Eric Sevareid
A Public Humanities Symposium
September 30 – October 3, 2010
Bismarck State College – Sidney J. Lee Auditorium
Bismarck, North Dakota
I believe that the most important lesson Eric Sevareid taught television journalists is that even in
television in the beginning is the word. Only a few television journalists today seem to accept
that…this new breed of producers are verbophobes—people who fear talking heads on television
as the ultimate turnoff—and photophiles—people who lust for pictures at all costs. But only
rarely is a picture worth a thousand words—if your cameras happen to be there at
assassinations, ten-alarm fires, hurricanes, volcanoes blowing their tops. What Severeid
demonstrated night after night was that a couple of hundred words are worth a thousand
pictures when the thoughts are those of a penetrating mind, accompanied by a brilliant ability to
put those thoughts into just the right words.
-Richard Salant, Men’s Club, Westport, Connecticut, October 15, 1992
Thursday, September 30, 2010
11:00 a.m. Registration
12:30 p.m. Welcome
1 p.m. Ray Penn
“The Philosopher for the Common Citizen”
Eric Sevareid can take his place as a twentieth century practical philosopher in the same league
as Marcus Aurelius, Cicero and Epictetus. He often used the term “we” in his broadcast because
he saw himself as speaking for the common person whose values and common sense could guide
everyone (especially their political leaders) through tough times. He sought to describe the
essential nature of democracy and the mission of America in the world. In doing so he made
political philosophy accessible to his audience of voters.
BIO - Dr. Ray Penn is the Wesley Hill Professor of Philosophy, Religion and Communication
Arts at Lincoln Memorial University located in Harrogate, Tennessee. He has an extensive
education in philosophy and religion as well as communication study. He has served as a faculty
member in the communication studies department at Radford University located in Radford,
Virginia for eleven years and has been the program director of the Philosophy and Religion area
at L.M.U. for ten years. He has authored articles for: The Journal of Communication and
Religion, The Best in Theology, The Journal of Popular Culture, The Disciple, The American
Muslim, Vital Speeches of the Day and the United Methodist Reporter. Two of his most precious
possessions are a letter and signed picture from Eric Sevareid.
2 p.m. John Maxwell Hamilton clay
“Eric Sevareid and the Golden Age of Correspondence Memoirs”
Waves of hopeful young journalist walked the streets of Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. Would-be
foreign correspondents "rolled up in waves," as an editor at the Paris Herald put it, in that city
and throughout Europe. Some of the most important names of twentieth-century journalism-Eric Sevareid, William Shirer, and Dorothy Thompson, to name just a few-wandered in, as cubs,
and left as lions. As correspondents who stood witness to events rushing the world to war, the
memoirs they published after WWII dove below the surface of the news to seek its meaning.
And although their books are largely forgotten, they are still a potential beacon for journalists
seeking to recover the purpose and credibility they see slipping from their hands today.
BIO - Jack Hamilton Executive is currently Vice Chancellor & Provost of the Hopkins P.
Breazeale Professor of Journalism at Louisiana State University.
In the course of his career, Hamilton has had assignments in more than 50 countries in Africa,
Asia, Europe, and Latin America. In addition to covering foreign news, Hamilton has written
extensively on foreign newsgathering and sought to improve it. In the 1980s, the National
Journal said Hamilton has shaped public opinion about the complexity of U.S.-Third World
relations “more than any other single journalist.”
Hamilton’s most recent book is Journalism’s Roving Eye: A History of American Newsgathering
Abroad.
3:15 p.m. Tom Isern brenna
"Little Folded Paws: Sevareid as Memoirist"
Authors who have, as Bill Stafford says, come away from the plains seem compelled to explain,
endlessly, where they come from and why they are the way they are. Eric Sevareid, in his
autobiographical writings, is in the mainstream of this river of what may be called colonialist
memoir. Velva, North Dakota, a great place to be from, remains timelessly pickled in the
writings of its famous native son. Authors, as memoirists, stray from historical reality. In light of
these tendencies, is there much to learn from the memoirs of a personage such as Sevareid? Yes,
because despite authorial intentions, memoirs tell truths to readers who listen.
BIO - Tom Isern is Professor of History & University Distinguished Professor at North Dakota
State University. A specialist in the history of the Great Plains, Isern takes an especial interest in
the autobiographical writings of prairie people. He is the author or co-author of six books and of
the weekly newspaper and radio feature, Plains Folk.
4 p.m. Marvin Kalb
“A Conversation about Life at CBS with Eric Sevareid”
Kalb, speaking from Washington, D.C., will speak about his long association with Eric Sevareid,
the role he played in helping Sevareid process some of his evening news commentaries, and the
unique position Sevareid held as one of the handful of "cultural filters" in American life from
1963-77. He will attempt to "place" Sevareid in the history of broadcast journalism and to reflect
on what we have lost in not having such voices in our public discourse today.
BIO - Marvin Kalb, Edward R. Murrow Professor of Practice, Emeritus, and Senior Fellow at
the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, was the Shorenstein
Center’s Founding Director and Edward R. Murrow Professor of Press and Public Policy (1987
to 1999). He is currently Writer-in-Residence at the United States Institute of Peace. He was
recipient of the 2006 National Press Club Fourth Estate Award. His distinguished journalism
career encompasses 30 years of award-winning reporting for CBS and NBC News, as Chief
Diplomatic Correspondent, Moscow Bureau Chief, and host of Meet the Press. Kalb has
authored or coauthored 10 nonfiction books and two best-selling novels. His most recent book,
The Media and the War on Terrorism (co edited with Stephen Hess), explores the interaction
between the government and the media during times of war and national emergency. Kalb is
currently writing a history of the impact of the Vietnam War on American presidential decision
making from Truman to Obama. He hosts The Kalb Report, a discussion of media ethics and
responsibility at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, and he is a regular contributor to
Fox television and National Public Radio.
5:00 -5:15 p.m. Synthesis
Thursday evening
Keynote Address:
7:00 p.m. Belle Mehus Auditorium
Bob Schieffer
Featuring Bob Edwards
“The Legacy of Eric Sevareid”
When longtime CBS News television journalist Bob Schieffer joined the network’s Washington
bureau in 1969, he joined the ranks of legends and legends-to-be, including Eric Sevareid, Dan
Rather and Roger Mudd. "I'll never forget the day I walked in there. It was like a little leaguer
suddenly being called to pinch-hit for Mickey Mantle in Yankee Stadium." Forty years later,
Schieffer is a legend in his own right and now occupies Eric Sevareid’s old office at CBS. "He
was really my hero," says Schieffer. "He was the one I kind of most wanted to be like… I still
think of it as his office - I don't think of it as my office. I feel very honored to be able to sit in the
same room where he sat." In his keynote address, Schieffer will share his memories of Sevareid
and the lessons he learned from the legendary Murrow Boy.
After his presentation, Bob Edwards will join Mr. Schieffer on stage and conduct a live interview
on the current state of broadcast journalism and the future of the profession.
BIO - Bob Schieffer is broadcast journalism's most experienced Washington reporter. He is the
network's chief Washington correspondent and also serves as anchor and moderator of "Face The
Nation", CBS News' Sunday public affairs broadcast. He is also a regular contributor to "The
CBS Evening News with Katie Couric".
Schieffer has covered Washington for CBS News for more than 30 years and is one of the few
broadcast or print journalists to have covered all four major beats in the nation's capital - the
White House, the Pentagon, the State Department and Capitol Hill. He has been Chief
Washington correspondent since 1982 and congressional correspondent since 1989 and has
covered every presidential campaign and been a floor reporter at all of the Democratic and
Republican National Conventions since 1972. He began anchoring "Face The Nation" in May
1991.
Schieffer is a member of the Broadcasting/Cable Hall of Fame and is the recipient of the 2003
Paul White Award, presented by the Radio-Television News Directors Association. The award
recognizes an individual’s lifetime contribution to electronic journalism.
He has won many other broadcast journalism awards, including seven Emmy Awards. In 2002,
he was chosen as Broadcaster of the Year by the National Press Foundation. Schieffer was also
the 2004 recipient of the International Radio and Television Society Foundation Award and the
American News Women’s Club Helen Thomas Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 2005, his
alma mater, Texas Christian University, created the Schieffer School of Journalism in his honor.
In 2008, Schieffer won the Leonard Zeidenberg First Amendment award from the Radio
Television News Directors Association and was named a "Living Legend" by the Library of
Congress.
BIO - Bob Edwards is the host of “The Bob Edwards Show” on Sirius XM Radio and “Bob
Edwards Weekend,” distributed to public radio stations by Public Radio International (PRI).
Both programs feature in-depth interviews with newsmakers, journalists, entertainers and other
compelling figures.
Before joining Sirius XM in 2004, Edwards hosted National Public Radio’s (NPR) “Morning
Edition” for 24-and-a-half years, attracting more than 13 million listeners weekly. He joined
NPR in 1974 and was co-host of NPR’s evening news magazine, “All Things Considered,” until
1979 when he helped launch “Morning Edition.”
He is the author of “Edward R. Murrow and the Birth of Broadcast Journalism.”
Bob Edwards has won the duPont-Columbia Award for radio journalism, a George Foster
Peabody Award for excellence in broadcasting, and the Edward R. Murrow Award for
outstanding contributions to public radio. In November of 2004, Edwards was inducted into the
national Radio Hall of Fame.
Friday, October 1, 2010
9:00 a.m. Welcome
9: 30a.m. Mark Bernstein
“World War II on the Air”
In 1937, Edward R. Murrow sailed to London to become chief CBS correspondent in
Europe. Murrow – then 29 – had never written a news story in his life. Three years
later, his was among the world’s best-known voices. Murrow created the forms of
broadcast journalism that stand to this day. He did this by recruiting a team of
reporters who in his words, could “think and write.” The first hired was William
Shirer, later the famed author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. The second
was a North Dakotan, Eric Sevareid, who, postwar, would for decades be the editorial
voice of CBS. Along with Howard K. Smith, Charles Collingwood and others, these
were the voices that brought Americans at home the news from the front. This
presentation will include audio segments of actual broadcasts.
BIO - Mark Bernstein is an author and magazine writer, with particular interests in American
biography and technological history. Born in Chicago, he lived for thirty years near Dayton,
Ohio, and moved to Washington, D.C. in 2004.
His book, World War II on the Air [with Alex Lubertozzi] tells the story of the Edward R.
Murrow and the CBS correspondents in wartime Europe. The volume was published with a CD
of archival broadcasts, narrated by Dan Rather. His earlier work includes Grand Eccentrics, a
group biography of such turn-of-the-century entrepreneurs as the Wright Brothers and Charles
Kettering. He is currently completing a biography of former Ohio Governor John J. Gilligan.
,
He has written 100 magazine articles, published in Smithsonian, American Heritage of Invention
& Technology, Smithsonian Air & Space and other periodicals.
11:00 a.m. Alan Bjerga Brenna
“Severeid's Washington Legacy: Enduring, or Obscured”
As president of the National Press Club, Alan Bjerga is seeing a press corps that's fractured, with
a chorus of discordant voices and business models that's leading to major shakeups related to job
losses, the decline of major media institutions like Severeid's CBS and the rise of bloggers, niche
media and numerous tiny outlets of varying audience reaches and quality. So, what example
does Eric Sevareid hold for today's media? Bjerga will explore Eric Sevareid’s relevance for
younger journalists working in traditional and newer forms of media today.
BIO - Alan Bjerga (born 1973) is the president of the National Press Club. He covers
agricultural policy for Bloomberg News and is also the president of the North American
Agricultural Journalists. In 2009 he was recognized for his work covering U.S. food aid and the
famine in Ethiopia. He received awards from the Society of American Business Editors and
Writers, the North American Agricultural Journalists, and the Overseas Press Club for this work.
Before working for Bloomberg News, Bjerga won the NAAJ's top writing award in 2005 while
working for the Knight-Ridder Washington Bureau.
Bjerga, who grew up on a farm near the town of Motley, Minnesota, went to Concordia College
(Minnesota) where he earned a bachelor's degree in History and English Literature and edited the
student newspaper, The Concordian (Moorhead). He earned a masters degree in Mass
Communication from the University of Minnesota, where he was the managing editor of The
Minnesota Daily. Bjerga began his career with the St. Paul Pioneer Press (Minn.) and also
reported for the Sioux Falls (S.D.) Argus Leader and The Wichita Eagle (Kan.).
At his National Press Club inaugural on Jan. 30, 2010, he played guitar and sang lead vocals with
"Honky Tonk Confidential", a retro/alt country band with songs written by CBS Face the Nation
anchor, Bob Schieffer.
12:00 Lunch with Donovan Webster
“Sevareid’s Adventure with the Naga Tribe in Burma”
On August 2, 1943, print and CBS Radio correspondent Eric Sevareid was one of seventeen
passengers who stepped aboard a new Allied C-46 to cross the “Burma Hump” into China. An
hour into the flight the plane crashed into the mountains of Burma and Eric and his fellow
passengers were stranded at the mercy of the Naga tribe of headhunters for fifteen days. Safety
lay hundreds of miles away in India, through hostile enemy terrain. Donavan Webster will
recount Sevareid’s near fatal plane crash and adventure with the tribe and the perilous trek out of
danger.
BIO - Donovan Webster is a journalist and author. A former senior editor for Outside
magazine, he now writes for National Geographic, Smithsonian, Best Life, Vanity Fair, Men's
Health, Garden & Gun, and The New York Times Magazine, among other publications. He lives
with his family outside Charlottesville, Virginia, United States.
In 1996, he co-founded Physicians Against Landmines/Center for International Rehabilitation
(CIR). An international, non-governmental humanitarian organization, CIR was a co-recipient of
the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize. CIR sponsors wheelchair and prosthetics programs, plus prostheticsfabrication training and disability advocacy, in post-conflict nations worldwide.
Friday afternoon
1 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. A recreation of the moment when broadcast news was born in the spring of
1938--not an imitation, but a live radio news roundup. Sirius (formerly NPR) anchor Bob
Edwards will participate, and will make remarks about the Murrow Boys and broadcast
journalism.
3:00 p.m. Camille D’Arienzo
“Sevareid on War and Peace”
An exploration of Eric Sevareid’s commentaries on war and the lessons he draws from history.
BIO - Mercy Sr. Camille D’Arienzo is a former elementary-school teacher and college professor
who wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on the war commentary of Eric Sevareid. She currently hosts
her own radio show in Boston, M.A.
4:00 p.m. Raymond Schroth
“Eric Sevareid and the Search for an American Identity”
Eric Sevareid believed that the purpose of America was to be an American. He did his reasoning
as an American intellectual, and in his mind being an American meant giving oneself over to the
idea that at the core of our democracy is “the conscience of a people demanding the best of
themselves.” It allowed Eric Sevareid to achieve the rarest and most sought-after ideal of
journalism: He became America’s conscience staring back at the nation through the mirror of the
media. Eric didn’t so much tell people what to think, as how to think critically and self
reflectively as a nation. Raymond Schroth will examine Sevareid’s idea of America and discuss
its relevance for today’s Americans.
BIO - Fr. Schroth, who has taught at five Jesuit colleges and universities, most recently at Saint
Peter's College in Jersey City, is now an associate editor of America magazine, the 100 year-old
Jesuit opinion weekly. His new biography, Bob Drinan, the Controversial Life of the First
Catholic Priest To Be Elected to Congress, will be published by Fordham University Press this
November.
5:00 - 5:15 p.m. Synthesis
Friday night
Keynote Address:
7 p.m. Nick Clooney
“The Role of the Press in a Democratic Society”
Gathering and delivering news has been Nick Clooney’s passion since he was a little boy in
Maysville, Kentucky, listening to the unforgettable voices of Ed Murrow, Eric Sevareid, and
William Shirer describing the panoramas of World War II on the radio. Drawing on his own
experience Clooney will contextualize the ethics of journalism from WII through the present.
BIO - Nick Clooney has been a broadcaster since he was 16 years old.
But gathering and delivering news has been Nick Clooney's passion since he was a little boy in
Maysville, Kentucky, listening to the unforgettable voices of Ed Murrow, Elmer Davis, William
Shirer and others describing the panorama of World War II on the radio. It was in Maysville that
Nick began his broadcasting career. His first assignment, appropriately, was reading a newscast.
Over the years, Nick Clooney has been a reporter, anchor, managing editor and news director in
Lexington, Kentucky, Cincinnati, Ohio, Salt Lake City, Utah, Buffalo, New York and Los
Angeles, California.
When anchoring in Los Angeles, Nick Clooney was selected as one of “the best in the business”
of television news by Washington Review of Journalism. He has been inducted into the
Cincinnati, Kentucky and Ohio Journalism Halls of Fame, named a Kentucky Distinguished
Broadcaster and, most recently, elected to the Ohio Radio and Television Broadcasters’ Hall of
Fame.
Nick Clooney has received an EMMY for commentary and another for historical narration. He
was nominated three times for National EMMYs for his work with American Movie Classics.
In 2006, Clooney and his son George travelled to Darfur, Sudan and filmed a documentary, A
Journey to Darfur, which was broadcast on American cable TV as well as in England, Scotland,
Wales, Northern Ireland, and France. In 2008 it was released on DVD with the proceeds from its
sale being donated to the International Rescue Committee to help the people of Darfur.
Nick Clooney now works with American Life TV cable channel headquartered in Washington,
D.C. and continues to write his thrice-weekly column for the Cincinnati/Kentucky Post.
Saturday, October 2, 2010
9 a.m. Welcome
9: 30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
The Chorus of America, 1963-1977
Assessing Eric Sevareid’s Commentaries on America and the World on the CBS Evening News
Clips of Sevareid commentaries on a range of subjects, followed by a panel of humanities
discussion and exploration
Sevareid and the Space Program
Sevareid and Civil Rights
Sevareid and the Assassinations
Sevareid and Vietnam
Sevareid and Watergate
Sevareid the 60s’ Youth Movement
Panelists:
T. Harrel Allen author Eric Sevareid’s CBS Commentaries, 1964-1977: The Voice of Reason,
Camille D’Arienzo, Craig Nelson author Rocket Men, Raymond Schroth
12:00 – 1:00 p.m. Lunch with Suzanne St. Pierre
“Eric”
Covering three decades of news, Suzanne St. Pierre built her career as a producer for
newsmagazines, including over fifty segments of 60 Minutes. She has produced segments for
numerous correspondents, including Mike Wallace, Morley Safer, Diane Sawyer, Lesley Stahl,
and Meredith Vieira. Her work as a producer and researcher has led to the creation of several
movies, including “Rain Man”, starring Dustin Hoffman. She has received a Peabody, three
Columbia-duPont awards, and four Emmys for her work. Don Hewitt once commented that of
all the stories on 60 Minutes he was proudest of St. Pierre’s piece about Lenell Geter, a piece that
ultimately led to a wrongly convicted man’s release from prison. She was married to Eric
Sevareid from 1978 until his death in 1992.
National Energy Center of Excellence 4th Floor
Tickets for meal required
SaturdayAfternoon
1:30 p.m
Dr. Jim Leach
Chairman, National Endowment for the Humanities
“Sevareid and Civil Discourse in a Noisy Democracy”
Eric Sevareid understood that words reflect emotion as well as meaning. They clarify -- or cloud
-- thought and energize action, sometimes bringing out the better angels in our nature, sometimes
lesser instincts. In the current political climate of America words like 'fascist' or 'communist’ are
being used with increasing frequency and creating a culture of incivility. Jim Leach will explore
Eric Sevareid’s approach to civil discourse and draw lessons for today’s caustic discourse.
Introduced by Tami Carmichael
BIO - Jim Leach is the ninth Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Nominated by President Barack Obama on July 9, 2009, and confirmed by the Senate in early
August, Leach began his four-year term as NEH Chairman on August 12, 2009.
Leach previously served 30 years representing southeastern Iowa in the U.S. House of
Representatives. After leaving Congress in 2007, Leach joined the faculty at Princeton
University’s Woodrow Wilson School, where he was the John L. Weinberg Visiting Professor of
Public and International Affairs until his confirmation as NEH chairman. In September 2007,
Leach took a year’s leave of absence from Princeton to serve as interim director of the Institute
of Politics and lecturer at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
Leach graduated from Princeton University, received a Master of Arts degree in Soviet politics
from the School of Advanced International Studies at The John Hopkins University, and did
additional graduate studies at the London School of Economics.
Leach holds eight honorary degrees and has received numerous awards, including the Sidney R.
Yates Award for Distinguished Public Service to the Humanities from the National Humanities
Alliance; the Woodrow Wilson Award from The Johns Hopkins University; the Adlai Stevenson
Award from the United Nations Association; the Edgar Wayburn Award from the Sierra Club;
the Wayne Morse Integrity in Politics Award; the Norman Borlaug Award for Public Service;
and the Wesley Award for Service to Humanity.
Q & A clay and Brenna
3:00 p.m. Sean Bloomfield and Colton Witte with Dennis Weidemann
“Retracing Canoeing with the Cree”
Both 18, Witte and Bloomfield canoed from the Twin Cities to the Arctic Ocean in 2008. The
2,200-mile journey was inspired by legendary journalist Eric Sevareid’s book Canoeing with the
Cree, which described his trek from Minnesota to Hudson Bay. Witte and Bloomfield made the
trip in 49 days. Providing a fitting congratulations, Star Tribune columnist Nick Coleman wrote
of Witte and Bloomfield’s excellent canoe adventure: “Others have done it before. But none, to
my knowledge, have done it faster, and few since Sevareid and his paddling partner Walter Port
have captured the public’s imagination more effectively.”
Thirty years ago Dennis Weideman before Witte and Bloomfield Dennis Weideman paddled to
Hudson Bay. Looking back at his youthful adventure in Not So Wild a Dream, Eric Sevareid
had a very different perspective from Canoeing with the Cree, a book he wrote when he was 18.
Bloomfield, Witte, and Weideman will compare and contrast their epic adventures with
Sevareid’s during this presentation and slideshow. And offer the perspectives of both youth and
seasoned professional.
BIOS Colton Witte grew up in Chaska with his family, parents, Dan and Kathy, brother Nathan and
sister Alexandra. He's dreamed about this trip since he read the book Canoeing with the Cree in
the 7th grade. Colton is a Chaska High School 2008 graduate and is currently a Junior at
Minnesota State, Mankato . Besides planning this adventure, Colton also enjoys
outdoor activities, playing music, hanging with his girlfriend Courtney and spending time with
his family and friends.
Sean Bloomfield also grew up in Chaska, with his parents Patrick and Patricia, brother Jim and
sister Cris. Sean also read Canoeing with the Cree, as it was passed down to him at a young age
by his dad. He recently finished his senior year as a goalie on the Chaska High School varsity
hockey team. He also enjoys spending time with his family at their cabin on the "Iron
Range" and also with friends. Besides canoeing, Sean also enjoys water skiing, hunting and
fishing. Sean is currently a Junior at Minnesota State, Mankato.
Dennis Weidemann grew up in La Porte City, Iowa, living the idyllic small town life of novels.
While a student at Iowa State University in 1979, he and three other former farm kids hatched a
plan to paddle from Minnesota to Hudson Bay. With beat-up canoes and little experience, they
set out on a two-and-a-half month voyage of youth .
Thirty years later, Weidemann has chronicled their adventure in This Water Goes North
(Manitenahk Books, 2008). The book was a Midwest Connections Pick (Midwest Booksellers
Association) and Benjamin Franklin Awards finalist (Independent Book Publishers Association),
and is now in its second printing. Dennis currently lives in Wisconsin, where he continues to
write and paddle (like the old man he is).
4:00 p.m. Clay Jenkinson
“The Ordeal of William Shirer”
William L. Shirer. Shirer was recruited by Edward R. Murrow before Sevareid, and he, not
Murrow, served as the anchor of the first news roundup on March 13, 1938. Shirer, like
Sevareid, was a serious intellectual who regarded himself as a writer at least as much as a
broadcaster. Unlike Sevareid, Shirer could not settle into a sustainable role as a Sunday news
magazine host on CBS. He was the author of three remarkable books: The Berlin Diaries, The
Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and one of the twentieth century’s greatest autobiographies, the
three-volume Twentieth Century Journey. The contrast of the Murrow Boys' "other intellectual"
creates a historical context for the life and achievement of Eric Sevareid.
The Dakota Institute is working on a documentary film about the life and achievement or Eric
Sevareid. The film will be released in 2012 on the occasion of Sevareid's centennial. A short
series of clips of the interviews that have already occurred will be shown.
BIO - A cultural commentator who has devoted most of his professional career to public
humanities programs, Clay Jenkinson has been honored by two presidents for his work. On
November 6, 1989, he received from President George Bush one of the first five Charles Frankel
Prizes, the National Endowment for the Humanities highest award (now called the National
Humanities Medal), at the nomination of the NEH Chair, Lynne Cheney. On April 11, 1994, he
was the first public humanities scholar to present a program at a White House-sponsored event
when he presented Thomas Jefferson for a gathering hosted by President and Mrs. Clinton. When
award-winning humanities documentary producer Ken Burns turned his attention to Thomas
Jefferson, he asked Clay Jenkinson to be the major humanities commentator. Since his first work
with the North Dakota Humanities Council in the late 1970s, including a pioneering first-person
interpretation of Meriwether Lewis, Clay Jenkinson has made thousands of presentations
throughout the United States and its territories, including Guam and the Northern Marianas.
5:00 -5:15 p.m. Synthesis
Saturday Night
Keynote
7:00 p.m. A conversation with Dan Rather and Nick Clooney
“Knowing Eric”
Internationally renowned journalist, Dan Rather, was one of Eric Sevareid’s favorite protégés.
Rather will share his memories of Eric and discuss the enduring values Sevareid instilled in him
during an informal conversation with close friend Emmy-winning commentator Nick Clooney.
BIO - Nick Clooney has been a broadcaster since he was 16 years old.
But gathering and delivering news has been Nick Clooney's passion since he was a little boy in
Maysville, Kentucky, listening to the unforgettable voices of Ed Murrow, Elmer Davis, William
Shirer and others describing the panorama of World War II on the radio. It was in Maysville that
Nick began his broadcasting career. His first assignment, appropriately, was reading a newscast.
Over the years, Nick Clooney has been a reporter, anchor, managing editor and news director in
Lexington, Kentucky, Cincinnati, Ohio, Salt Lake City, Utah, Buffalo, New York and Los
Angeles, California.
When anchoring in Los Angeles, Nick Clooney was selected as one of “the best in the business”
of television news by Washington Review of Journalism. He has been inducted into the
Cincinnati, Kentucky and Ohio Journalism Halls of Fame, named a Kentucky Distinguished
Broadcaster and, most recently, elected to the Ohio Radio and Television Broadcasters’ Hall of
Fame.
Nick Clooney has received an EMMY for commentary and another for historical narration. He
was nominated three times for National EMMYs for his work with American Movie Classics.
In 2006, Clooney and his son George travelled to Darfur, Sudan and filmed a documentary, A
Journey to Darfur, which was broadcast on American cable TV as well as in England, Scotland,
Wales, Northern Ireland, and France. In 2008 it was released on DVD with the proceeds from its
sale being donated to the International Rescue Committee to help the people of Darfur.
Nick Clooney now works with American Life TV cable channel headquartered in Washington,
D.C. and continues to write his thrice-weekly column for the Cincinnati/Kentucky Post.
BIO - Given his distinguished record and his long exposure on television around the globe, Dan
Rather may be the best-known journalist in the world. He has covered virtually every major
event in the world in the past 50 years. His resume reads like a history book, from his early local
reporting in Texas on Hurricane Carla to his unparalleled work covering the assassination of
President John F. Kennedy; the civil rights movement; the White House and national politics;
wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf, Yugoslavia and Iraq. From his first days as the
Associated Press reporter in Huntsville, Texas, in 1950, Rather has more than earned his
reputation as the “hardest working man in broadcast journalism.”
Rather served as anchor and managing editor of the CBS EVENING NEWS from March 9, 1981
to March 9, 2005, the longest such tenure in broadcast journalism history. In 2006 Rather
founded the company News and Guts and became anchor and managing editor of HDNet’s DAN
RATHER REPORTS, which specializes in investigative journalism and international reporting.
Over the many years of his career, Rather has regularly landed the biggest interviews with the
world’s most important and compelling figures, from the famous to the infamous. Rather’s
passion for the news, for getting the story and for taking on the most challenging assignments in
journalism is unmatched. He has dedicated himself to delivering to the American public
coverage that is fair and accurate, no matter the size and scope of the story. He has interviewed
every United States president from Dwight D. Eisenhower to George W. Bush and Barack
Obama, and virtually every major international leader of the past 30 years.
He has received virtually every honor in broadcast journalism, including numerous Emmy and
Peabody Awards and citations from critical, scholarly, professional and charitable organizations.
Rather has also authored or co-authored seven books, four of which have become New York
Times bestsellers.
In 1994, Rather was honored by his alma mater, Sam Houston State University in Huntsville,
Texas, which named its journalism and communications building after him.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
8:30 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Field Trip to Eric Sevareid’s hometown of Velva, ND
Buses leave from Bismarck State College
Not So Wild a Dream: The Legacy of
Eric Sevareid
A Public Humanities Symposium
September 30 - October 3, 2010
Bismarck, North Dakota
2ECOND THOUGHT
A publication of the North Dakota Humanities Council
autumn 10
on
[the SEVAREID issue]
1
The purpose of America
is to be an American.
-Eric Sevareid
North Dakota Humanities Council
reminding the nation why it exists, and what it stands for
U Pluribus Unum
Out of Many, One
Support democratic ideals. Become a member of the ND Humanities Council.
See enclosed envelope for more information.
features
[contents]
THE CONSCIENCE OF AMERICA
Photos in this issue generously provided by Suzanne St. Pierre.
4 Long Thoughts Briefly Spoken
By Dan Rather
8 He Was All of America Talking to Itself
By Raymond A. Schroth, S.J.
16 Go Ahead and Look
In Praise of Forbidden Looking
[the SEV
By Scott Nadelson
20 A Tribute to Eric Sevareid
By Scott Stevens
IN HIS OWN WORDS
24 Reading and Rereading Eric Sevareid
By Mark Strand
28 Not So Wild a Dream
By Eric Sevareid
44 The Taming of a Dream
By George Scialabba
FIERCE PRAIRIE POPULISM
50 The Land That Shaped the Thinking of
Eric Sevareid
By Ray Penn
54 The North Dakota Eric Sevareid Never Knew
By William C. Pratt
ERIC SEVAREID LEGACY SYMPOSIUM
58 Complete Schedule of Events
ON SECOND THOUGHT is published by the
North Dakota Humanities Council.
Brenna Daugherty, Editor
Jan Daley Jury, Line Editor
To subscribe please contact us:
North Dakota Humanities Council
418 E. Broadway, Suite 8
Bismarck, ND 58501
800-338-6543
[email protected]
www.ndhumanities.org
Any views, findings, conclusions, or
recommendations expressed in this
publication or the Not So Wild a
Dream Symposium do not necessarily
reflect those of the National
Endowment for the Humanities or the
North Dakota Humanities Council.
note
from the
executive
director
The
Revolution
of Rising
Expectations
Eric Sevareid was a threat to America. At least the FBI thought
so since they kept an extensive file on his activities for fear he may be
a communist or perhaps a foreign spy. Vice President Spiro Agnew
was so convinced of the damage Eric was inflicting on American
society that he singled Sevareid out during his crusade against the
media, during which he insisted that journalists were all “nattering
nabobs of negativism” with a liberal bias. I reject the notions that
Eric Sevareid was a communist, a spy, or liberally biased, but I have to
agree that he was dangerous.
It seems the particular problem with Eric Sevareid was that he didn’t
just inform his audience of specific events, he sought to explain why
they happened the way they did and what that might mean. Of
course today MSNBC and Fox attempt the same thing, but they
have an obvious political spin, right or left. The problem that so
exasperated those with power, right side or left, during his tenure
at CBS (1939-1977) was that Eric took several sides. Even his most
loyal viewers could find themselves irked by his unpredictability.
The trouble wasn’t that people didn’t know where Eric stood. (As
he explained in his response to Agnew’s request that journalists
face an interrogation in which they explain their real thoughts and
feelings on every issue, he was right there, night after night, with all
the eyes of America on him.) The trouble was that Eric followed his
own trajectory to arrive there. His mind was a labyrinth of knowledge
acquired through intensive scholarship and the firsthand experience
of a reporter at the center of pivotal world events. He spent the bulk
of his waking hours wandering through the wisdom of the past and
the questions of the contemporary world. In the end, he hoped that
he had stumbled upon the truth, knowing full well, “Truth is neither
turgid nor neatly packaged; it is elusive, many-sided, a harvest
gathered only with patience, humility and largess.” In the evening
he synthesized the complexity of his thoughts into two-minute
monologues for mass consumption. He was America’s first and only
nightly news philosopher.
But that was only part of the problem. Eric was also stubbornly
convinced that the purpose of America is to be American. He did
his reasoning as an American intellectual, and in his mind being an
2
American meant giving oneself over to the idea that at the core of our democracy is “the conscience of a people
demanding the best of themselves.”
This was a dangerous combination.
It allowed Eric Sevareid to achieve the rarest and most sought-after ideal of journalism: He became America’s
conscience staring back at the nation through the mirror of the media. Eric didn’t so much tell people what to
think, as how to think critically and self reflectively as a nation. During Eric’s reign of terror, national television put
its audience in the uncomfortable position of responsible citizenship.
America didn’t always like what it saw in its reflection. Eric was often critical, and more than often even a bit
cynical, but he refused to be apocalyptic. In the midst of race riots, Watergate, and Vietnam, Eric reminded
America to demand the best of itself. In one of my favorite commentaries, he turns prophetic:
In the absolute sense our power steadily grows; our economy grows in spite of temporary slowdowns; and—
most exciting of all—there is a cultural, educational burgeoning that one can feel in the American air almost
everywhere from coast to coast. There is a passion for higher education of an intensity I have felt in no other
country I have known. The tremendous pressure on the universities is due not only to the rise in population,
but to a general rise in family goals for the young. “The revolution of rising expectations” applies to the
United States, highly developed as we already are.
I have seen nothing like this anywhere. Say, if you will, that the television screens and the magazine racks
are half-filled with trash; say that teaching standards are far too low in a thousand places; say that athleticism
outranks intellectualism in a thousand places. I will agree, but I will say to you that all this is changing, slowly
because the task is enormous, but most surely. A cultural explosion as well as a population explosion is
gathering force among our people underneath the honky-tonk exteriors. There are over 2,000 theatrical
groups in the United States. More than half the symphony orchestras in the world are to be found in the
United States. Painting is a passion with millions… and I would assert, as a prophecy, that from this vast
and growing exposure there will rise the highest general level of education, understanding of the world and
cultural awareness that history has ever witnessed.
Eric’s prophecy has not yet come to fruition, but if we continue to democratize the humanities and arts, I fear we
will come dangerously close.
May the Sevareid Legacy Symposium reawaken the dream of revolution in America’s conscience.
Brenna Daugherty
Executive Director
3
4
Dan Rather (left) and Eric Sevareid (middle) being welcomed to Vietnam, 1966.
Long Thoughts
Briefly Spoken
By Dan Rather
[the conscience of america]
Next to power without honor, the most dangerous thing in the world is power without humor.
-Eric Sevareid
Where does one begin when contemplating
the life and times of Eric Sevareid? As the years
slide by since his death it doesn’t get any easier. What
a man; what a life. And in this age of “news-lite”, news
values succumbing to entertainment values, a widespread
lowering of ethics and standards in journalism (to say
nothing of the deterioration of good writing in general),
how we miss him!
Eric believed in the power, the importance of words.
To him, more than to any other person I have ever
known, words mattered. He believed that words have
consequences, even when only spoken. He considered
writing to be a moral act. This was embedded in his head,
heart and soul. It was deep in his id, in the core of the man.
So to say that he never wasted words is an understatement.
His silence happened to me many times, driving with him
up to fly fish or hunt birds over dogs in Virginia, or on some
plane ride, or working a story.
That’s just the way he was. Eric Sevareid was eloquent on
the air, but in person he was quiet. Given to silence. Long
silence if he was thinking, or if he just didn’t believe he had
anything worth saying, or if he didn’t feel like talking just
then.
I remember the first time he invited me to go bird hunting
with him, in 1967. I had not hunted anything for a while and
the only gun I had in my Washington home was a 12-gauge
shotgun with a choke. I had last used it years before on a
Texas duck hunt. Too big a gun for quail, to say the least.
This shotgun was in a carrying cover so Eric didn’t see it
when he picked me up. We drove for two hours. Other
than “Good morning,” he said nothing.
When we finally got out of his car and began preparing to
walk, I unsheathed the big 12-gauge. He uncovered a little
28-gauge double-barrel. He spoke not a word. But he
looked at me like I was a hitchhiker with pets, looked at me
with that big Nordic glare. Then he smiled, shook his head,
and mumbled, “C’mon.”
I felt foolish but forgiven. Eric always forgave you. We
went on to have a great afternoon in the outdoors. I
was constantly early and too far out front with my shots.
“Patience,” he counseled softly. “Patience.” Pause. “And
concentration.”
He was even better when it came to pursuing trout.
He was out of Velva, North Dakota, by the way of the
University of Minnesota, Paris, and a thousand datelines
long since forgotten. He had been many places, but he
came home.
And he came home to Georgetown, to his own house, to
die.
He knew he was dying. You could never fool Eric; he was
too smart, too observant, too sensitive.
Like Edward R. Murrow, who hired him at CBS, Sevareid
was a lifetime scholar. Murrow was the best reporter and
5
[the conscience of america]
broadcaster in the history of over-the-airwaves news. He
was the classic scholar-correspondent. So was Sevareid.
Eric also grew into being a philosopher-correspondent,
the only one broadcast news has produced. And he is
unquestionably the best writer to come out of electronic
journalism.
The proof is not just in Not So Wild a Dream, one of
the best autobiographies of his time and perhaps his
defining work. There are also his essays, read on radio
and television for almost half a century. No one of his
generation wrote more or better essays–no one, print or
broadcast. And they have stood the test of time. Much
of what he wrote about America and what it meant to be
an American in the post–World War II era is as interesting
and instructive today as it was the day he wrote it. Sevareid
is the only broadcast journalist I know who was a combat
correspondent in the Spanish Civil War, World War II,
Korea, and Vietnam. When I visited him for the last time,
he sipped tea and told me how he wished he could have
gone to the Persian Gulf. “Sort of,” he added, “but I guess
I’ve seen enough wars.”
My mind went back to a place near Hue, early in the
Vietnam fighting. Sevareid was the first of the big-name
American broadcasters to come and see for himself,
firsthand, what we were getting ourselves into.
“I don’t like it,” Eric told me. “I don’t like it partly because
I don’t believe anyone has thought this damn thing
through.”
Sevareid always thought things through. And partly
because of that, he knew about an incredible range of
things: how to lead quail, how to mend a fly-line, how to
converse with a monarch or a showgirl, and how to stay
alive in tight places.
Like Hemingway, he loved the outdoors. Like Hemingway,
he was a man’s man when that was still something you said,
when that still meant something. He and Hemingway had a
northern-midwestern stoicism, determination, and intellect.
He went to Paris and Hemingway did (they knew each other
there). And the two wrote in similar spare, lean styles. For
my money, Sevareid did it better.
The man and his writings had a quiet
authority, and the beauty of simplicity.
The excellence of his writing is part of the reason
6
people who came late remember Eric Sevareid the elder
statesman, the sage. But he was a combination of thought
and action. Like Andre Malraux, the French philosopher,
writer, and journalist whom he knew and admired, Sevareid
traveled the world, seeing for himself, engaged, taking
chances. And then he tried to think things through, write
about them and philosophize about them.
He always seemed taller than he was, although he was well
over six feet. He dominated rooms, seemed to dominate
any landscape he occupied. He had charisma, and he was
a star. But he was a quiet star, and he was not so much
glamorous as he was compelling. When you heard him
speak on the radio, where I heard him first, and later on the
television or in his office, you listened, and you thought.
There was, in person as over the air, a brooding quality
about him. But his wife for the last thirteen years, Suzanne
St. Pierre, brought him calmness within and a happiness
that had always seemed to have eluded him before. He
also took great joy in his twin sons and a daughter from
previous marriages.
When I saw him that last time, in his Georgetown house,
with the sun shafting through the windows over a fountaincentered, small back garden, he seemed at peace. He
knew, in that way that Eric always knew everything, that
his work was done, his place secure. In the pantheon of
broadcast journalism, only Ed Murrow himself ranks above
Sevareid.
When Murrow died, Sevareid wrote (as usual) the best line:
“He was a shooting star; we will live in his afterglow a very
long time.”
Now, the same can be said of Sevareid himself. But I prefer
to think of him as a Northern Star, the Great Northern Star:
constant and clear, the big, bright, quiet one.
Dan Rather served as anchor and managing editor of the
CBS Evening News from March 9, 1981, to March 9, 2005,
the longest such tenure in broadcast journalism history. He
has covered virtually every major event in the world in the
past 50 years including the assassination of President John
F. Kennedy; the civil rights movement; the White House and
national politics; wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, the Persian
Gulf, Yugoslavia and Iraq. In 2006 Rather founded the
company News and Guts and became anchor and managing
editor of HDNet’s Dan Rather Reports, which specializes in
investigative journalism and international reporting.
I think of him as a
Northern Star, the
Great Northern Star:
constant and clear, the
big, bright, quiet one.
7
Sevareid at his Virginia cabin, 1978.
He Was All of America
Talking to Itself
Condensed from an address delivered in Bismarck, North Dakota, on November 12, 2009
By Raymond A. Schroth, S.J.
8
[the conscience of america]
Never underestimate your listener’s intelligence, or
overestimate your listener’s information.
-Eric Sevareid
We have come together this evening, I am convinced, not merely out of nostalgic affection
for the bygone days when the major networks did courageous documentaries, when radio and
television newscasters respected the English language and the public’s intelligence, nor even
for love of North Dakota, nor merely in our respect for the legacy of Eric Sevareid. We come in
patriotism, because, like Sevareid, we love America — its wheat fields, and local rivers, its trout
streams and ocean shores, its Velvas and Manhattans, and Washington, D.C. And, though
your children and grandchildren and my journalism students may not recognize the name, we
miss him. And we think we know what he would say if he were here today.
In the summer of 1994 I was swimming in the surf off Sea Bright, at the villa house of the
Society of Jesus on the New Jersey shore. A fellow Jesuit asked me what I was working on;
and, when I told him the biography of Eric Sevareid, he replied, as the waves washed around
him: “There comes a time when the heart must tell the head what it must do; and that is the
time when the heart is about to break.”
My friend was quoting the last line of Eric’s powerful CBS Evening News commentary on
the Vietnam War. He had heard it once and remembered it for more than twenty years.
Meanwhile today, when synchronized suicide bombings of government buildings in Baghdad
kill more than 130 Iraqis and when two helicopter crashes in Afghanistan take another 14
American lives, while President Obama takes his time deciding on troop deployments there
because he “wants to get it right,” the battle between the human head and heart seems
relevant again.
In the beautiful first paragraph of his post-World War II memoir, Not So Wild A Dream, he
evokes the earth, fields, and water of tiny Velva, where he was born, to set the scene for the
book’s theme: the democratic spirit that won the war took its strength from the American
frontier, from the toil and vision of the men and women who came together to build the barns,
harvest the crops, and then to fight the battles of the war.
In 1953 he wrote a letter supporting a fund drive for a Velva medical clinic, and in 1956
published “You Can Go Home Again,” in Collier’s, an ambiguous essay which could be read
as an endorsement or indictment of American small-town life. He had consulted a psychiatrist
about his boyhood memories and had been told that his emotional attraction for the Mouse
River was an “oceanic feeling,” a deep yearning for ultimate origins: “The golden threads of
the past.” Exploring the town alone, he knocks at the door of his old house. No one answers.
In 1987, just five years before his death, with his sister Jeanne and a PBS television crew, he
returned to produce an American Experience documentary on the early chapters of Not So
Wild a Dream. The project took three days, but he stayed in a hotel in Minot and commuted
to work. Arthritic, he moved slowly with a cane. The visuals showed the wheat fields and the
Mouse River of the first line of his memoir, but, because the flood control levee had cut off the
main current, the river was a stagnant pond. The script began with a line lifted from the 1946
memoir: “Why have I not returned for so many years?”
But a few years earlier, after his Collier’s article, a woman told him she was from Minot, which
he had described as a “Magic City” in his writings. His reply was a chilly brusqueness, which
Raymond A. Schroth, S.J.,
is a writer for the 100-yearold Jesuit opinion weekly,
America magazine. He is also
the author of The American
Journey of Eric Sevareid.
9
[the conscience of america]
friends attributed to shyness and others to rudeness,
“I really don’t have anything to do with Minot or Velva
anymore,” he said. “We moved to Minnesota when I
was very young. I’ve never been back except for special
occasions.”
To the literary historian there is nothing surprising in his
attitude. There is a moment in his childhood where the very
young Arnold symbolically “runs away from home.” He
zips out the door and runs down the street, headed several
blocks to who knows where. Anyone from a small town
who wants to be a writer—Willa Cather, Sinclair Lewis, or
Larry Woiwode—must first flee the town; otherwise he or
she risks self-censorship to avoid offending relatives, or the
local history syndrome that romanticizes the past.
But it was here, as an apprentice at the Velva Journal, a
four-page weekly, that he learned what he wanted to do
with his life. When his father’s bank failed in 1925, the
family moved for a year to Minot, then to Minneapolis,
where they lived in a big wooden house in a middleclass neighborhood, and, though the high school period,
he wrote, “is surely the worst period in a man’s life,” at
Minneapolis Central High School he learned something
about cooperation, “team spirit,” social equality, how to
put the school paper to press, and how to write a two–
column headline, which he said, was on “a higher order
than the ability to write a sonnet.”
Doing my research I followed young Arnold’s trail from
Velva to Minnesota. (It wasn’t until 1939 that he moved
his middle name, Eric, into front place.) I stayed a few
days at the Jesuit Novitiate residence in St. Paul, where,
one of the young Jesuits, when I said what I was working
on, exclaimed, “I know about him. Today I just met a guy
whose father made a big canoe trip with him in 1930!”
Not in my wildest dreams had I imagined that I could
actually find and talk to Walter Port, the rugged young
athlete, more than three years older than Eric, who joined
him for the 2,250-mile, death-defying ordeal of paddling
a canoe from Minneapolis to the Hudson Bay. When I
found Walter Port the next day, he was extremely gracious
but ailing; he had outlived his old friend, but just barely.
I sensed that had it not been for Walter Port’s strong
body and strength of character, 65 years before, there
would have been no Eric Sevareid as we came to know
him. At a turning point in their journey they were urged
to turn back; but, Eric wrote later, “What I was entering
10
I knew
instinctively that if I gave up now, no
matter what the justification, it would
become easier forever afterwards
to justify compromise with any
achievement.”
upon at Norway House was a contest with myself.
At the University of Minnesota he was the rare undergraduate
who published his first book at eighteen, Canoeing with the
Cree (1935), based on the reports he had sent in to a local
newspaper on his trip; and today, bold young men and women
every few years reproduce the journey, feeding the Minneapolis
Tribune from their laptops along the route.
Working his way through college, he majored in political science
and joined the Jacobins, an elite political discussion group,
mentored by the charismatic Professor Benjamin Lippincott, a
Democratic Socialist. Several were pacifists and demonstrated
against compulsory drill. More than anything else, Eric poured
his energies into the campus Minnesota Daily, convinced that
he should and would be named editor—only to have his name
vetoed by the university president. The sting of this rebuke still
lingers ten years later in his memoirs. And ten years after that,
in the 1950s, his opposition to the ROTC pops up again in his
FBI file as evidence that he was un-American.
Nevertheless, his career maintains the steady course into
newspaper journalism, at the Minneapolis Star and Minneapolis
Journal where he covered a brutal truckers’ strike and exposed
the Silver Shirts, a national network of Ku Klux Klan–like clubs,
only to be fired in the wake of a newspaper strike. In 1935 he
had married Lois Finger, a law student and the beautiful and
brilliant daughter of the track coach; in 1937 they left for a new
life in Paris. There, the Paris edition of the New York Herald
Tribune saw his talent and let him write what he wanted. He
interviewed Gertrude Stein, and his coverage of the trial of
Eugene Weidman, a serial killer, caught the eye of CBS’s Edward
R. Murrow in London.
War was on the horizon and Murrow had been commissioned to
assemble a cadre of reporters to cover it. His search was not for
young men with good looks. Radio listeners neither knew nor
cared whether their reporters were handsome. Nor even great
voices. What mattered was intelligence —and the ability to
adapt the language of print journalism to the needs of the ear—
and realism to make the listener feel present at the event, like
holding the microphone at pavement level so listeners could
hear the footsteps of Londoners descending into the bomb
Eric canoeing God’s River, 1930.
Eric Sevareid, high school graduation photo, 1930.
[the conscience of america]
shelters, and a conviction that the common man, given the information, could judge the public good.
Sevareid, by nature, spoke, and wrote visually; but somehow he made his poetic prose work. He joined the new
fraternity called “Murrow’s boys” —including William L. Shirer, Larry LeSueur, Howard K. Smith, Winston Burdett, and
Charles Collingwood—with Murrow as not just their boss but, especially for Eric, their “father figure,” and in London,
their inspirational leader, like Shakespeare’s Henry V, their “little touch of Harry in the night.”
As the German army marched toward Paris, Eric sent Lois and their twin sons Michael and Peter, delivered after a very
difficult pregnancy, home to America. Eric had come to love Paris passionately. It was the city that gave this North
Dakota and Minnesota boy a new life. As its government fled south, he wrote, “Paris lay inert, her breathing scarcely
audible, her limbs relaxed, the blood flowed remorselessly from her manifold veins. Paris lay dying, like a beautiful
woman in a coma, not knowing or asking why.”
This was another turning point, like his pause at the age of seventeen, on the way to Hudson Bay. As a teenager he had
identified with Richard Harding Davis, the greatest of the turn-of-the-century war correspondents, whose battle stories
had the unfortunate effect not only of making war look romantic but of suggesting that war correspondents—in the
Spanish-American War and the Boer War—were somehow invulnerable, that the bullets passed over their heads or hit
only combatants on either side of the intrepid reporter. Davis himself discovered to his shock in his attempts to cover
World War I, that the machine gun and bombing from the air had made the old gentlemen’s rules obsolete. In World
War II many correspondents would lose their lives. Sevareid did not want to be one of them. He was afraid.
But he was also learning that fear is never conquered in one brave act. Like the life-long struggle for personal integrity,
it is conquered only step, by step, minute by minute, and for him, word by word.
At this turning point, I would like to condense the chronology of Sevareid’s life and then focus on one aspect of his
character, which, to me at least, seems, in retrospect most meaningful.
Rather than return to America to be with his family, Eric reported to Murrow in London. But his nerves did not serve him
well during the Blitz. Murrow himself, whose spectacular courage led him to fly with the bombing raids over Germany,
refused to go into the shelters, because he said that once he tried one he might flee to them all the time. Sevareid
returned to Washington in 1941 and covered stories in Latin America. But his eyes were on Europe. Though the term
“objective journalism” was not yet current, Sevareid, like Murrow, believed that the media must serve democracy, and
so should be mobilizing public opinion against Nazi Germany.
11
[the conscience of america]
When bombs fell on Pearl Harbor, he struggled with his
conscience over whether he should enlist, but he was
persuaded to serve as a war correspondent instead. He
followed the armies into China, North Africa, Italy, southern
France, and finally across the Rhine into Germany. After
the war the Murrow Boys became the foreign radio and
then television correspondents for CBS, known as the
“Tiffany Network,” for its high standards and courageous
documentaries, “CBS Reports,” with Sevareid as a roving
correspondent and nightly commentator on the CBS Evening
News with Walter Cronkite.
Looking back at his long and successful career, one must ask:
what was the heart of his moral character? I suggest physical
and moral courage. He planted the building blocks of this
courage as a high-school graduate by canoeing to Hudson
Bay, and as a college student, by riding the rails, during the
Depression, across the country to work in a California gold
mine. During World War II he did not want to die, but he
continually put himself in circumstances where he might be
killed.
Sevareid (right) in Murrow’s (left) office, 1954.
In 1943, at the request of the United States government, he
flew to China to assess the political situation. Over the Burma
“hump” the engines of his C-46 gave out, and the twenty
passengers, including diplomat John Paton Davies, parachuted
into the jungle. At the realization that the plane was going
to crash, Eric’s first reaction was, “Oh, no! This can’t happen
to me!” But as his chute opened, it was “My God, I’m going
to live.” As a boy he received the sacrament of confirmation
and considered joining the Lutheran ministry; but in college
12
and in his journalism career, he left his religion behind. But
as the wind carried his chute toward the burning wreckage of
the plane, he prayed, “Dear God, don’t let the fire get me.
Please!”
As the survivors assembled, the captain appointed Eric the
group chaplain, not because he was holy, but because he was
older and looked like a leader. In a way that foreshadowed
the role he would assume as a TV commentator. Chaplain
Eric was playing a role which, though secular, stemmed from
his professionalism as a newsman, one who gets the story
and considers its meaning, which is, in a sense, his quest
for a transcendent truth. So, on August 8, 1943, at 11:00
a.m., the time he remembered going to church at home, he
constructed a huge cross and conducted a memorial service
for the co-pilot, Lieutenant Charles Felix, whose body they
had buried on the hillside.
The Nagas, fierce headhunters, found them and made them
at home. The air force dropped supplies. Days later a rescue
party led by a dashing young British diplomat arrived to help
guide them on a 140-mile, ten-day march as they trudged
over hills and waterfalls under the boiling sun into safety in
India.
He continued his mission to China where he traveled
extensively, met the troops and their leaders, and broadcast
several reports which he could get through the censors.
But the 2,500-word essay—in which he delivered the
full, negative assessment of the Chiang Kai-shek regime,
whose government was more fascist than democratic, and
concluded that if the Chinese and American people were
to remain friends, they must end the “polite lying, the false
propaganda and the concealing of fault” — was killed by the
government censors and shelved.
In 1954 John Paton Davies was fired from the State
Department for giving advice that later turned out to be
unpopular. With the rise of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy,
Democrats were accused of having “lost China”; John Foster
Dulles removed Davies and others known as “old China
hands,” accused of being soft on communism, from the
Foreign Service.
Eric in his late-night radio broadcast, knowing that he himself
could be accused of communist sympathies if his 1943 essay
were published, defended him. The board that dismissed
Davies dropped the charges of communism, but said he
had “defects of character.” Sevareid recalled their ordeal in
the Burma jungles and replied, “I saw their victim measured
The liberation of Gertrude Stein, 1944.
against the most severe tests that mortal man can design. Those he passed. At the head of the class.”
Herbert Bayard Swope, legendary editor of the old New York World, praised Sevareid’s courage. Davies responded
that it did take courage to go against the “hysterical frame of mind in the country”; but in another sense it did not
because Sevareid really believed what he said, and it was his
business to say what he believed.”
take courage,
From the beginning, in 1950, well before Murrow’s famous See It Now broadcast, Sevareid opposed McCarthyism and
defended others, like Owen Lattimore and Robert Oppenheimer, whom he thought were falsely accused. His toughest
condemnation came during the U.S. Army–McCarthy hearings on January 10, 1954, when McCarthy revealed that a
young man on the staff of counsel Joseph Welsh had a remote communist connection, and Welsh exploded in righteous
indignation, “Have you no shame?” Sevareid replied that night, that McCarthy had no answer because “he had no
feeling that he had done anything morally wrong . . . He cannot help it. The personal tragedy of McCarthy is that the
nerve chord or cluster of cells that produce what men call conscience was not granted to him.”
From 1963 until he retired in 1977, Eric Sevareid settled into a working routine he interrupted only for occasional
speaking engagements, fishing trips, and vacations. He drove his daughter Tina to Chevy Chase Elementary School,
read the New York Times and Washington Post, and then drove his blue Volvo to the new CBS office at 2020 M Street at
13
Sevareid’s reporter’s notebook from China, 1972.
[the conscience of america]
10:00 a.m., where, in his relatively large office, he sat and stared at his gray manual Royal typewriter.
After lunch he answered all his correspondence, and, unless the writer questioned his integrity, he sent
warm, brief, gracious replies. To old friends from Velva: “Of course I remember you. . . Your house was
just. . .” He wrote many condolence notes, often promising prayers. The challenge was writing that
evening’s commentary. Strictly speaking, in journalism conventional wisdom, it was not a commentary,
but an analysis. An editorial proposes a line of action. An analysis dissects a news item into its parts and
puts it in context. A commentary gives the journalist’s personal opinion. Sevareid was not supposed to
the attraction for Sevareid’s viewers was
watching a good mind come to a conclusion, a clear opinion
that will help move a public trying to make up its mind.
give “opinions.” Whatever the form,
His creative process was complex. He talked out ideas with producer friends, made phone calls, picked
the brains of local experts, wandered into the hall and paced solemnly up and down, stopped in on the
young Marvin Kalb, just back from Moscow. He lunched with friends, swam at the Metropolitan Club to
ease the pain of his arthritis, returned to the office, where he’d sometimes stretch out on the sofa, and
return to the typewriter to stare some more. He smoked steadily, inhaling deeply and blowing a big cloud
out in front of his face.
Some staff complained that he was lazy. After all, how hard is it to write 400 words, a two-minute address?
But for him it was not just 400 words. They were his 400 best words—words meant to last. He told novelist
Kurt Vonnegut that he was writing the Gettysburg Address every day. Finally, the script was retyped for
the teleprompter, the make-up applied, the lights dimmed because he hated the glare and to soften his
features. He never got used to microphones or cameras and he long complained that the TV medium
sacrificed words to image. Yet, ironically, on the nights when his viewers had no idea what exactly he had
said, they were still awestruck at the words which poured forth from the man whose grey head filled the
TV screen and they understood that the source was a very wise and good man.
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[the conscience of america]
When Eric Sevareid retired in 1977 he was never replaced, and in the silence that followed the art of commentary died.
Once 60 Minutes demonstrated that news could be profitable as well as the source of the network’s prestige, management
evaluated news programs on the basis of the “bottom line.”
Those two minutes could be used for another commercial. When the new technology made it possible to broadcast live
from all over the world, young, ambitious reporters lusted after those two minutes as well. Commentary had developed
during the New Deal when new big government programs demanded “experts” like Walter Lippmann, James Reston,
and the Alsop brothers to explain policies. Today the cabinet secretaries and even the president compete for time on the
Sunday morning and even late-night talk shows.
With the explosion of information, the line between reporting and interpretation has grown fuzzy again; the journalist on
the scene interprets the event. In public television and cable news, “pundits,” who, unlike their journalistic predecessors,
who were made experts by their experience, are often former political operatives, who either chat seriously or yell at one
another and call it “analysis.”
Eric was correct when he feared the picture would win out over the good word. In the world of the couch potato with the
remote control, no one listens to one person for two minutes. Ultimately the problem is that Sevareid was unique. No one
else has come along with the world’s battlegrounds, his library of history and literature, and his mastery of the language, as
well as the North Dakota wheat fields in his blood and brains. He was all of America talking to itself.
In three quotations, we will give him the last words.
In October 1970, in a speech written by William Safire, Vice President Spiro Agnew, in an attempt to intimidate the press,
said that commentators like Howard K. Smith and Eric Sevareid should appear on a panel show and reveal their “real
opinions.” Sevareid replied:
Finally, at the risk of sounding a bit stuffy, we might say two things. One, that nobody in this business expects for
a moment that the full truth of anything will be contained in any one account or commentary, but that through free
reporting and discussion, as Mr. Walter Lippmann put it, the truth will emerge.
And second, that the central point about the free press is not that it be accurate, though it must try to be, not that it
even be fair, though it must try to be that, but that it be free. And that means, in the first instance, freedom from any
and all attempts by any power of government to coerce it or intimidate it in any way.
On April 19, 1972, the futility of the Vietnam War was becoming evident. Eric said:
If we have reached the dreadful point where the honor of the state and the conscience of the people collide, then what
does honor mean, anymore? We are asked to believe it is dishonorable to depart and risk the safety of Vietnamese
political and military leaders, but honorable to go on contributing to the certain death and misery of the wholly
innocent.
We are asked to believe that better relations with Russia are worth the loss of our own sense of moral identity. There
does come a time when the heart must rule the head. That time is when the heart is about to break.
In November 1977, we had three nights to say goodbye. On the last:
There is in the American people a tough, undiminished instinct for what is fair. Rightly or wrongly, I have the feeling I
have passed that test. I shall wear this like a medal. Millions have listened, intently and indifferently, in agreement and
in powerful disagreement. Tens of thousands have written their thoughts to me. I will feel, always, that I stand in their
midst. This was Eric Sevareid in Washington. Thank you and good bye.
To which I say, AMEN.
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[the conscience of america]
One good word is worth a
thousand pictures.
-Eric Sevareid
I was maybe eight or nine
years old, sitting with my family
at the Hunan Restaurant in Morris
Plains, New Jersey. It was a weekday
evening in winter, the place raucous
with kids and businessmen, no
different than the dozens of times
we’d been there before. We were in
a booth beside a bank of windows,
and outside it was dark enough
for me to see my reflection in the
glass. I enjoyed watching myself as
I ate, making faces and tracing the
movement of food down my throat.
But then, just as I took a bite of spare
rib, I heard a woman’s voice behind
me, not much more than a whisper:
“I hope you choke on it.”
The voice was slow and deliberate,
full of anger, weighted with a
bitterness deeper than any I’d
encountered before, and this startled
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me even more than the words
themselves. For an instant I was sure
those words were directed at me,
though I had no idea how I might
have provoked them. I was sure,
too, that I was the only one who’d
heard them, the only one capable
of hearing them, as if they’d been
spoken directly into my ear, or only
within my head. I chewed carefully
and swallowed.
But then, beside me, my brother
snickered. My father looked up,
blinking, and my mother glanced
over my shoulder with an astonished,
stricken look, her jaw clamped on
a mouthful of food. Not only had
everyone heard the voice, I realized,
but it had nothing to do with me.
And for some reason I found this so
disappointing that I set down my
rib and began to turn. “Mind your
own business,” my mother said, but
it was too late. In the glass I caught
sight of the couple behind us, their
reflection framed by the red velvet
uprights of the booth. The woman
was in her early forties, with curly
hair and a bony, bloodless face, lips
pressed so tightly they disappeared.
Her eyes were sunken and dark, and
even then I recognized them as the
eyes of someone who’d hardly slept
for days. She had a plate in front
of her, but her meal looked spare
and unappealing, several chunks of
crispy, glazed chicken surrounded
by soggy broccoli, and in any case,
it hadn’t been touched. Her hands
were under the table, her back stiff,
her entire body still except for an
odd twitch in her cheek that made
her slender nose alternately sharpen
and dull.
The man across from her I could see
only in profile, and it was strange
to think that he and I were back to
back, separated only by a few inches
of fabric and foam. He was a little
older than the woman, with gray
hair over his ears, a trim mustache,
a pinch of loose, rough skin under
[the conscience of america]
Go Ahead and Look
In Praise of Forbidden Looking
By Scott Nadelson
Scott Nadelson’s most recent book is The Cantor’s Daughter. He teaches creative writing at Willamette University, Salem, Oregon.
his chin. He wore a suit that seemed
tight around his shoulders, and
his face was flushed, as if his collar
were squeezing all his blood into his
face. His plate was nearly empty,
only a few bits of pork and onion
and pepper remaining in a pool of
dark sauce. He took a sip from his
wineglass, then bent close to the
table and scooped a mound of rice
into his mouth. His jaw moved a
couple of times and then stopped.
He dropped his chopsticks. His
hands went to his throat. But I knew
he wasn’t choking. He pretended
for a few seconds, then laughed, and
went back to eating.
The woman’s mouth parted, but she
didn’t say anything. Her shoulders
went limp. Her face no longer
looked hard but beaten. Her tired
eyes left the man, and before I could
turn away, they caught my own.
There was no doubt that she’d
seen me looking, no doubt that
she knew what I’d seen. There was
embarrassment in her expression,
and shame, but also a hint of
pleading, a desire for understanding
and sympathy. She was glad to have
someone else witness her torment,
I can guess now, glad not to suffer
alone.
When I turned back, my mother was
looking at me with disappointment
and reproach. I wanted to tell her
that she didn’t need to scold me,
that she was right, I shouldn’t have
looked, and that what I’d seen was
punishment enough. There were
three untouched ribs left in front
of me, but I’d lost my appetite. I
pushed the plate away.
I was recently reminded of this
incident while rereading First Love,
Ivan Turgenev’s brilliant early novella,
in which a boy discovers that his
father is having an affair with their
beautiful young neighbor, Zinaida.
The sixteen-year-old narrator, too,
is in love with Zinaida, but as yet
he has no experience of love other
than longing and fantasy. When
he secretly follows his father to a
rendezvous with Zinaida, he knows
he shouldn’t look, but he can’t bring
himself to turn away. Already he is
in the grip of some kind of mystery,
held fast by “an odd feeling, a
feeling stronger than curiosity,
stronger even than jealousy, stronger
than fear.” And what he sees he
can hardly believe. The two argue
quietly, Zinaida at first resisting her
lover’s advances. Then she holds out
her arm, across which the narrator’s
father delivers “a sharp blow” with
his riding crop. This horrifies the
narrator, but what he sees next
shocks him even more: “Zinaida
quivered—looked silently at my
father—and raising her arm slowly to
her lips, kissed the scar which glowed
crimson upon it.” After this, her
resistance is gone, and the narrator’s
father runs into her waiting embrace.
(cont.)
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The narrator doesn’t understand what he has seen any
more than I understood what I saw in the restaurant, and
his thoughts are “in a dreadful whirl.” What he does realize,
though, is that “however long [he] lived, [he] should always
remember Zinaida’s particular movement — her look, her
smile at the moment.” He has witnessed the ugliness and
cruelty of adult love, the violence of desire, the wildness of
passion, all of which he is years away from experiencing for
himself. But he recognizes that this moment has aged him.
His own love “now seemed … so very puny and childish
and trivial beside that other unknown something which
[he] could hardly begin to guess at, but which struck terror
into [him] like an unfamiliar, beautiful, but awe-inspiring
face whose features one strains in vain to discern in the
gathering darkness.”
His glance has thrust him deeply into the mysteries of
the world, and while this immersion terrifies him, it also
transforms him. A few years later Zinaida dies in childbirth,
and by then the narrator is prepared to face what lies before
him: “Even in those lighthearted days of youth,” he tells us,
“I did not close my eyes to the mournful voice which called
to me, to the solemn sound which came to me from beyond
the grave.” He is now open not only to the mysteries
of love but also to grief and suffering and loss. He has
entered the realm of truth, and there he remains, as much
as it may pain him.
Examples of such forbidden looking abound in Western
literature. None, I suppose, is better known than the story
of Lot’s salty wife, but close on its heels is that of the poet
Orpheus, who, upon descending to the underworld to
rescue his wife Eurydice from an untimely death, receives
an injunction from the inhabitants of Hell: Take your
wife back to Earth, but as you go, don’t look behind. Of
course Orpheus does look, and Eurydice falls back into the
darkness, never to return.
In Ovid’s version of the story, Orpheus casts his forbidden
glance in order to make sure that Eurydice is still with him,
“fearful that she’d lost her way.” I read this less literally than
metaphorically: What Orpheus fears is that his wife is in
fact still dead, that she can’t really return to the world of the
living. When he turns, he sees the face of death behind him
and knows that his wife is lost to him forever. She is taken
from him a second time not because he has abandoned
the prohibition but because his attempt to rescue her from
death was futile from the start, because death is always
18
final. Orpheus’s forbidden glance brings him face-to-face
with the fact of mortality, a fact he can no longer deny,
and when he returns to the world he is inconsolable,
“melancholy-mad,” sitting in “rags and mud,” living on
“tears and sorrow.”
But something else happens to Orpheus in the midst of
his renewed grief, something, as with Turgenev’s narrator,
profound and transformative. Before being torn to
pieces by “raging women” made wild by his beautiful
singing and his refusal to sleep with them, he sits on a
grassy hill to play his golden lyre. “A lovely place to
rest,” Ovid tells us, but one that “needed shade.” And
no sooner than Orpheus sings his first notes do all the
trees of the world crowd around him, from the “silver
poplar” to the “swaying lina,” from the “delicate hazel”
to the “spear-making ash.”
His singing now isn’t just beautiful but metamorphic,
magical, an art form that transcends pleasure and
enjoyment to literally change the landscape. According
to Ovid, before visiting the underworld, Orpheus was
“poet of the hour.” Now, having faced death and the
horrible truth of mortality, he brings trees to a barren
hillside. Informed by the knowledge of death, his art
is lifted from momentary, passing fancy into legend.
Despite what it cost him, his forbidden glance brings him
greatness, and more important, infuses his song with a
beauty that reshapes the world.
Orpheus remains one of our most powerful archetypes
of the artist, not because of his solitary brooding, but
because of the way he captures his ineffable encounter
with the unknown and gives it form, translating it for
those who’ll never experience it for themselves. The role
of the artist is to see what we can’t or don’t want to see
and to present it to us in a form that doesn’t allow us to
look away.
No one, to my mind, has embraced this act of exposing
the forbidden more fully or successfully than Chris
Burden, the notorious performance artist of the 1970s,
best known for pieces in which he has collaborators
shoot him in the arm or crucify him to the hood of a car.
When I first learned about Burden in an art history class
in college, my professor spoke about him as an art world
pariah, someone who took experimentation too far, who
was reckless, sensational, exploitative. But when I finally
[the conscience of america]
viewed clips of his work, I was surprised to find how quiet
they are compared to the sensationalism that surrounds
us on every mediated front, how spare and simple and
restrained . While his pieces often involve danger and selfinflicted pain, they resist the sensationalism of their subject
matter in order to explore some of our most fundamental
questions: How do we relate to the bodies that contain
us? How much can these bodies bear? How can we live
in the face of our vulnerabilities and the violence that
constantly threatens us?
In 1973, the year I was born, Burden bought a month’s
worth of advertising time on a local TV station. After a
highly produced ad for a dance-music record anthology,
video of one of Burden’s performances appeared in black
and white with only a simple graphic, the artist’s printed
name followed by a handwritten title, “Through the Night
Softly.” For ten seconds, TV viewers watched Burden,
wearing only underwear, with his hands held behind his
back, squirm across pavement covered in broken glass.
The only sound was Burden’s heavy, grunting breath and
the crunch of glass shards under his chest. And then the
screen went blank and he was quickly replaced by another
highly produced ad, this one for shower soap.
I can only guess what viewers might have made of
Burden’s ad while awaiting the return of a sitcom or
baseball game, when they were staring at their TVs with
the half-consciousness that advertising demands. The
image passed so quickly that they might have wondered
if they’d really seen it, or if they’d only imagined it. They
might have believed that someone at the TV station had
made a mistake, that they’d glimpsed something they
weren’t supposed to see, that they should have turned
away. But that image of a man crawling through glass
must have burned in their minds; they must have carried
it around with them for the next few days or weeks or
months, and even if they wanted to forget it, it would show
up in their dreams.
When Burden placed “Through the Night Softly” on TV,
American involvement in the Vietnam War was winding
down after many gruesome years, and certainly the piece
evokes images of soldiers crawling through mud and
debris, images that must have been all too familiar to
viewers by 1973. But what Burden seemed to intuit—
decades before reality television and 24-hour cable
news—is that ours is a culture in which looking isn’t really
The images produced for
us by advertisers are meant to
lull, to erase thought rather than
to provoke it, and the constant
marketing of products drains
meaning from even the hard
facts of the nightly news. By slipping
seeing.
his ad between images of laundry detergent and motor
oil, Burden ruptured the trance of his viewers, making
them confront not only the horror of war and the everpresence of mortality, but also the body’s incredible
resilience, its fragile beauty. He cut a small slit in the
surface of our mundane daily existence and gave us a
brief, irresistible glimpse of what lay behind.
The TV was his hillside, broken glass his lyre, ten
seconds of video his song.
It would be disingenuous to trace the start of my writing
life to that evening at the Hunan Restaurant when I
was eight or nine years old. Another decade passed
before I picked up a pen and tried to write a story, and
certainly other experiences contributed to the genesis
of those early efforts. But now, whenever I sit down to
face a blank page, I try to remind myself what, above all
else, I’m supposed to do: look at what you don’t want
to see, even if you don’t understand it, even if it causes
you discomfort or confusion or pain.
I couldn’t have guessed what went on between that
couple in the booth behind me, what might have
made the woman say those bitter words or look at me
with such despair. Even now I can only wonder at the
cruelty of the man’s laughter as he scooped rice into his
mouth. All I knew then was that I’d glimpsed something
I shouldn’t have, that I’d peeked into an adult world
of misery and meanness I wasn’t ready for and didn’t
think I ever would be. I’d seen something terrible and
profound and mysterious, and like Turgenev’s narrator, I
knew it was something I’d never forget.
The couple left before we did, and I kept my head down
as they passed our table. Soon after, my father paid
the bill, and I followed my family outside. It had grown
darker since we’d gone in. But now my eyes were all
the way open. They took in more light. They made the
darkness brighter.
19
Sketches of Eric Sevareid by Jonathan Twingley. www.twingley.com
[the conscience of america]
20
[the conscience of america]
The bigger the information media, the less courage and
information they allow. Bigness means weakness.
-Eric Sevareid
A Tribute to
Eric Sevareid
Reprinted with permission from the Minnesota News Council
When people gather at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on September 16 [1992] to honor the memory of Eric
Sevareid, who died July 9 at the age of 79, someone should talk about the Silvershirts. His exposure to them and of them
helped the boy from North Dakota grow into a man of the world.
In the basement of Wilson Library on the West Bank campus of the University of Minnesota, you can find a microfilm file of
the old Minneapolis Journal and, on the roll for September 1936, a page-one, five-part exposé of a local anti-Semitic, fascist
group—the Silvershirts—by a young reporter named Arnold Sevareid. (He started using Eric, his middle name, when he became
one of Ed Murrow’s boys, as World War II neared and his broadcasting career began.)
THE MINNEAPOLIS JOURNAL New Silver Shirt Clan With Incredible Credo Secretly Organized Here
Weird Order, Beset by Unbelievable Fears and Hatreds, Claims Six Thousand
Members in Minnesota. By Arnold Sevareid
You probably won’t believe this story. It concerns an organization now active in Minneapolis—known as the Silver Shirts. It concerns secret meetings, whispers of dark plots against the nation and the Silver Shirts’ incredible credo. Members of this organization talk about ideas and goals so fantastic that anyone who has heard them in
meeting as I have goes away wondering if he still lives in America in 1936. Then he wonders if Sinclair Lewis could have been wrong, after all, when he wrote “It Can’t Happen Here.”
21
[the conscience of america]
The series strikes today’s reader as bizarre: for one thing, it
totally lacks the kind of documentation today’s standards for
publication and credibility require. An editor’s note on the
first piece says, “Some of these stories will present extremes;
others will describe typical attitudes. All of them will seem
incredible. But they are based on verified experiences.” The reader gets, however, no verification. No names, places,
dates or times appear; you have to take Sevareid’s and the
paper’s word for it. And the style of most of the writing has
long since been dismissed as “Gee whiz” journalism. Any reporter loves getting on page one, but Sevareid didn’t
like the way the Journal played his splashy story. What he
found so offensive and dangerous to society, his editors at
the pre-Cowles conservative paper regarded with a tone
of mockery, as a later generation of editors would regard
conventions of UFO buffs. The stories described a secret society of right-wing
survivalists who envisioned a takeover of America by a
Jewish-Communist conspiracy. One of its supposed leaders
was Maurice Rose; they saw him as an international banker
in disguise. In fact, Rose worked as chauffeur to Governor
Floyd B. Olson. Predicting a takeover, one Silver Shirt told Sevareid: “In
Minneapolis they are going to start through Kenwood and
sweep eastward around the lakes and thence across the city.”
In line with the editorializing tone of the series, Sevareid
offered an observation: “I was astounded, but not from
the cause to which he attributed my astonishment. I was
astounded that such childish reasoning could exist in a brain
of a man so mature.” Despite the prominence the series gave Sevareid, that
experience and others at the Journal hardened attitudes
in him that his bosses could not abide, and they fired him.
Those attitudes took shape in the years just before, when
as a student at the “U” he led the successful fight against
compulsory ROTC, and President Lotus Coffman saw to it
that Sevareid was denied the editorship of the Daily that he
had earned. “For the first time,” Sevareid later wrote, “I tasted the ashes
of bitterness.” Particularly bitter for one who had worked so hard and who
had won the respect of so many peers and teachers. And
for one whose drive and optimism made him think of himself
as much less likely a victim of unfairness than those whose
causes he had taken up. 22
The Depression, the rise of fascism, and challenges to his
sense of fairness all combined to change Sevareid from
the boy he described in his autobiography, Not So Wild a
Dream, published in 1946. When Sevareid left his farm town of Velva, North Dakota
(pop. 837), even when he finished Minneapolis Central
High School in 1930, this soon-to-be campus radical still
believed—as he later wrote—”that Herbert Hoover was a
great man, that America was superior to all other countries
in all possible ways, that labor strikes were caused by
unkempt foreigners, that men saved their souls inside
wooden or brick Protestant churches, that if men had no
jobs it was due to personal laziness and vice—meaning
liquor—and that sanity governed the affairs of mankind.” His experiences at the university and downtown with the
Journal convinced him otherwise. He developed strong
sympathy for organized labor, including the embryonic
Newspaper Guild he had joined. Once, assigned a story on
a suburban camp that downtown businessmen were “nobly”
organizing for the poor and homeless, he listened as a
banker confided: “Of course, between you and me, we
have a hard-headed motive. These filthy bums are edging
too far up Nicollet Avenue. If we don’t get them away they
will tarnish the high tone of these blocks and drive realestate values down.” Sevareid recalled: “He nudged me and winked. The
potentate, letting the lowly scribbler into the secrets of
power! I delayed writing the story, and when an editor
inquired about it, I was foolish enough to blurt out my
feelings on the matter. I was told to conform or resign from
the paper.” Not long after that, Sevareid wrote a story mistakenly
identifying a veterans group as the American Legion instead
of as the VFW [Veterans of Foreign Wars], and the paper
took advantage of the opportunity to fire him. These were the journalistic roots of the man most Americans
picture as that silver-haired, dour fellow—the very model
of moderation—who delivered himself of deliberate
interpretive essays on the CBS Evening News with Walter
Cronkite. Did Sevareid talk that way off camera? One of his college
chums, Warner Shippee, now retired director of the Center
for Urban and Regional Affairs here, remembers Sevareid’s
speech as measured: “He thought of himself primarily as a
writer. I saw him as a person who was very judicious, who
weighed things—a true journalist.” Shippee and Sevareid belonged to a maverick campus
group, a non-Greek fraternity called the Jacobins, a name
derived from the political group in the French Revolution
known for extreme egalitarianism. Minnesota’s Jacobins
included Dick Scammon, who later headed the U.S. Census
Bureau; Earl Larson, who became a federal judge; Lee
Loevinger, who became a state supreme court justice and
Federal Communications Commissioner; Phil Potter, who had
a great career at the Baltimore Sun; Art Naftalin, who became
mayor of Minneapolis. Naftalin says of Sevareid: “He was a hero to me and the rest
of us who came after him at the University. He was someone
who’d gone off into the real world to fight for what so many
of us believed in.” Naftalin said he’s been reading Sevareid’s
autobiography again and appreciating his writing more than
ever: “He had an incredible ability to capture the mood of
whatever he was involved in.” Sevareid’s writing sets a high standard. Take his sense
memory of his boyhood home in North Dakota, where
there was “no roof to the sky, no border to the land.” Can’t
you hear his familiar cadence? “Wheat was the sole source
and meaning of our lives . . . it was rarely long outside the
conversation.” He loved the democracy of his farm town, and
he wondered, “Why can’t the rest of the world be like us?” He discovered how different it was, not only in the big city,
where small-fry fascists fomented hate, but in Europe, where
haters became killers. In Minneapolis, after his Silvershirts
series ran, he recalled, his personal life became a hell, filled
with vicious verbal attacks on him. In France, in September
1939, he inhabited another hell, as war broke out. This hell
was more theirs than his, but he felt it keenly enough to make
us feel it, too. Sevareid witnessed the boarding of the trains
that would take thousands of Frenchmen, still exhausted by
World War I, off to training and battle. “No bands played,” he wrote after the war, “there were no
flags, and nobody make a speech about ‘la gloire.’ They
moved to the trains of endless length as though it were a
weary routine they had practiced for twenty years. As far as
you could see there were the clusters of faces, expressionless
faces in the compartment windows. Another journalist who
saw it—Miss Dorothy Thompson, I think—said, ‘Not one
replaceable face.’”
Arnold Eric Sevareid—like any of the rest of us—is not
replaceable, either. But today’s news media
need to make room for his kind of
journalism—explaining the life-and-death
issues of the day. 23
[in his own words]
Reading and Rereading
Eric Sevareid
By Mark Strand
I have never quite grasped the worry about the power of the press. After all, it speaks with a thousand
voices, in constant dissonance. -Eric Sevareid
Eric Sevareid broadcasting during the invasion of southern France.
While veterans of the last war were unpacking their footlockers in 1946, Eric
Sevareid’s Not So Wild a Dream suddenly appeared in their living rooms, making its
way as a bestseller. Like the kid on the block who succeeds at door-to-door sales,
Sevareid’s “first born” left the house without so much as an introductory note from
its parent to warn readers what the book was up to.
24
[in his own words]
To people in the book trade, Sevareid must have seemed myopic about marketing. The following were also absent from
the book: a preface by a famous person, or one of the author’s pals, to confer status and boost sales; chapter headings
with names instead of numbers (the author was taking the reader on a tour around the world; signposts might help). There
were no photos, and the author’s biographical sketch was missing. Not So Wild a Dream would only state its name up
front and say that the CBS writer Norman Corwin had thought of it first. Then with a swoosh of italic type, To L.F.S., the
book was off and running.
Eric Sevareid was used to jumping into a story, and he was hell-bent on getting to page one, scene one with this first
sentence: “The small brown river curved around the edge of our town.” Readers were then swept away by a narrator who
brings scenes to life, as vivid as film, and lays his thoughts over the images. Simultaneously, the reader is inside the action
and the mind of the author. A river of film runs through Sevareid’s book: his childhood in North Dakota, his 2,000-mile
canoe trip with his friend Walter Port, riding cross-country in boxcars, working a newspaper beat, attending the University
of Minnesota, and starting a family during a war while circling the globe as a CBS correspondent.
Here is Sevareid’s “short film” about France on the brink of war:
“They were coming from the slums and tenements, and they still had on their soft, powdery denim, their working clothes.
From the elbows hung the oval helmets they had kept in the back closet since 1918. They did not look like soldiers
beginning a war; they looked like soldiers at the end of a war, when soldiers resemble any other tired men. Their wives had
come with them to the station, hanging to their arms, shuffling rapidly in their felt slippers to keep up with their men. Their
hair was pinned carelessly in place, and their eyes had the dry glaze and coloring that signified all-night weeping. They
waited for the trains, standing facing one another, oblivious of anyone else, the husband staring over his wife’s head at the
floor, the wife staring at his chest, and neither speaking. A tall, handsome young officer with shiny dark straps was grinning
at his fashionable wife, pretending to sock her in the jaw, kidding her. Form. A behavior pattern. Noblesse oblige. The
poor, who struggle for daily bread, have time only for reality.”
Inside his river of film, Sevareid sometimes pauses to make powerful word pictures. While Germany invaded France, and
Lois Sevareid lay in a French hospital about to give birth to twin boys, Eric stopped in the middle of the French retreat,
looked back, and painted his famous visual metaphor of Paris as a woman lying in a coma slowly bleeding to death.
Then the action continues with rapid transitions in and out of scenes woven together with Sevareid’s thoughts about
people and nations. He is just as interested in a tribe of Naga headhunters in the Burma jungle as he is European
societies. A conscientious guide, Sevareid is so anxious to take the reader inside scenes that we sometimes lose sight of
him. As one of his reviewers wrote, Sevareid “uses autobiography not as a memorial to self but to enrich the common
experience.” Similarly, encounters with his family are veiled and nearly off camera. The reader may stop several pages later
and ask, “Was that Eric’s brother he just met on the street in Paris?” or “I wonder how Lois and the twins are?”
Beyond these personal questions, practical questions arise: How did Sevareid do this so quickly, less than a year after the
25
[in his own words]
war had ended? Memoirs this complicated take years to research and write, and some
gifted writers never get the job done. How did he have the courage to write so openly
about his thoughts and beliefs? The cold war was coming on. How would CBS and its
sponsors respond to his candid thinking? What about the House Un-American Activities
Committee or J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI? His only expressed concern was his fear that
the public would count him among those who “lost China” due to his frank reporting
about Chiang Kai-shek’s weak, corrupt regime.
The New Edition
Eric in the Burma jungle, early 1940’s.
Thirty years after its birth, Not So Wild a Dream was a grown-up. The book had ranked
high on the bestseller lists and survived eleven printings without changes, including
no word from the author in the form of an introduction. Then in 1976, a year before
his retirement, Sevareid stepped from the shadows like a proud father to explain the
mysterious birth of his book with a proper introduction to a new edition. He would also
talk about his approach to writing and reveal more about himself. The content inside
remained unchanged because, “self-protection of that kind would appear dishonest.”
The new dust jacket wore the subtitle: “A Personal Story of Youth and War and the
American Faith.”
About the birth of the book, Sevareid said that the 250,000 words were written at “one
sitting,” in an approximate eight-month window, a happy time for his family between
the war and his return to CBS. He had been twice the age of many young soldiers. Now
he was young by authors’ standards, his energy equivalent to an “overcharged storage
battery.” The book was written from memory with few notes or diaries and sent out
without an introduction because “books should be self-explanatory and require no
preparation of the reader.” There was little time to reflect on what he had done before
getting back to earning a living.
He was proud that the book had become an “original source” for the events to which
he was an eyewitness. He was pleased that another generation found it relevant and
amused by the readers who wrote to him with “genteel excitement” after discovering his
book in antique shops. Speaking of “errors of commission,” Sevareid sounds as proud as
a parent whose kid has nearly perfect teeth when he admits to one misspelled word and
a misnamed river in Russia. His only technical regret: using “which” when “that” would
“fall more gently on the ear.”
Mark Strand is a professor and
chair of mass communications
at Minnesota State University
Moorhead. He grew up in a
family-owned photography
business in Rugby, North Dakota,
and graduated from Concordia
College where the president of
the college told his parents, “He’s
a little liberal, but he’ll be all
right.” Strand did his graduate
work at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.
26
Concerning the craft of writing, Sevareid describes the “blessing—or the curse” of his
“double vision,” and the process of combining thoughts with actions. The double vision
technique calls for 1.) describe the scene (early morning: tired men in work clothes, their
wives in slippers, hanging on the men’s arms, making their way to rail station), 2.) locate
a person (an officer in dress uniform standing with his stylish wife), 3.) present an idea
(contrast the romance of noblesse oblige with the reality of the poor).
Sevareid had discovered that he wrote for the eye, not the ear. There was “not much
conversation in the book,” and he didn’t think he was cut out for writing novels. There
had been talk of movies. Hollywood wanted to re-tell Eric’s story about his encounter
with the Naga headhunters after a plane wreck in the Burma jungle, but India’s Nehru
[in his own words]
was busy putting down the rebellious Nagas, and nothing
came of it. Thirty years later Sevareid was still angry about
Nehru’s treatment of the Nagas—and the abrupt ending
to his film.
Filmmaking and writing are not as easy as one, two, three.
Behind the scenes are emotions. For Sevareid, emotions
were mostly kept in check. He admits to an “impersonality
in his personal narrative” and says he was “too young to
handle intimacies in public view.” His authorial attitude
was “One did not impose his deepest emotions upon
others and certainly not upon strangers.”
This attitude about privacy was acceptable in the age of
Jefferson but not in 1976. Some of Sevareid’s friends,
and many of his readers, wanted to know why he had
said so little about his first wife Lois in the book. He
acknowledged Lois’s importance and went on with a
painful explanation of why their marriage of nearly thirty
years had ended. Then he offered this confession:
“The fantasy grew in me that her last chance for health
lay in my departure as well as my own last chance to feel
again, to see again with the poet’s eye and perhaps, one
day, to write something that would be more whole than
the writer. I never did, in spite of the departure, of course,
and of course she never found health. She endured her
own far greater tragedy for a quarter century in all and
then died with merciful speed.”
After a lifetime of condensing what he had seen and
thought into words, first in print, then five-minute radio
essays, and finally two-minute television commentaries,
Sevareid was working inside fifteen pages to write
something “more whole than the writer.”
In the rest of the introduction, he discusses how America
and the world have changed since 1945. The man a friend
called a “hundred proof American” expresses faith in his
country: “We are a turbulent society but a stable republic;”
his profession: “No other great power has the confidence
and stability to expose and face its own blunders;” and his
countrymen to whom he wished his best: “Freedom is the
condition of feeling like one’s self.”
Reading Eric Sevareid
One of the charms and benefits of midwestern libraries is
the number of first edition books still on their shelves. I was
fortunate to find the original 1946 edition of Not So Wild
a Dream in mine and was so entranced by the book that I
put down a series of murder mysteries by a Pulitzer Prize–
winning journalist to read Sevareid’s autobiography.
I wanted to know more. I had only known Sevareid as
the man who propped up the CBS Evening News for two
minutes each night with nothing but a rock-solid shot on
one camera and thoughtful words. Raymond Schroth’s The
American Journey of Eric Sevareid, so beautifully written
and researched, was just the ticket. Later I purchased my
own used copy of the new (1976) edition of Not So Wild a
Dream and was surprised to find the “missing introduction.”
Now I had something to offer the other member of my
two-man Eric Sevareid Book Club, the North Dakota State
University photographer, Dan Koeck. As a patron of another
library specializing in first editions, Dan valued the new
information, but we both agreed that it we were better for
being for being deprived of the latest edition, that we had
experienced Not So Wild a Dream the way the author had
intended.
My interest continued as I pursued other Sevareid books
no longer in print. This Is Eric Sevareid, a book comprised
of his longer pieces that appeared in various printed
publications, includes his essay for Collier’s, “You Can
Go Home Again,” helps answer the question, “What did
Sevareid see in Velva?” The fascinating interviews Sevareid
conducted with notable Americans, ranging from the
elite journalist Walter Lippmann to the longshoreman and
philosopher Eric Hoffer, have been collected in a book
titled Conversations with Eric Sevareid. Reading those
conversations sheds light on Sevareid’s remarkable ability to
see several sides to a question.
To my surprise, I found Small Sounds in the Night (1956),
a collection of Sevareid’s CBS radio essays, on-line.
Once the property of the Kansas City Public Library, the
book was hiding out on the Internet in both the pdf and
e-pub formats. Sevareid liked to grouse about changing
technologies, but he might be pleased by how well his
printed radio essays translate to new media. It is not so wild
a dream to assume that someday we may read his essays on
an e-reader with the option to listen to them in Sevareid’s
distinctive voice, and no doubt, the package will include the
optional video.
27
[in his own words]
Brotherhood is not so wild a dream as
those who profit by post poning it pretend.
-Norman Corwin from “On a Note of Triumph”
Not So Wild
a Dream
By Eric Sevareid
Excerpted from Not So Wild a Dream by Eric Sevareid
with permission by the Don Congdon Agency.
28
[in his own words]
29
[in his own words]
The small brown river curved around the edge
of our town. The farmers plowed close to its muddy
banks and left their water jugs in the shade of the
willows. There is not much shade in the northern
sections of North Dakota, nor is there much shelter in the
wintertime. Even as very small children we could sense
the river’s life-giving nature and meaning to the farmers,
to us all. By December, despite the river’s current,
the men could cut ice blocks three feet square, to be
stacked and layered with sawdust in the shed behind
Moose’s general trading store on Main Street, against
midsummer when hot winds came across the prairie, a
time when the milk seemed to sour just a few minutes
after you had milked the cow, when you couldn’t even be
sure of the butter kept in the well.
Velva . . . was only one of various villages strung upon
the river’s wandering length, but naturally we felt we
exercised particular rights of possession over its flowing.
On the red-painted wooden bridge, leading into the
“city park” was mounted a large sign bearing a white
star and the words in block letters: “Star City on the
Mouse.” This led also to the baseball diamond and the
swimming hole just beyond. Sometimes the team from
a village like Voltaire would come play our men, and I
can still remember my own feeling of proud generosity
when, after the game, the Voltaire team would hurry
to our swimming hole, strip off their overalls, and slide
down our mud slide into the water, shouting, splashing,
and shoving one another. Voltaire was only a few miles
away, but it was bare and riverless. These men swam
awkwardly with a great deal of thrashing and spitting.
Only their forearms were burned a dark brown, and the
face and neck down to the junction of the collarbone.
The rest of their bodies was dead white in contrast.
Grown men in those climates did not expose their
bodies to the sun, and it was years before I saw adults
with carefully nurtured “tans,” acquired in leisure, not
working, time.
Wheat. So far as Velva was concerned, wheat was the
sole source and meaning of our lives, which were given
in continuing hostage to the vagaries of this pewtercolored ocean that lapped to the thistle-covered
roadbed of the Soo Line and receded in perpetually
undulating billows as far as a child could see from the
highest point, even from the top of the water tank. We
were never its masters, but too frequently its victims. It
was our setting and scenery. It was rarely long outside
30
a conversation. On the mercy of the wheat depended
the presence of new geography books in the red brick
schoolhouse, a new Ranger bicycle from Montgomery
Ward’s, good humor in my father’s face. Its favor or
disfavor determined the size and mood of the crowd
of farmers on Main Street Saturday nights, and was the
reason Pastor Reishus in the Lutheran church prayed as
frequently for rain as he did for our immortal souls. In
good harvest it meant that hordes of itinerant workers,
I.W.W.’s (which meant “I won’t work,” according to the
businessmen of the town), hung around the poolroom
and Eats Cafe, hunched like tattered crows on the
hitching rails, spat tobacco juice at the grasshoppers
in the dusty street, and frightened the nice women of
the town so that they rarely ventured on Main Street in
the evening time. Good harvest meant that my father
would have to leave his office in the back of the little
bank, remove his hard white collar, change to overalls,
and, taking my older brother with him, go to help out on
one of the bank’s farms by driving the four-horse binder,
while Paul, who was big for his age, would struggle with
the shocks. Hired man or town banker, wheat was the
common denominator of this democracy. It made all
men equal, in prosperity or wretchedness. It meant that
my father, the banker, was more of a confessor than the
Catholic priest. His office was connected by a door to
the town library for a time, and I could slip in among
the bookshelves on days when the library was closed to
everyone else. Sometimes I looked through the keyhole.
I remember times when I would see a gaunt, unshaved
Norwegian farmer sitting before my father’s desk, staring
down at his blackened nails, speaking to my father
with a painful difficulty about the locusts or the reaper
which broke its axle on a rock, and sometimes, with
more difficulty, about his wife who had gone sick again.
Those were the bad times. Those were the days when
my father could not eat much at supper. Those were
the days when a buggy would drive up to our house
after supper and my father and a wheat farmer would sit
on the porch talking in low tones, with long periods of
silence, until after we children fell asleep upstairs. Wheat
was our solace and our challenge. My mother, who came
from a green and pleasant city in the distant, mystical
East—in Iowa—feared and hated it. My father simply
met the challenge without emotion, as a man should,
and grappled with it as well as a man knew how. In the
end he lost it. It ruined him.
North Dakota. Why have I not returned for so many
[in his own words]
years? Why have so few from those prairies ever returned? Where is its written chapter in
the long and varied American story? In distant cities when someone would ask: “Where
are you from?” and I would answer: “North Dakota,” they would merely nod politely and
change the subject, having no point of common reference. They knew no one else from
there. It was a large, rectangular blank spot in the nation’s mind. I was that kind of child
who relates reality to books, and in the books I found so little about my native region. In the
geography, among the pictures of Chicago’s skyline, Florida’s palms, and the redwoods in
California, there was one small snapshot of North Dakota. It showed a waving wheatfield. I
could see that simply by turning my head to the sixth-grade window. Was that all there was,
all we had? Perhaps the feeling had been communicated from my mother, but very early I
acquired a sense of having no identity in the world, of inhabiting, by some cruel mistake, an
outland, a lost and forgotten place upon the far horizon of my country. Sometimes when
galloping a bare-backed horse across the pastures in pursuit of some neighbor’s straying
cattle, I had for a moment a sharp sense of the prairie’s beauty, but it always died quickly
away, and the unattainable places of the books were again more beautiful, more real.
2
My father was of the second generation of Norwegian pioneers who came with the Swedes,
the Germans, and the Danes to this bleak and barren northwestern country, where the
skyline offered nothing to soothe the senses, but where the soil was rich and lumpy in
knowing fingers. He was of the second wave. The first, which carried in my grandfather,
paused, in the fifties and sixties, among the pleasant rolling hills of Iowa and southern
counties of Minnesota, where one was always sure of rain. The land hunger did not die
there. The railroads pushed out across the Dakotas, reaching for the fertile and already
long-famous Oregon country, and the sons of the first, considering themselves very much
American but still easily speaking their European tongues, followed soon after. The
westering impulse was still strong in those men when my father went, in the first decade
of this century, and those who penetrated North Dakota sought quick returns as well as
permanent homes. For this was bonanza county. The soil was perfect for the crop. There
were no hills to circumvent, no forests to clear. It required steadier purpose, harder work,
and better men than the finding of gold; but the wheat was their gold. This was the Wheat
Rush. So, recklessly they plowed and planted, the same crop year after year. They grew
momentarily rich in the years of the First World War, but then the rains ceased. By now
the original buffalo grass, which had preserved the soil, was long since plowed away, and
without rain the earth lay dried and desolate, the color of old mud, and the hot prairie winds
of summer, with nothing to stop them, simply transferred the top soil in the form of fine dust
to faraway places. God knows how families survived those years, but they were tough and
patient people and they always talked of “next year . . . next year,” until even a child could
grow sick of hearing it.
(And this, in the very years when the rest of the country flourished in the most extravagant
prosperity it had ever known. Before Franklin Roosevelt presented the principle that
Americans were one, obliged to care for one another. An idea, I must say, which would
have seemed very strange out there in my father’s day, when a man still believed that his
preservation depended upon himself alone, so that he blamed only himself—and the
elements—when he failed.)
Perhaps it was our common dependence upon the wheat that made all men essentially
In distant cities
when someone
would ask:
“Where are you
from?” and I
would answer:
“North Dakota,”
they would merely
nod politely
and change the
subject, having no
point of common
reference.
31
[in his own words]
equal, but I do know now, having looked at society in many countries, that we were a true democracy in that huddled
community of painted boards. A man might affect pretensions, but he could not pretend for long. We lived too closely
together for all that. There were, of course, differences in degree of material wealth. There were what was always
referred to as the “well-to-do,” and we had a few families “on the other side of the tracks.” No doubt there was envy
at times and small bitternesses here and there. But no man lived in fear of another. No man had the power to direct
another to vote this way or that. No impenetrable combine could foist a candidate upon the people if they did not wish,
and it would have been quite impossible to rig an election and get away with it. This was an agrarian democracy, which
meant that there was no concentration of capital goods, which meant in turn, since we had no all-powerful landlords,
that that no class society based upon birth or privilege had a chance to develop. Only a very thick-skinned, insensitive
person would dare to “put airs on” in that intimate community. If Mother dressed my brothers and me too prettily for
school one day, it was a moral and political necessity that we muddy our clothes as quickly as possible before showing
up in the classroom. If this was a Christian democracy, still, no virtue was made of poverty; the Scandinavian is too hardheaded for that. But to be poor was no disgrace. If the man of the house in one of the families that lived close to the
edge fell ill and could not work, my mother and other mothers carried them baskets of fresh things to eat. It was not
charity, not condescension to ease the conscience; it was neighborliness, taken as such, and no one’s pride was injured.
The Horatio Alger tradition was strong even then, and the village boys really read those insufferable little books. One
day when we were out picking wild plums by the river bank, another boy said to me: “Your father is a pretty good man,
even if he is the richest man in town.” I had no feeling of pride; far from it. I was shocked, and hurried home, close
to tears. I demanded the truth from my father, for if this were true, I felt I would be in a highly compromised position;
somehow my own worth would be at a discount. Patiently, he demonstrated to me that the charge of possessing great
wealth was a false accusation, and I relayed this gratifying information to the proper place without delay.
Pictured second from the left: Eric Sevareid (15 years old).
32
[in his own words]
Later, I read all the exalting literature of the great
struggle for a classless society; later, I watched at
first hand its manifestations in several countries. It
occurred to me then that what men wanted was Velva,
on a national, on a world, scale. For the thing was
already achieved, in miniature, out there, in a thousand
miniatures scattered along the rivers and highways of all
West and Middle West. I was to hear the intelligentsia
of eastern America, of England and France, speak often
of our Middle West with a certain contempt, with a joke
in their minds. They contemned [sic] its tightness, its
dullness, its bedrock of intolerance. They have much to
learn, these gentlemen. For we had, in those severely
limited places, an intolerance also of snobbery, of
callousness, of crookedness, of men who kicked other
men around. The working of democracy is boring, most
of the time, and dull compared with other systems, but
that is a small price to pay for so great a thing.
I must have been very young when Main Street was first
published. It is a title I remember along with Rover Boys,
Horatio Alger, and the Bible. Not that I read it, then,
but my mother did and the neighbors up and down our
street. I remember the local wrath, and remembering my
mother’s distress I know it came from being deeply hurt.
Of course, in these little places originality was frowned
upon, and genius would have been suspect. Of course,
the pressure to conform was almost irresistible, and the
boundaries of that conformity were appallingly narrow.
Of course, art was at a discount and “niceness” the
standard of taste. But this terrible indictment bewildered
the citizens and made them wonder if all they had tried
to do was wrong and had gone for nothing. For they
had no other standard by which to measure except the
past. And what had the past been? It had been sod
huts, a diet of potatoes and gruel. It had been the hot
winds of the summer that shriveled the crops, and the
blizzards of winter that killed the cattle, that brought the
pneumonia and influenza that killed their women and
children, while the stricken men turned the pages of a
home medical guide and waited for a doctor who lived
twenty miles away. It had been the gnarled men who
sweated beside a kerosene lamp to learn the grammar
of their new county’s language. It had been the handing
on from neighbor to neighbor of a few volumes of the
classics, a few eastern newspapers three months old. It
had been the one-room schoolhouse in a corner of my
grandfather’s homestead, where a “bright” aunt could
occasionally be prevailed upon to teach the rudiments
to tired boys and girls, who had risen before dawn to
lug the slops because the family could not afford a hired
man. They came together in villages and put paint on
the boards of their houses. They planted green trees,
made a park as best they could. They put their money
together and hired for their children teachers who knew
a little more. They sent some sons away to come back
with the knowledge of medicine and the law. They built
hospitals and colleges. The colleges were not Harvard
nor Oxford, but they saw that the right books were there.
They thought they had done well. Who, in his present
comfort and easy knowledge, is now to sneer? They
were of the men who built America; they are now of the
men who keep America. They are America.
I was to become one of that small swarm of young
American journalists who, however deficient in scholarly
background, infested foreign capitals, boldly bearded
their great men, pugnaciously investigated their political
movements, demanded the unornamental truth at a
thousand press meetings where our French, British,
or Portuguese colleagues approached the great with
timid genuflections and regarded us with a mixture of
distaste and awe. Instinctively, we looked at men for
what they were—as men. A title of office, or a “von” or a
“de” before their names was no kind of passport to our
favor. Partly this was due to the rigorous downrightness
of our American journalistic training, but partly to our
beginnings in a hundred Velvas.
When “Duff” Aaker died prematurely, why did the whole
town mourn his death with such unfeigned sorrow? He
was only a country doctor with no wealth, no lineage,
no power over them but the power of his personality. I
can still feel, when I remember, the tapping of his strong
fingers on my chest and the cigar smell of his salt-andpepper beard. He was one of the first in our town to
own an automobile, which he drove with savage speed.
He played the piano, the ’cello, and the violin and even
wrote symphonic music, which would have made anyone
else suspect in respectable eyes. He understood my
mother’s longing for the green and leafy places, and
to him alone she could talk. He could denounce the
Republican party and vote Nonpartisan League—heresy
among the businessmen—and get away with it. He could
drink in Prohibition days and get away with that. He
could speak so wisely with a dying octogenarian that the
old man was happy in dying. In his wrath he could refuse
anesthesia to a drunken farmhand, terribly gashed in a
33
[in his own words]
pitchfork fight, make him sit upright on a kitchen stool,
pour iodine overgenerously, and rebuke the man if he
grunted.
He drove down one day from the new hospital at Minot
to play the organ at the funeral of the local shoemaker,
and rushing out of the church tripped, I think, on a
croquet arch obscured in the weeds. He was injured
internally and died in great pain. My father was a big,
stern man, who made stern judgments, and I had never
actually heard him speak any praise of the doctor. The
night Aaker died my father went up to bed early, without
saying goodnight. When we children were going to
sleep we could hear his bed shaking. He was sobbing,
and we listened in terror all night, for we had never
known him to do such a thing. Duff Aaker was the first
great man I ever knew about outside of books. No
president or premier ever seemed so great to me.
Sometimes now it seems that my generation lived in
preparation for nothing except this war that has ended
and which involved my own life so profoundly; but the
First World War, which was really the first phase of this
one, must have been a very minor interlude for that
generation. It surely did not affect our village much.
I do remember my father lifting me to the window
of a troop train as it halted beside the water tank, in
order that we children could shake hands with Uncle
Ephraim who was passing through on his way “over
there.” I remember scolding Arthur Renning, next
door, for putting sugar on his bread, knowing that the
government in Washington did not want us to put sugar
on bread. That’s all I remember about the war, except
a dream, which is clearest of all. I dreamed the same
dream many times. A column of “Huns” was marching
down Main Street, past MacKnight’s drugstore, and had
reached Welo’s department store, when I, lying artfully
concealed on the roof of the bank, let go with my
father’s Winchester .22 and mowed them down. They
seemed to make no effort to take cover, or to stop me,
and they all died instantly. (In the winter when this war
was ending in Europe, the British press printed pictures
of two German youngsters who had tried to snipe at
our men. The caption said: “Examine the faces of these
killers, this spawn of the Nazi beasts. Can we treat them
as innocent children?”)
There were a good many Germans in town, but your
parents never talked about them as Germans, never
34
pointed them out and set them aside in your mind.
Broad women with kindly faces who opened the doors
to their clean, good-smelling kitchens and handed you
a piece of limp, fragrant coffee-cake. They were just
the neighbors. You knew they came from Germany,
but you did not move them into that side of your mind
which contained the Germany of the devilish Kaiser, the
spiked helmets, and the savage men who cut the hands
from Belgian children. The conception of Germans as
a race, with racial (or, at least, national) characteristics
of their own, was something that did not enter my mind
for many years. There were no races with us, except
the Negroes, and we saw only one specimen, who
worked awhile around Johnson’s barber shop, then
drifted somewhere else. Undoubtedly, there were Jews
among us, a few, but I didn’t know what a Jew was
until I was almost ready for college. A Jew is still just
another person to me. If I do not experience any special
reaction in the presence of a Jew, it is not due to broadmindedness. I cannot. It just isn’t there. The toxin was
not injected into our bloodstream early enough, for
which we give thanks to Velva.
For my father’s generation, born in America though they
were, the “old country,” which they had never seen, still
seemed close. He carried a faint Norwegian accent in
his speech throughout his life, which came from his early
boyhood when few around the farms spoke English.
Christmas dinner was never right for him without lutefisk
and lefse, and Pastor Reishus always preached first in
Norwegian, then in English. But there came a break
with my generation, the third. It happened throughout
that northwest country. Talk with visitors in the parlor
about the old country bored my brothers and me. I
hated the sound of the Norwegian tongue and refused
to try to learn it. It meant nothing to me that my
grandfather on my mother’s side was one of America’s
most distinguished scholars of Scandinavian literature
and life. The books in my classroom dealt only with
the United States, and there lay the sole magnet to our
imaginations. The thread connecting these northwest
people with Europe was thinning out, and with my
generation it snapped.
There was another course which changed in that period.
We were the first to grow up without the American West
shining before the eye of the mind as the vision of the
future. Instinctively we knew that the last of the frontiers
had disappeared. From the time when the Indian
[in his own words]
tales lost their spell and we began to think, we wanted to go east. It was the East that was
golden. My father did move his family east—a little way, to Minnesota—but not to seek more
opportunity, more freedom; years of drought ruined his wheatlands and broke his bank.
3
The high-school period, in America anyway, is surely the worst period in a man’s life—the most
awkward, uncomfortable, inept and embarrassing of all times. And the most fruitless. It is
astonishing how little one is taught in these schools, or, at least, how little one absorbs of what
they must be trying to teach. They handle this period much better in Europe, particularly in
France. At least they do something with a boy’s mind. They fail, however, to do anything at
all about the boy’s body, which is important at that age, so that almost the only exercise the
pale, skinny Paris kids of seventeen obtain is in chasing girls—and, furthermore, catching up
with them. This probably explains some of the pallor, although most of it is due to the hard,
relentless grind over the books through which the French boy of seventeen understands at
least as much of the world of ideas as the American youth beginning his junior year of college.
In high school we obediently went through brief courses in elementary physics and chemistry,
without the faintest glimmering ever percolating into our minds about the rigor and the
glories of the scientific method, the long heart-breaking struggle of men to establish it against
institutionalized superstition, or how and why it had made our age fundamentally different,
more wonderful and more terrible, than all preceding ages. We learned “civics”—that is, we
learned to repeat, like parrots, the Preamble to the Constitution and perhaps the Bill of Rights.
We acquired not the faintest understanding of the Age of Reason, nor the long, slow loosening
and freeing of men’s minds in their contemplation of society which resulted in a Jefferson or
a Tom Paine. We had no idea of the older, European sources of these ideas, or what their
fruition in the American Colonies did to the establishments and the people of Europe and
half the globe in the generations that followed. So far as we were taught, the United States
came into being because our forefathers were “against kings” and “wanted to worship as they
pleased.” We were not taught these things, because our teachers, with few exceptions, did
not know them. If they understood the economic interpretation of history and the meaning of
the great Bolshevik revolution to the future world we children would live in, they certainly did
not share that understanding with us. They knew of George Washington, but few had heard
of Simon Bolivar; they knew about Napoleon, but not about Rousseau; they let us read the
life of Herbert Hoover, if we wished, but none of them suggested we look into the ideas of
Norman Thomas. America makes high-school teaching a trade. We turn out the tradesmen
and tradeswomen “certificates” in their hands, by the thousands every year from the assembly
belts of innumerable factories called teachers’ colleges and education courses. There are fine,
devoted souls among them, but they are likely to quit trying early in the game. The system
is against them. It is an exhausting grind with far too many bobbed, shaggy, or brilliantined
heads before them every hour, all of whom, the system demands, must be treated exactly
alike. Chambers of Commerce and parents’ organizations are looking over their shoulders
constantly, and periodically down their throats. The system is designed to prevent challenging,
revolutionary ideas, particularly political, from ever reaching a youngster, and at this stage,
when most of them are more conservative than their fathers, more priggish than their preachers,
the vast majority of American boys end forever their formal education.
The virtues of the system have little to do with the intellect, but they are real: By competitive
sports (vastly overdone) a boy may acquire the invaluable easy confidence with his fellows
which can last him the rest of his life, which is the basic touchstone among young men all over
America makes
high-school
teaching a trade.
We turn out the
tradesmen and
tradeswomen
“certificates” in
their hands...
35
[in his own words]
the world, for the relationship of most men during at
least one half their lives has a physical basis. By living
and working among girls he can acquire that peculiarly
American thing—a natural approach to women as
friends and even as comrades, not purely as sexual
objects; a level unattained anywhere else in the world,
except possibly in Russia. By the complete, leveling
atmosphere of the public school, he becomes almost
oblivious of social classes—for a time—and, while he
acquires more respect for brawn than for brain, he
acquires more for brain than for birth. Finally, by the
team and committee system, so frequently ridiculed by
foreign observers, he learns that the worst disgrace of all
is to “let the team down.” He learns the doing of things
together as the natural method, and since the central
problem of our times is the social problem, the instinct
of working together is the most important instinct a man
can learn. Intellectuals go through a phase when “the
team spirit” is a joke. Later I saw it win a war for my
country.
I finished Minneapolis Central High School in the
summer of 1930, pale and skinny, having learned
nothing except how to put the school paper to press,
believing that the ability to write a two-column “A”
headline was of a higher order than the ability to write
a sonnet, believing that Herbert Hoover was a great
man, that America was superior to all other countries
in all possible ways, that labor strikes were caused by
unkempt foreigners, that men saved their souls inside
wooden or brick Protestant churches, that if men had no
jobs it was due to personal laziness and vice—meaning
liquor—and that sanity governed the affairs of mankind.
4
I then proceeded to an adventurous enterprise so heroic
in its scope that I am staggered to this day when I recall
it. It is practically devoid of meaning and implication. In
any case, I am going to relate it.
All through the high-school years I was the slavishly
devoted comrade of a boy two or three years older
than I, a boy of solid physique and remarkable energy
who was so popular that he became the president
of our graduating class. Walter Port came from Big
Woods country in the northern part of the state, where
his people had been fishermen and timber cruisers.
He had a dark and swarthy face which would have
36
been handsome except for the indentations left by
early smallpox. He worked until midnight each night in
a downtown drugstore, then walked two miles to his
rooming house, rose at dawn to do his “home work,”
then walked to school, where he managed to be the
highly successful “business manager” of student
publications as well as performing on the swimming
and gymnastic teams. He was the confidant of everyone
from the principal to the janitors. The girls liked him, and
to me he was the knight without fear, without reproach.
The idea for the enterprise originated with him. He
may have acquired it from reading the story of the
Kensington Rune Stone, an unresolved mystery in
American and particularly Minnesota history about
which surprisingly few Americans have ever heard. In
1898 a farmer in the western part of the state plowed
up a flat stone bearing markings that resembled some
kind of writing. It turned out to be Runic, the alphabet
of the early Teutonic or Celtic tribes, and as translated
by Scandinavian scholars it told a brief story of a party
of men (“8 Gothe and 22 Norwegians”) who had come
from the sea inland by the rivers and were attacked by
savages, with the result that the author of the tablet was
almost alone among the survivors. The date 1362 was
inscribed, placing the event several generations before
the time of Columbus’s voyage of discovery. If literally
true, this meant that Vikings of some description had
penetrated to the Middle West, to the very land heart
of the North American continent. Their most natural
route would have been into Hudson Bay, then through
the inter-connecting rivers which lead south and west
to Lake Winnipeg, then straight south along the Red
River of the North to the area where the tablet was
discovered. The authenticity of the tablet has been in
dispute ever since it was found—one group of scholars
quite convinced the thing is true, others believing that
a certain young Scandinavian scholar at the University
of Wisconsin, disgruntled by bitter quarrels with his
teachers, had fabricated the tablet and planted it,
knowing it would be uncovered, excite the world of
historians, and, he hoped, show up his superiors to be
the unmitigated asses he was convinced they were.
Altogether, if the second theory is correct, it is the
most elaborate delayed-action booby trap in academic
history. But it was half-dud, the explosion was muffled;
nobody agrees who has proved what.
The story of the Rune Stone confirmed what was
[in his own words]
obvious from a glance at the map—that one could
go by water from the Red River area to the Atlantic
Ocean in the north. By a more careful look at the map,
Walter and I saw that it was also possible to prove
something which, in our minds at least, was ignored by
our contemporaries and was of historical consequence.
We would demonstrate that it was possible to travel,
entirely by water, from ocean to ocean, straight through
the heart of the continent. Everybody knew of course
that the Mississippi connected the Gulf of Mexico with
Minnesota, and we would show that you could continue
from the Mississippi to the North Atlantic by branching
off into the Minnesota River at Fort Snelling, mount its
five hundred miles, push through a couple of small lakes
at the Minnesota headwaters, go the thirty-mile length
of the narrow Bois de Sioux river (really just a swamp),
which is the beginning of the Red River of the North;
then you would just descend its seven-hundred-mile
length, debouch into Lake Winnipeg, skirt up its eastern
shore and get into one of the rivers that drain the lake
into Hudson Bay some five hundred miles farther on,
and you were there. (Just why anybody would treasure
the knowledge that you could thus cross the continent,
especially since it would have to be done in a canoe
small enough so that a man could carry it on his back
over the necessary portages, is a question that never
occurred to us. We were less than twenty. Forgive us.)
The harassed editor of the Minneapolis Star, looking
for any device to increase circulation, even among
adolescent readers, gruffly agreed to pay us one
hundred dollars all—we dared to ask—in return for the
weekly descriptive articles that I would provide. I fear
he lost his investment—the articles seem inconceivably
flat and tasteless now. Walter had been raised on
the northern rivers and had practical talents. My
understanding of watergoing craft you may judge
by the fact that when my father dragged our newly
purchased but second-hand canoe into the basement
to get the thing out of his way, I expressed fear that
the dampness might warp its shape. My method of
preparation for the trial was to read books on “how
to live in the forest,” while Walter simply went ahead
collecting the instruments, equipment, and clothing
which his experience and natural instinct told him would
be required. I hadn’t the faintest conception of what
we were really letting ourselves in for—nor, I suspected,
had my parents, who let me go. I think Walter had, and
I do know that with any other type of partner my parents
would have seen no more of me in the living state.
But in the actual practice one learns rapidly, even a
boy who cannot drive a nail straight nor chop wood
for a fire without gashing his shins. At seventeen one’s
capacity to absorb physical suffering is almost unlimited.
Indeed, instead of breaking you down and wearing
you out, it builds you up, hardens and knits your flesh
together, makes you impervious to blazing sun, ants,
mosquitoes and ticks, adjusts the pulmonary system to
any number of freezing nights spent upon the soaking
ground, grows tough calluses where blisters ought to
be, and teaches your stomach to accept with relish any
amount of lard, raw dough, burned beans, or even the
flesh of carp, aged turtle, maggoty perch, muskrat, and
porcupine.
We paddled, that summer and fall, something more
than twenty-two hundred miles. It was not so much a
test of the body; the body takes care of itself at that
age. It was a test of will and imagination, and they too,
at seventeen, have a power and potency which rarely
again return to a man in like measure. I would follow
shock troops across a hundred invasion beaches before
I would repeat that youthful experience of the rivers. I
simply could not do it again. As it was, death came
closer than we realized, not once but time after time.
Undoubtedly we had pleasant days of keen delight;
but the light strokes have nearly all vanished from the
picture as my memory retains it, and I am conscious in
recollection of a mood of emotional weariness, anxiety,
and downright fear; there is a remembrance of endless
dark days of dull plodding, on and on through an
impenetrable veil of rain and forest. Mr. Hemingway can
have the camping life. When you are lost, when you are
hungry, when the rivers and woods become your enemy,
waiting for you to die, none of the senses—not even
literary—discovers pleasure. For years afterwards a visit
to the woods produced a moment of nausea.
We had overcome some thirteen hundred miles of
the physical test when we encountered our first really
serious obstacle, which was of course of a moral nature.
It was a concerted attempt of older and wiser persons in
Winnipeg, Canada, to dissuade us, “for our own good,”
from attempting the vast lake and wilderness beyond.
At the Winnipeg Canoe Club, impressively grown-up
people took us aside and described the tendency of
this body of water to develop sudden, unforeseeable
37
[in his own words]
squalls and storms, recounted the disturbing stories of
canoeing friends who had disappeared forever along
these rocky shores. As for the five hundred miles of (at
that time) practically uncharted wilderness between the
head of the lake and Hudson Bay, none of them had ever
done that by canoe, and none, we were assured, would
ever be foolish enough to try it. Neither Walter nor I
was a particularly defiant or cocky youngster, and this
offense against our will caused us many heartsick hours.
But in the preceding weeks we had been gradually
learning, though we had never objectively analyzed it,
a fundamental lesson; we learned it the hard, empiric
way. We learned that nearly all human beings get along
without exact knowledge— indeed, that they seem
to prefer inexactness, no doubt, because, to find the
precise truth of any question, no matter how ordinary or
near at hand, requires serious effort. We had discovered
that almost nobody along the way, farmer or fisherman
or camper, knew the precise nature—the currents, the
rapids, the portages, the distances from point to point—
of the very stretches of river or lake upon which they
had spent their lives and all the secrets of which they
were quite convinced they knew by heart. We learned,
in effect, to distinguish between hearsay and fact. With
feelings more of apology than confidence, we rejected
the theories, the arguments, and the conclusions of our
very well-meaning friends. When we stumbled upon a
wizened old prospector in the government map bureau
who knew part of the country we intended to traverse
and who said we could probably make it provided we
were not complete damn fools, that was all we needed
to transform hope into belief.
At the settlement of Norway House, at the northern
end of the lake, we met exactly the same kind of moral
offensive, this time of an even more serious nature.
They pointed out to us that it was already the first of
September. Our equipment, including our clothes,
was summer equipment. The rivers in those latitudes
freeze very early and very suddenly. If we knocked
a hole in our canoe or overturned and lost it in the
rapids, we would find it impossible to walk through
the impenetrable brush along the river’s edge. Precise
charts and maps existed only for the first two hundred or
so of the five hundred miles we would have to paddle,
and none was available for us. Even though we did
reach Hudson Bay at York Factory, that place had been
abandoned as a railway head, and there was no telling
how we would be able to make it back inland, along
38
the Nelson River to the rail lines, ninety miles from the
sea. It went on like this for two or three days, and at
one point, I know, there was a conference with the Royal
Canadian Mounted Police, who were responsible for
human lives in the region, to decide whether they could
or should forcibly prevent us from going on.
We had decided that we could not descend the mighty
Nelson River, which drains off Lake Winnipeg’s waters to
the sea, because it was far too bewilderingly varied in
its channels for anyone without a guide. (A guide was
something our remaining fifteen dollars would scarcely
pay for.) We could not take the old trading route of the
Hayes River, because, as I remember, of the seasonal
shallows. There was only one route remaining. This
was to descend the Nelson a few miles, branch off into
a long series of tiny lakes, some connected by channel,
others only by overhill portages, navigate the twentyfive miles of God’s Lake, descend the God’s River until
it became the Shamattawa and then the Hayes, and so
into the Bay at York Factory. The crude maps we had
with us covered only to a line halfway across God’s Lake.
Again we found the same situation we had encountered
at Winnipeg. Nobody at Norway House, white man or
Indian, had ever actually made the trip to the Bay via
God’s River. But again we found a man who believed
it could be done. He was a young Danish trapper of
clear intelligence and warm heart. He had no maps
to give us, but he had been fifty miles or so down the
length of God’s River, where he had still had a winter
cabin, unvisited for a year. He was not certain, but he
believed that the river reached the Shamattawa in a
single channel, with no insurmountable obstacles. He
was alone in his sentiment, but he thought we could do
it, assuming we were not injured or overturned in the
rapids. But he made it clear that once we were well into
the God’s River there was no turning back. We could
never remount the savage current, and walking would
be impossible until the ice froze thick—and we would
probably not last that long.
We left with an understanding that if no telegram was
received from us after three weeks had passed, our
people in Minneapolis should be informed that we were
missing, when, if my father could raise the money, a
search would presumably be organized. At daybreak,
in cold, drizzling rain, we pushed away from the wharf
at Norway House. No one was about save an elderly
Cree male who squatted under an upturned skiff on the
[in his own words]
rocks, chewed on a large bone, and regarded us with
impassivity. We fell into our accustomed rhythm of
paddling which had become an automatic reflex of the
muscles. The current moved us rapidly and the curtain
of spruce and tamarack closed around us. I had no
sensations of bravado and derring-do. I was scared and
I knew it. I was experiencing that indefinable feeling
which comes to most soldiers at some unpredictable
moment in war, the feeling of having pushed one’s
luck too far. It was our will that drove us on into this
thing, and yet it was something else too—something
akin to fear, which also has its propulsive and creative
properties. (Ten years later someone under the London
blitz—Ed Murrow, I think—said: “I have never gone
down into a shelter, because I was afraid to. I was afraid
of myself; I feared that if I did it once I could not stop
doing it.”) What I was entering upon at Norway House
was a contest with myself. I knew instinctively that if I
gave up now, no matter what the justification, it would
become easier forever afterwards to justify compromise
with any achievement.
A few days passed; the nights grew colder. We came
upon a French Canadian priest from the mission at
Island Lake, making his way by canoe in the other
direction, “going out” after five years in the bush. His
eyes were a watery blue, some of his teeth were gone,
and his beard had dirty streaks of gray. He looked
fifty and was thirty. We shot snipe and duck and got
lost. Men who have experienced varieties of lostness
tell me that the worst is to be lost on a large body of
water, when the horizon is the same in every direction
and you haven’t the slightest idea which direction
to select. They are probably right, but I would not
care again to go through a couple of back-breaking
days of stumbling, dragging a loaded canoe up one
narrow stream channel, then another, then another,
to find them all eventually become mere seepage
from the rocky ground. The stomach becomes very
undependable and you want to vomit. After a while
you would just like to sit and cry. But you drag around
and eventually, by the simple process of elimination,
you find the proper channel. Our maps proved almost
useless, and we would certainly have got lost time and
again in this series of small streams and miniature, rockbound lakes if it had not been for our good fortune to
be overtaken by a freight canoe bound for the trading
post on God’s Lake. Two Indians were taking in the
new post manager. Most young men who enter the
fur-collecting service of the Hudson’s Bay Company
come from Scotland, and they are all called Jock.
All the Cree Indians in this happy hunting ground of
the missionary have biblical names; these two were
Moses and James. We were quite welcome to trail
along behind them. We were expert canoeists by
this time, and we had little trouble staying with them
on the water, but on the half-mile-long portages,
which frequently led over ninety-degree crags, it was
a desperate business. Indians can take up to two
hundred and fifty pounds on their backs, secured with
nothing but a flat tump line around their foreheads.
And they do not walk; they run. By the time Walter
and I had transported all our gear to the far side
and thrown our aching bodies to the ground, our
traveling companions would have finished their meal
and pushed off again. In fear of getting lost again,
we would throw our things into our craft and take out
in pursuit, cramming handfuls of cold beans into our
Eric and Walt during during canoe trip.
39
[in his own words]
mouths between strokes of the paddle.
This went on for five or six days. On the morning of the day we expected to hit the lake, we lost them completely.
God’s Lake contains some five thousand spruce-covered islands, all looking exactly alike. If you can tell from hour to
hour which is island and which is the main shore, you are doing very well indeed. But we knew the approximate location
of the trading post, we had a compass, and we had learned to paddle in such exact measure that we knew precisely how
many strokes of the paddle we required to cover a mile in still water. In the darkness, we eventually glimpsed the light.
Jock had his feet up on the table when we entered, a little embarrassed. “Excuse me,” he said. “You’ve got a long way
to go on your own you know. I figured if you could get through that stretch alone we could let you try for the Bay. A lot
of people at Norway House think you are crazy bastards, you know.”
To cross the lake we used the same method of dead reckoning, logging by paddle stroke. We had one point of
reference: Elk Island, not far from the outlet to the God’s River, had recently been burned off. It was the largest island
on the lake, some twelve miles long itself. We wound in and out among the maze of smaller islands, and at noon, on
schedule, we reached this smoldering island. We worked around it all afternoon and camped on its eastern tip that
night. (We were probably the first Americans to ever see this particular place. There are millions of islands in the
Canadian lakes, but Elk Island on God’s Lake has a rather special place in my mind for the reason that some two years
after we had obtained a night of dreamless slumber on its granite ledges, a lot of other people obtained their fortunes
in the quartz gold those ledges contained. It was the biggest gold strike Canada had experienced in years. I hope
our Danish trapper friend was in on it. A village sprang up there, and no doubt the wild run down the God’s River to
Hudson Bay became a concession for excursionists—the portages, for all I know, paved with flagstone and marked with
neon lights.)
In the morning we cut straight north until we hit what we were convinced was the main shore of the lake. We skirted
about and finally noticed that the grasses on the bottom of the clear shallows were all bending in one direction. Very
shortly we were in the unmistakable current and were sucked into God’s River at its source. The sun was shining that day
and we were happy. It was the last time the sun shone, and the last time we felt happy until the whole enterprise was
over. The intervening period was and is unsurpassed in my life for sheer, concentrated misery. We had not progressed
a mile on this rushing surface before the river collapsed with a roar over a ten-foot ledge, very nearly carrying us with it.
God’s River
40
[in his own words]
Ahead, on the bend, we could see spouting white spray
that meant another waterfall. We knew we were in for a
struggle. The second sickening discovery was that the
portage trails, even in this first stretch where our Danish
advisor had traveled, were so overgrown with brush, so
cluttered with fallen trees, that the paths frequently were
impossible to find. This meant slashing away brush with
our knives until our knuckles bled, hacking at the logs
with an ax that was far too light for the job, then hoisting,
dragging, and shoving an awkward, eighteen-foot canoe.
We went through this performance innumerable times,
always in freezing rain and fog. A half-day’s labor to
accomplish a two-hundred-yard portage was a normal
requirement.
We had been warned of the time when the rains would
come, but nothing in our experience had prepared us
for this. Day and night, the drizzle did not cease for so
much as an hour. With the rain, the water we shipped
over the gunwales in the fast stretches, and the water
that seeped through the many cuts in the bottom of
the craft, our equipment sloshed about constantly, our
clothing and food were soaked through. There was
nothing to be done about it. Our blankets were equally
soaked. The woods oozed with water, every leaf held a
pond, every dead twig and log was rotten with wetness.
In order to build a fire at night we would have to stop
paddling in midafternoon, then spend two or three hours
whittling out chunks of heart wood. Not even birchbark
would burn. In our wet clothes we slept, wrapped in wet
blankets, with only the edges of our rubber ponchos
pulled over our faces. We began to notice, in the
morning, light trimmings of frost on the ponchos, and
one morning Walter beckoned me to the edge of the
river. There, in a quiet eddy, was a faint film of ice. Our
daily progress was heartbreakingly slow, and we were
becoming obsessed with the urge to get on, to get
on. We did not stop at noon any more, but ate, as we
worked, a few cold pancakes saved over from the night,
and a few beans and dried prunes. We were falling far
behind our expected schedule, and our food was giving
out. We were forced to pause for fish. One cast of the
hook, with a piece of white cloth as bait, would bring a
three-pound speckled trout in these unfished waters. I
remember Walter gripping one by the head in his teeth,
his bleeding hands too stiff with cold to hold the slimy
creature.
We passed each day in silent anxiety. We rarely spoke.
Our fear of being caught by the ice or running entirely
out of food before we reached a settlement overrode our
fear of the rapids. We took greater and greater chances.
Frequently, now, instead of getting out to reconnoiter a
stretch of rock and flying white spray, whoever was in the
stern would simply stand as we drifted in, make a quick
survey, a quick decision, and then we would drive in to
our opening. You must move at greater speed than the
current if you are to have leverage to throw your canoe
about among the rocks. We had already lost our extra
paddle, and now we shattered the tip of one of the two
remaining. We got along with it, somehow; it would have
been a day’s work to fashion a substitute, however crude.
We run into shallows and for two days waded, dragging
and lifting the canoe and its load. Once we carried the
canoe over our heads a quarter-mile along a six-inch
ledge on a sheer bank of greasy clay, twenty feet above
the water. Once, while we were crawling on our bellies
over an enormous granite boulder, slipping the floating
canoe along below us with a rope, Walter lost his grip.
He fell backwards, executed a quick flip in midair, and
landed on all fours in the bottom of the canoe without
overturning it.
One day we heard again the dull roaring the signified
a waterfall ahead. But this time it was something new:
the river had suddenly narrowed to one third its width
and plunged through a rocky gorge, corrugated into
four-foot waves. That, we could manage. But after
roaring through the gorge, the river struck, almost at
right angles, a solid wall of rock before careening into
its normal shape. We were beyond all prudence by this
time. Walter’s back and the canoe itself disappeared for
a few seconds from my sight in a white world of spray.
Dipping a paddle was like offering a torrent a toothpick.
(Have you ever heard the blood pound in your head?)
The next sight was the black wall rushing upon us. We
flayed the water, attempting to swing the canoe, did
swing it, then, together, at the same instant, flung up the
paddle blades as if they were lances, and absorbed the
numbing shock in our arms and shoulders.
The river reached junction with a creek which poured in
at the right hand. This should have been the location
of the Dane’s cabin. We searched through a morass of
blackened, falling spruce and sodden ash. Either the fire
that had obviously swept through the area some weeks
before had eliminated every log of the cabin, or this was
not the place, and we were very far, perhaps fatally far,
41
[in his own words]
behind schedule. We did not speak that day or evening;
we were reaching a danger point of the spirit, when
something was certain to happen. Readers who have
experienced a long period in the wilderness with only
one other companion, no matter how intimate a friend,
will have been waiting for this. The pattern is a common
one. Walter and I had different natures; he was more
healthily extrovert than I, and his emotions demanded
a physical outlet. I would simply stifle mine and brood.
He had French blood and I Norwegian, and perhaps that
helps explain why my anger could be suppressed and his
could not. As always, in these situations, a trifle becomes
the occasion for the explosion, though the causes are far
more complex. We had reached that point where one
feels the sick bitterness in his heart even before he is fully
awake in the morning.
The explosion came one morning after our profound
disappointment at missing the cabin of the Dane. His first
words to me in twenty-four hours were: “Why don’t you
wash that goddam pan the way it ought to be washed?”
I forgot mine to him. He was walking toward me, and
I knew this was it. When I reach a physical crisis, there
is always a brief moment of panic succeeded by a cold
period of abnormal mental clarity. I was conscious, not of
his doubled fists, but of the forest, the river, the distance.
This would be the end. I said: “Wait until we get out
of here.” But in a moment we were hammering and
clawing, ripping one another’s sodden clothing, rolling
and kicking through the ashes of the campfire. Walter
had the deep chest and heavy arms of an athlete, but I
was taller and broader, and three months of exertion had
done unsuspected things to my thin muscles. Neither
of us could manage to defeat the other, which saved the
situation, since the loser would very probably have been
killed. We lay a long time, in the drizzling rain, quite
spent. I began to break up; I thought about my mother,
started to cry inside, and said over and over again to
myself: “I’m too young to die.” Eventually, our flesh
became chilled, we entered the canoe, avoiding each
other’s eyes.
Within eight hours we overtook the first human being we
had seen for two weeks, a Cree family in a freight canoe;
within nine we were upon the Shamattawa; within ten
hours we were eating roasted duck before a great fire
in a temporary trading shack, just opened by two young
Scotsmen from York Factory. Rolled in dry blankets before
the fire, the two of us discussed with excitement the
42
approaching end of our trip. We were fast friends; we
were less than twenty.
Having received bad advice—or, what was more likely,
having misunderstood—we ran, on the wrong side, the
two-mile-long Shamattawa Rapid, of local fame. Two
Indians had just died in it, on the proper side. There
was one bad moment when the canoe lodged on an
underwater ledge and began, quite audibly, to crack
apart. The forests fell away, we reached the wide Hayes
River, tried to sleep on a bank of wet clay, which was
exactly like reclining on a cake of ice, gave it up, and
gulping six prunes and three raw potatoes, almost the
last of our provisions, we set out in pitch darkness. We
paddled, without pause, nearly sixty miles that day. We
smelled the sea all afternoon, struggled with a mysterious
force which we did not realize was the incoming tide,
and at darkness came abreast of the low huddle of white
buildings which is the old trading establishment of the
Hudson’s Bay Company. A schooner rode at anchor. It
was the first time I had ever seen the ocean.
Factor Harding of York Factory was a warm host and wise
counselor. For weeks he had been keeping our mail,
including a check for fifty dollars from the Minneapolis
newspaper, wondering who we were and from what point
of the compass we were expected to materialize. He
was very decently composed and signed a testimonial to
the effect that we had indeed reached York Factory by
canoe. He also gave us thirty dollars for the worthless
canoe, inasmuch as we would need cash for guides
to take us over to Port Nelson, on the far side of the
Nelson River, which entered the sea here, just around the
headlands. An Englishman was present, Colonel Reid,
an official of the Company, who had just arrived on the
schooner from London. I had never seen an Englishman
before. He appeared, with his gray tweed sports clothing
and pipe exactly as the movies had taught me to expect
an Englishman to appear. His accent, also, was exactly
right. He said: “Minneapolis? Where the deuce is
Minneapolis?” He said: “Twenty-two hundred miles by
canoe? But what on earth for?”
Being seventeen, the world fascinated me just the way it
was, and I accepted it the way it was. The Cree Indians
in these sprawling little settlements interested me as a
people, as Persons. I certainly thought of this immense
northern region as “their country,” and if they were in
rags, if their cabins and tepees were cesspools of stench
[in his own words]
and many of the Indians themselves rotten with disease,
why, that was just the way they were. They must like it that
way, it must be due to the charming laziness of their idyllic
forest life. I thought the “bishops” and “deacons” brave
self-sacrificing men to come to these lost places and
teach the natives to mouth the words and chants of rituals
which would of course preserve their immortal souls. It
never occurred to me that there was a chain of causation
and purpose uniting the deacons, the red-coated police,
and Colonel Reid in one system, and that the nexus was
the stack of mink, otter, and beaver skins in the wooden
warehouse. When I observed Colonel Reid strolling
straight through a group of Indians on the boardwalk,
without the slightest hesitation in his deliberate stride,
without the faintest suggestion in his countenance that
he was aware of their existence, it left an impression
somewhere in the back of my mind—but I did not know
what I was really seeing, what I was to see later in many
parts of the world. I had never heard of Imperialism. I did
not know there were whole races and classes of people
living in the relationship of master and slave and that this
coexistence conditioned the members of each group in
their very bodies, the working of the eyes, the carrying
of the shoulders, the timbre of the voice box, the whole
interfunctioning of the nervous system.
With two Indian guides provided by Harding we
remounted the Hayes a few miles in a freight canoe, then
struck across the five-mile neck of land, floundering in the
muskeg morass to our knees for most of the hike, in the
course of which Walter badly wrenched a leg. We were
paying the guides; had we been born in the milieu of
Colonel Reid, we would simply have ordered the guides
to take Walter’s pack and slow down their killing pace.
That never occurred to us. We were the strangers, in
their land, and it was a point of honor and duty to live
up to their standards. By the time we had traversed the
turbulent four-mile width of the Nelson River estuary
in another canoe and began the walk against driving
rain into the settlement, each step for Walter was an
agony. We carried a letter from Harding to the Mounted
Police of Port Nelson, the only white men who lived in
this abandoned railroad terminal of scraggly shacks and
rusted machinery. The policemen were away on a hunting
trip. There was no possibility, given Walter’s condition,
of our being able to walk ninety miles up the disused
roadbed to the Hudson Bay Railway. A return to York
Factory would serve no purpose. We found, at length, an
evil-looking half-breed who was going “up to steel” with a
compatriot, in two motor-driven canoes. It was a three-day
trip. There was a heavy snowfall. There were many hours
of poling up through the rapids, of “tracking” the heavy
canoes by rope and pole from the shoreline. Walter’s leg
grew worse, and he subsided into silent suffering. I lost the
heels from my rotted boots and drove a boot nail deeply
into my foot during a long stretch of tracking when it was
impossible to halt.
For several days we rested in the shack of a lonely old
Swede whose duty it was to patrol and watch one section
of the rail line. He bathed and bound our injuries while we
went through his library, which consisted of the Bible, the
Essays of Emerson, and several small blue pamphlets on
healthy sex relations. He wept a little when we climbed
aboard the next freight train to come through from
Churchill, and wrote to us for months thereafter.
One long night of blinding snow we huddled on the tender
of a freight locomotive as it whistled and clanked through
the Saskatchewan forests. There were two roustabouts
lying beside us that night, and when we reached our
destination at dawn we had to hand them down from
their tender as you would a frozen log. To a pockmarked
Chinese we paid fifty cents for fried eggs and a bed, and
at noon we were roughly shaken awake by a broad-faced
Chinese girl who informed us other voyagers were waiting
for the bed. She remained in the room, leaning on a mop,
observing us with quiet deliberation as we dressed. A
highway reached to this point, hitchhiking was easy and
pleasant, and thus we went home.
A boy does not grow up so imperceptibly that there are
not sudden moments when he is acutely conscious of
change within him. I walked, carrying my pack and paddle,
toward my father’s house, past the castellated red-brick
high school, scattering the drifts of dry autumn leaves with
my broken boots. The boys and the girls on the sidewalk
seemed unprecedentedly young.
We had paddled a canoe twenty-two
hundred miles, had survived, and had
proved nothing except that we could paddle
a canoe twenty-two hundred miles, a capacity
of extraordinarily small value for the future. My chief return
on this investment, outside of a fleeting local notoriety
which got me a job on a newspaper—as office boy—was
that for several months thereafter, until sedentary habits
softened my flesh, my older brother could not lick me.
43
[in his own words]
The Taming
of a Dream
By George Scialabba
Author of What Are Intellectuals Good For?
Saints are usually killed by their own people.
-Eric Sevareid
In Democratic Vistas (1867), his immortal paean to American
promise, Walt Whitman celebrated an ideal to which, he claimed,
the American West at least sometimes approximated:
I can conceive a community, to-day and here, in which, on a
sufficient scale, the perfect personalities, without noise, meet; say
in some pleasant western settlement or town, where a couple of
hundred best men and women, of ordinary worldly status, have by
luck been drawn together, with nothing extra of genius or wealth,
but virtuous, chaste, industrious, cheerful, resolute, friendly and
devout. I can conceive such a community organized in running
order, powers judiciously delegated — farming, building, trade,
courts, mails, schools, elections, all attended to; and then the rest
of life, the main thing, freely branching and blossoming in each
individual, and bearing golden fruit. I can see there, in every young
and old man, after his kind, and in every woman after hers, a true
personality, develop’d, exercised proportionately in body, mind,
and spirit. I can imagine this case as one not necessarily rare or
difficult, but in buoyant accordance with the municipal and general
requirements of our times. And I can realize in it the culmination of
something better than any stereotyped eclat of history or poems.
Perhaps, unsung, undramatized, unput in essays or biographies
— perhaps even some such community already exists, in Ohio,
Illinois, Missouri, or somewhere, practically fulfilling itself, and thus
outvying, in cheapest vulgar life, all that has been hitherto shown in
best ideal pictures.
44
Riding the rails, 1933.
[in his own words]
45
[in his own words]
... and we
seemed to
be alone,
on the
summit of
the world.
In the middle of the next century, a son of one of those Western communities looked back on his
boyhood and remembered something not unlike what Whitman had foreseen:
We were a true democracy in that huddled community of painted boards. … There were, of course,
differences in degree of material wealth. There were what was always referred to as the “well-to-do,”
and we had a few families “on the other side of the tracks.” No doubt there was envy at times and
small bitternesses here and there. But no man lived in fear of another. No man had the power to
direct another to vote this way or that. No impenetrable combine could foist a candidate upon the
people if they did not wish, and it would have been quite impossible to rig an election and get away
with it. This was an agrarian democracy, which meant there was no concentration of capital goods,
which meant in turn, since we had no all-powerful landlords, that no class society based on birth
or privilege had a chance to develop. … No virtue was made of poverty … but to be poor was no
disgrace.
Later I read all the exalting literature of the great struggle for a classless society … It occurred to me
then that what men wanted was Velva, on a national, on a world, scale. For the thing was already
achieved, in miniature, out there, in a thousand miniatures scattered along the rivers and highways
of all the West and Middle West. I was to hear [others] speak with a certain contempt of our Middle
West … its dullness, its bedrock of intolerance. [But] we had, in those severely limited places, an
intolerance also of snobbery, of callousness, of crookedness, of men who kicked other men around.
The working of democracy is boring, most of the time, and dull compared with other systems, but
that is a small price to pay for so great a thing.
The rest of Eric Sevareid’s splendid memoir, Not So Wild a Dream, bears the impress of this noble
prairie populism. The incidents of his early life are set down with a wry but still glowing moral fervor:
the abject poverty of the despoiled Cree Indians he encountered on his astonishing 2200-mile canoe
trip with a high-school friend; the rough-and-ready egalitarianism of mine scavengers in the Sierra
Nevada and hobos on the railroad boxcars he bummed back to the Midwest; his shocked discovery
as a cub reporter that “nearly all men working in a large American concern did their daily work under
the tyranny of fear”; the camaraderie of the undergraduate radicals in the “Jacobin Club” at the
University of Minnesota; the young Sevareid’s disillusion when administrators’ machinations cost
him the coveted editorship of the college newspaper. Later in the book, his indignation over the
treatment of Southern Negroes and his anguish over victorious America’s apparent preference for
dealing with former collaborators rather than leftist partisans are eloquently rendered.
Though the teeming memoir was dashed off in six months – by a mere thirty-three year-old – it did
not lack literary qualities. The New Yorker’s A.J. Liebling, whose war writings have been collected
in a Library of America volume, is usually considered the most accomplished of World War II
correspondents. But compared with Sevareid’s taut narrative, pulsing with moral drama, psychological
insight, and colorful incident, Liebling’s prose seems mannered, too sly by half. Which is not to say
that Sevareid was incapable of lyricism or wit. En route to China, his transport plane went down.
Sevareid and most of the other passengers and crew managed to parachute. Here is his description
of their rescue, after twelve days in the Burmese jungle, by a British official and a party of natives:
They came as the light was dimming away. The mist was spread below us, and we seemed to be
alone, on the summit of the world. A low chanting sound came from beneath the cloud layer, growing
louder and louder until it seemed that a subterranean forest of voices was rising to engulf us. Dark,
46
[in his own words]
glistening bodies appeared from the ravine, more and more of them, flooding among us and surrounding our space
of habitation. A tall, slim young man wearing a halo of shining fair hair, carrying the mystery of civilization in his casual
posture and soft blue eyes, materialized from the void. He was standing at our gate, smiling gently, like a stranger in
the countryside, out for a stroll and dropping in with an air almost of apology. He was garbed in a soft blue polo shirt,
blue shorts, and low walking shoes. His legs were bronzed and firm. From his smiling lips drooped a long cigarette
holder. He was Philip Adams, the Sahib of Mokokchung, king of these dark and savage hills.
Left to right: Edward Murrow, Charles Collingswood, Eric Sevareid.
After a short stay in India and a longer stay in China, he reported in Not So Wild a Dream, his “basic beliefs in the
liberal approaches were deeply shaken.” Were the democratic ideals he revered of any use in this hungry, crowded
half of the world? Might the coercive methods of Communism be, in these desperate circumstances, a lesser evil? He
confronted these questions sensitively and fearlessly:
47
[in his own words]
For the present I find myself divided, not only between
political liberalism and cultural conservatism, but I
find myself politically liberal on domestic affairs and
increasingly conservative on foreign affairs.
The great aim of freedom in security for the individual seemed to me universal and eternally right. As for the methods,
however, it seemed clear that there was a time-space equation involved which could not be ignored. … Half the
human race was barefoot, filthy, sick, and worried from morning till night, from birth until death, over no other
problem than simply finding food for their bellies. The truth was that, no matter how ruthless the effort might be,
nothing could be worse than the present condition. And maybe in ten years, or twenty, or fifty, these hundreds of
millions would be able to live, to be clean and whole, to rise above their animal state and walk as men. True, there
was danger that the means would become the end. But it seemed to me that the risk was worth the taking.
In retrospect, a question occurs to anyone pondering twentieth-century American history: why did such openness of
mind and generosity of spirit as this so rarely find expression in the new mass media? Even Sevareid himself seldom
if ever in his broadcasting career matched the admirable blend of discrimination and passion that makes Not So Wild
a Dream an inspiration, even now. With honorable exceptions, he seemed in his broadcasts to have exchanged the
searching critical spirit of his first mentor, Edward R. Murrow, for the bland centrism of Walter Lippmann and James
Reston. Like the latter, he became an insider, his perspectives and values fatally shaped by what they all regularly,
knowingly referred to as “the mood here in Washington.”
The price of respectability in American public discourse has always been an unwillingness to question the good
intentions of US foreign policy. Of course everyone agrees that the U.S. has made mistakes abroad, out of naivete,
impatience, or short-sightedness. But to deny that American international behavior is fundamentally idealistic, is
sincerely devoted to spreading democracy and freedom everywhere, without regard to the commercial or strategic
interests of those who wield domestic power in the United States—this is heresy. It is anti-American, irresponsible,
beyond the pale.
Sevareid largely accepted this conventional wisdom. Like Lippmann and Reston, he was a Cold War liberal. He scoffed
at “the mea culpa open letters one is asked to sign by high-minded American professors deploring the principle of
the Cuban invasion attempt”—the principle, that is, that the U.S. has every right to disregard international law and
the UN Charter. (Alas, if more people had joined back then in deploring that “principle,” even graver US crimes
in Vietnam and Iraq might have been prevented.) He reassured nervous Brazilians that “we have no designs on
Latin America save its stability and security”—this less than a decade after the U.S. shocked all of Latin America
by organizing the overthrow of the newly elected reformist government of Guatemala and two years before the
U.S. supported a military coup in Brazil that that imposed a harsh right-wing dictatorship on that country. He urged
“African nationalists” to “abandon their comfortable hatreds” and admit that “the British and the French … truly are
moving out of Africa, truly do seek free and viable African states”—this just four years after the British and French
invaded Suez and a year before the U.S. and Belgium organized the murder of Patrice Lumumba and the breakup of
the Congo. He lamented that “the generous humanitarian American formula for saving underdeveloped countries
from Communist upheaval”—a formula that in fact included frequent armed intervention, CIA subversion, and steady
support for anti-democratic military commanders —“cannot work in a good many such countries” and professed
himself “impatient” with the frivolous notion that we might succeed better abroad through “more exemplary conduct
at home … and by ceasing to support the local dictators.” Joseph Alsop or William F. Buckley, Jr., could not have put
it better.
It is not what one would have expected from the former doyen of the Jacobin Club. What happened? Introducing his
major collection, This Is Eric Sevareid, he faced this question. “For the present I find myself divided, not only between
political liberalism and cultural conservatism, but I find myself politically liberal on domestic affairs and increasingly
48
conservative on foreign affairs.” He had, he suggested, been naïve. Time and travel had taught him that Communism was
more dangerous and the Third World more corrupt than he and other left-liberals had suspected. If this was apostasy, it
was honestly come by and modestly asserted. He did not, at least, become a neoconservative.
Another remark in that Introduction also revealed that he’d come a long way from Velva. “It has become harder to
believe that if only the people are given the truth, they will do the right thing, that some kind of folk instinct is better than
expertise and aristocracy of wisdom and taste.” This is rank Lippmannism. Surely Sevareid had spent too much time in
Washington, among the “experts” who managed to squander, in the second half of the twentieth century and the first
decade of the twenty-first, so much of this country’s blood, wealth, and reputation.
In any case, whether “the people are given the truth” was not up to Sevareid, as he knew all too well. Raymond Schroth’s
biography tells of a confrontation between Sevareid and CBS chief William Paley in 1956 over a broadcast criticizing the
State Department, which Paley ordered killed.
The two men sat there across from one another. … Paley had, as usual, the upper hand. … Despondent, Sevareid broke
the silence. “Maybe I’ve been too long with CBS.” Paley just sat there silently looking at him – a signal that, yes, it was
time for Eric Sevareid to resign. But he didn’t.
Eric Sevareid, 1947
Two years later, Paley again demonstrated his unfitness for his position by terminating Edward R. Murrow’s great series
See It Now, telling Murrow: “I don’t want this constant stomach-ache every time you do a controversial subject.” “It goes
with the job,” protested Murrow, who apparently hadn’t learned that the job of publishers and media executives is to
please advertisers and shareholders, not to see that “the people are given the truth.” It’s a pity that Murrow and Sevareid,
with their extraordinary talents, had to spend so much of their professional lives working for someone with a weak
stomach. But that’s journalism, then and now.
49
[fierce prairie populism]
The Land That
Shaped the
Thinking
of Eric
Sevareid
By Ray Penn
With breathtaking rapidity, we are destroying all
that was lovely to look at and turning America into
a prison house of the spirit.
-Eric Sevareid
After traveling the world to interview people living
under various forms of government, Eric Sevareid reached
this conclusion: “What men [in other countries] really
wanted was Velva, North Dakota.”
When Sevareid sought to explain why American journalists
were so aggressive in seeking “the unornamented truth”
from world leaders while other journalists “approached
them with timid genuflection” he pointed to the fact that
American journalists had their “beginnings in a hundred
Velvas,” places where pretentious people were not
respected. Unlike those whose veneration of smaller places
and simpler times reached no deeper than the level of
nostalgia—an emotion that rarely motivates a person to
50
change the future—Sevareid repeatedly argued that the
health of small towns directly affected the health of a nation.
He argued that to ignore the values learned in the hundreds
of Velvas across the nation would place the American spirit in
peril.
When others decried rural towns as places where
imagination was suffocated by the thin air of ignorance and
strangled by a rigid anti-intellectualism, Sevareid argued
that “small towns are not stagnant plants. . . but seedbeds,
ceaselessly renewing themselves, their seed constantly
renewing the nation. They are not quiet, fixed and static but
vital as life itself, pulsating with the lives that come to them
and the lives they give away.”
Sevareid was a philosopher, a practical philosopher. He
would not have had the patience to interview Immanuel
Kant or Rene Descartes. He would have been frustrated by
[fierce prairie populism]
their esoteric ways. He would have delighted, however, in the
opportunity to interview Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius. For they
were practical philosophers and their self-appointed aim to
apply deep wisdom to everyday life was exactly the mission
Sevareid took upon himself.
The difference between an esoteric philosopher and a
practical philosopher is easy to explain. I keep a marble
doorknob on my desk as a reminder of my days spent working
in my grandmother’s country store. An esoteric philosopher
would look at that doorknob and ponder whether reason and
sense impressions make it possible or impossible to know if
such a doorknob really exists. A practical philosopher would
look at that doorknob and note that it expresses true wisdom:
much of our lives is shaped by the doorknobs
we turn and the doorknobs we don’t turn.
Sevareid would agree that if a philosopher can’t tell you what
doorknobs to turn, then that philosopher is a poor one.
Although Sevareid left Velva, Velva never left him. The town
and the land around it shaped the way he thought. In fact,
I believe that if Sevareid had had his way, every American
would have been cycled through Velva for a year to wash
away the dirt of modernity and be tutored in the ways of
true democracy.
Let us first think about the ways North Dakota shaped
the way he thought. When you live in a place where so
much of the sky meets so much of the land, you cannot
help but carry a hunger for taking the long view of things
wherever you go. When all ground is in the foreground
and the background is the sky itself, you cannot focus
narrowly on any single event. Sevareid fueled each radio
or TV broadcast with an innate desire to relate human life
to the “big sky” forces bearing down upon it. Just as wind
patterns, rainfall, and days of sunshine determine much
of farm life, so the shifting winds of ideas and the shifting
51
[fierce prairie populism]
What men [in other
countries] really
wanted was Velva,
North Dakota.
actions of politicians determine much of American life.
Sevareid was parodied as “Eric Severalsides.” But if you are
continually exposed to enough space to explore around the
town you live in, seeing it not only from several sides but
seeing those sides against the background of a changing
sky, that experience can only make you intuitively sense any
truth must be a multifaceted truth.
If you farm or just hang around the edges of farming, you
absorb a form of hopefulness that has suffered enough
never to be grandiose but has been proved right enough
never to be fatalistic. Sevareid expressed this by noting
that he was by nature “pessimistic about tomorrow but
optimistic about the day after tomorrow.”
Returning to Velva meant remembering days in which “men
lived so close to God’s will in those prairie places.” It was
“a trial of the human spirit just to live there and a triumph
of faith and fortitude for those who stayed on through the
terrible blasting summer winds… and through the frozen
darkness of the winters when the deathly mourn of the
coyote seemed at times the only signal of life.”
As a boy Sevareid was surrounded by farmers who,
regardless of the type of crop they had just raised, talked
in hush tones about “tomorrow and tomorrow.” The
hopefulness of a farmer is fed by several tributaries: the
tributary of sheer endurance (a spirit of just doing what has
to be done), the tributary of duty (someone must feed the
52
nation), and the tributary of reverence (some force in the
soil and perhaps beyond the soil is more in favor of life and
growth than death and decay).
Sevareid was born into a time and place where one’s sense
of timeliness was shaped by daylight and darkness. Being
“on time” did not require strapping artificial time on your
wrist; it simply meant looking around for the rising of the
sun or the falling of darkness. Because of this Sevareid often
railed at the soul-sapping pace of city life. He no doubt
would have agreed with Carl Jung who is reported to have
said: “business is not of the devil; it is the devil!” This is
confirmed by his quoting the longshoreman Eric Hoffer that
“people in a hurry can neither grow nor decay; they are
preserved in a state of perpetual puerility.”
If living today, Sevareid would note that it is not hard
to find the cause of road rage. When a person lives in a
nanosecond world for eight hours and then brings this
sense of time to his or her commute home, the lack of sync
between these “time zones” produces rage.
North Dakota in Sevareid’s boyhood was very much like
my boyhood on the prairie of Illinois. There was so much
unoccupied space, a boy could escape the confines of the
house and find a place to think great thoughts without
having to explain to anyone what you were thinking about.
There was no escape from solitude except through books
which is basically an experience of guided solitude.
[fierce prairie populism]
For much of his life Sevareid hungered for more space. He
noted that “space is the key to it all; I think most Americans
are slowly suffocating for want of space whether they are
aware of it or not. . .” He was speaking from personal
experience when he wrote that “millions of us just don’t
thrive, in spirit or in flesh, in the big city.” He writes this of
the people of Velva: “people [there] are able to draw at
least a little apart from one another. In drawing apart, they
gave their best human instincts room for expansion.”
What makes Sevareid’s veneration of nature unique is that
he directly linked its preservation to the health of the human
soul. If you define the soul as I do — the consciousness of
everything that is real — then disease in the soul causes
you live in an unreal world, a distorted world that has lacks
depth and vastness. Sevareid, long before he interviewed
Rachel Carson, could see this link between environment
and soul. But it was the larger link between small-town
living and the health of our nation’s spirit, the vitality of our
villages and the vitality of our democracy, that Sevareid
made more clearly than any other practical philosopher.
Let us turn now to his basic argument. His argument that
the health of the Velvas of this country affects directly the
spirit of democracy is made in a single sentence. He writes:
“democracy rests on social discipline, which in turn rests
upon personal discipline—passions checked, hard words
withheld, civic tasks accepted, work well done, accounting
honestly rendered.”
In a small town it is not only possible for an ordinary person
to hold public office but it is necessary. Sevareid crafted a
definition of democracy that keeps the linkage between
rights and responsibilities in place. He slightly modified a
definition that came from an interview he did with Robert
Frost. Sevareid defines democracy as “feeling like oneself
in harness.” In his mind democracy encourages freedom
that is possible within the boundaries of duty but does not
encourage the use of freedom to escape from duty.
It was in Velva that he saw firsthand the truth about helping
others: the closer people are to a problem, the greater their
generosity. He wrote: “Human nature is everywhere the
same. He who is not forced to help his neighbor . . .will give
him not only help but his true good will as well. When the
citizens of Velva saw the need for health care, they not only
raised money to bring two doctors to the community but
also built them houses.”
It is in small-town life that Sevareid found the key to the
makeup of true heroes. He wrote: “I had always had a kind
of reverence for brilliance, eloquence and physical bravery;
I have come to have even more for that quality the Romans
called gravitas—patience, stamina, weight of judgment. This
is the essential quality of the truly strong, our preservers.”
I have often found it better to leave readers with the
companionship of good questions than sitting under
the tyranny of simplistic conclusions. Certainly the major
question is: does the withering of rural America mean the
withering of the American spirit? Or, cast another way, if
we could revitalize rural life, would a revitalization of the
American spirit follow?
Other questions abound. If not everyone can be recycled
through Velva, how do we create a Velva-like experience
for children; how do we help them see democracy being
done by average people? How do we place children in
the wideness of nature and encourage them to befriend
solitude?
How do we bring practical wisdom to children when they
have acclimated to think that anything new is automatically
better than that which has stood the test of time? How do
we encourage the value of self discipline in a world where
people live under the banner of maximum returns for
minimum work? How do we encourage a bit of Scandinavian
reserve in a world where harsh words are never withheld and
passions are never blocked? Perhaps the ultimate question
for us is Sevareid’s ultimate question for himself: how do we
awaken the world to the fact that what people really want is
Velva?
Ray Penn is John Wesley Hill professor of Philosophy, Religion
and Communication Arts at Lincoln Memorial University,
Harrogate, Tennessee. He has written a serious of essays on
growing up in the Midwest called Bless, O Lord, This Fool and
is seeking a publisher.
53
[fierce prairie populism]
The most distinguished hallmark of the American society is
and always has been change.
-Eric Sevareid
Eric Sevareid’s North Dakota connections are well known. His
most public testimony to this fact is found in a 1946 memoir, Not So
Wild a Dream, a 1956 Collier’s magazine article entitled “You Can
Go Home Again,” and a 1988 public television program based on
the earlier memoir. In all three accounts, Sevareid’s hometown of
Velva is portrayed as a wonderful place and a model of an egalitarian
community. In his memoir and in the script of the television program,
Sevareid writes:
But the Collier’s article perhaps offers a more realistic portrayal
of Velva. Like Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous essay on the
significance of the frontier in explaining American history, “You Can
Go Home Again” warrants re-reading, and I have often assigned it
to students in classes on the twentieth-century West and the Great
Plains. In it, Sevareid tells the lives of real people, contrasts his
recollections with the present (circa 1955), realistically accounts for
why people leave the small towns and countryside, and never is
condescending to the culture from which he came. In its own way,
it is a classic. Yet this insightful reminiscence overlooks some key
historical developments that qualify Sevareid’s version of a small-town
utopia —developments which, if included, suggest a more complex
history for Velva, McHenry County (where Velva is located), and North
Dakota.
Velva was not an “island community” isolated from the larger
world. The wheat that dominated the community and region tied
them to this larger world of economy, culture and politics. Velva
was in the orbit of Minot and the rural political culture of McHenry
County, and that meant it was not immune or indifferent to the
political radicalism that emerged in the early twentieth century and
came to dominate North Dakota politics in the World War I era and
immediate after. Sevareid’s hometown witnessed and participated
54
Eric Sevareid, 1980
Later, I read all the exalting literature of the great struggle for a
classless society; later, I watched at first hand its manifestations in
several countries. It occurred to me then that what men wanted was
Velva, on a national, on a world, scale. For the thing was already
achieved, in miniature, out there, in a thousand miniatures scattered
along the rivers and highways of all the West and Middle West.
[fierce prairie populism]
in these insurgencies, and some of the participants were friends
and acquaintances of the Sevareid families. Such developments,
however, explain the North Dakota that Eric Sevareid never knew.
The
North Dakota
Eric Sevareid
Never Knew
By William C. Pratt
Velva and McHenry County were not a classless society in the
1910–1925 era when the Sevareids lived there. Local farmers
resented the grain trade and railroads that set prices and rates
that they felt were discriminatory and unfair. As a remedy, they
joined a farm organization, the American Society of Equity, and
encouraged the formation of co-operatives in Velva and other
locales in the county. By 1917, Equity claimed 200 members locally.
A key figure in this movement was A. W. Ditmer, the father of the
local constable Sevareid describes in his 1956 Collier’s article. (The
younger Ditmer actually was Velva’s police chief, not the constable.)
Some of Equity’s supporters, including Ditmer, believed that bigger
changes were needed, and they enlisted in the Socialist Party in
the 1911–12 era. Realistically, Socialists never made a big splash
politically in Velva and McHenry County— certainly not like in Minot,
where earlier they had elected a mayor, or in Williams County,
where they named the sheriff in three consecutive elections. But
a rural district south of Velva had a Socialist school board in 1912,
and Velva itself opted for a Socialist councilman later that year. The
secretary of the party local in this era was Oscar Anderson, a jeweler
with whom Sevareid visited when he returned to Velva in 1955. In
1914, Sevareid’s home town was the site of a well-publicized debate
between a local Socialist farmer and a minister addressing the
proposition: “Resolved, That there is more Christianity in Socialism
than there is in the Church movement today.” The following year,
Eugene Debs addressed a crowd of more than 400 in Velva at the
party’s annual picnic. Debs had been the Socialist presidential
candidate in 1912, when he attracted almost 6 percent of the vote
nationally and carried three precincts in McHenry County. (The
same year, Sevareid’s father was an unsuccessful Democratic
candidate for the state senate.)
But the most important political insurgency locally and statewide
in this era was the Nonpartisan League (NPL), a topic Sevareid
barely mentions in any of his written accounts. The only time
the organization is mentioned is when he refers to Dr. “Duff”
Aaker, a local iconoclastic doctor, who “could denounce the
Republican party and vote Nonpartisan League—heresy among the
businessmen—and get away with it.” A farmers’ movement, the
NPL dominated North Dakota politics between 1916 and 1921, and
McHenry County was in the thick of this story from the beginning.
The initial organizing of the NPL took place in Margaret Township
55
[fierce prairie populism]
in adjoining Ward County. Probably the first county in the state,
however, to be fully organized was McHenry. While this recruitment
drive began in the northern section of the county, it quickly spread to
other parts.
McHenry County proved to be a strong NPL county, and Equity
members and former Socialists like Ditmer and Oscar Anderson
backed the new cause, but so did many non-Socialists. The League
had strong support in the rural districts. On the other hand,
Sevareid’s father stood with NPL opponents and in 1921 signed a
petition for the recall of League governor Lynn Frazier. That year,
Frazier and other key NPL officials were recalled. North Dakota was a
very polarized state in this era, one which journalist Mike Jacobs later
refers to as “an era of class consciousness.”
Yet nowhere in Sevareid’s written work on his North Dakota
background does he acknowledge such controversy. Perhaps, one
might suggest, he was very young at the time, just a kid, while these
events unfolded. He certainly could not be expected to recall a
debate between a Socialist farmer and a clergyman or a speech by
Eugene Debs when he was two and three years old, and perhaps the
debates over the NPL program and the 1921 recall election made
little or no impression upon him as well.
But by the 1930s, when Sevareid was a student at the University
of Minnesota and later a reporter for the Minneapolis Journal, he
was a great admirer of the state’s Farmer-Labor governor, Floyd B.
Olson. In his published memoir, he writes: “Floyd B. Olson . . . a
towering, fearless, extraordinarily able man. . . . He was our particular
hero.” To Sevareid, Olson was the the product of “a long third party
tradition,” which included Charles Lindbergh, Sr., another figure he
respected. What he does not mention in this discussion, however,
is that the NPL was an important part of the background of the
Minnesota Farmer-Labor movement. In fact, the party began as a
coalition between the NPL and organized labor. The episode that
attracted Sevareid to the senior Lindbergh is when he sought the
1918 Republican gubernatorial nomination as the NPL candidate. At
that time, there was no real Farmer-Labor Party.
Again, one might suggest that Sevareid had not studied up on the
56
Eric Sevareid, 1952, visiting with his early mentor, Bill Frances of the Velva Journal.
The NPL approach was not to form a third party, but to work through
the primaries of the major political parties. In North Dakota, as a
practical matter, this meant working through the Republican party,
by obtaining nomination of candidates pledged to its platform.
Espousing issues such as a state grain elevator, a state mill, state hail
insurance and a state bank, the League met with great success at the
ballot box, and was able to enact its basic program by 1919.
[fierce prairie populism]
origins of the Farmer-Labor movement while a college student;
rather, he and others had been attracted by the contemporary
political appeal of Floyd Olson, whom he felt “was almost certainly
America’s greatest political orator of that time, not excepting
Franklin Roosevelt.” But in his memoir, Not So Wild a Dream, he
writes of an episode after being fired at the Minneapolis Journal: “I
buried myself in the musty files of the state library for weeks, trying to
piece together the history of the third party revolt in the Northwest.
. . .” If he did in fact spend weeks studying this topic, it is difficult
to imagine that such sources left out the role of the NPL. At one
point Sevareid writes: “Minnesota to be sure is an exceptional state,
politically speaking.” But how could he not know that his home
state of North Dakota also was “an exceptional state, politically
speaking?” The son of a banker, did he not know of the Bank of
North Dakota, the only state-owned and-operated bank in the
country?
Velva (not to mention
McHenry County) for
Sevareid was not a topic
for historical research,
but the source of
boyhood memories of
home and belonging.
It may be that he forgot or simply never knew of the extent of
insurgent efforts in his native territory. (In regard to his 1946 memoir,
he writes: “I was working almost entirely from memory, with few
notes or diaries. . . .”) But whatever the case, this gap illuminates the
difference between journalistic reminiscence and history. Memory,
of course, is selective, and the purpose of recollection often molds
what is recalled. Sevareid’s article in Collier’s, for example, brilliant as
it may be, was written to treat the theme of leaving home and what
it might mean to return years later. Velva (not to mention McHenry
County) for Sevareid was not a topic for historical research, but the
source of boyhood memories of home and belonging. Perhaps his
banker father had commented at the dinner table about the Socialist
or NPL predilections of neighbors and acquaintances. But whether
or not he did, such topics are not found in Sevareid’s account. They
should caution us about reminiscence, no matter how prominent
the author, and encourage us to dig deeper and wider in our studies
of small-town and rural communities. Sevareid’s writings on his
North Dakota background, though selective, are insightful about
small-town life and the changes that occurred by the mid-twentieth
century. They tell that part of the story very well, yet at the same time
they overlook developments that helped distinguish North Dakota’s
twentieth-century history from that of the rest of the country.
William C. Pratt is professor of history at the University of Nebraska
at Omaha and a trustee of the Nebraska State Historical Society.
He has published three articles in North Dakota History and serves
on its editorial advisory board. In the spring of 2000, he was the
Distinguished Fulbright Lecturer in American History at Moscow State
University, and in the spring of 2007, he was a Senior Fulbright Lecturer
in American Studies at the University of Warsaw.
57
[eric sevareid legacy symposium]
Not So Wild a Dream:
The Legacy of
Eric Sevareid
A Free Public Humanities Symposium
September 30 – October 3, 2010
Sidney J. Lee Auditorium, Bismarck State College
Bismarck, North Dakota
The public is invited to attend any or all events.
Registration is preferred, but not required.
ndhumanities.org 877-462-8535
58
[eric sevareid legacy symposium]
Eric Sevareid broadcasting in the early 1960’s.
Sevareid in Italy, 1944.
I believe that the most important lesson Eric Sevareid taught television
journalists is that even in television in the beginning is the word. Only a few
television journalists today seem to accept that…this new breed of producers
are verbophobes—people who fear talking heads on television as the ultimate
turnoff—and photophiles—people who lust for pictures at all costs. But only
rarely is a picture worth a thousand words—if your cameras happen to be there
at assassinations, ten-alarm fires, hurricanes, volcanoes blowing their tops. What
Severeid demonstrated night after night was that a couple of hundred words are
worth a thousand pictures when the thoughts are those of a penetrating mind,
accompanied by a brilliant ability to put those thoughts into just the right words.
– Richard Salant, Men’s Club, Westport, Connecticut, October 15, 1992
Sponsored by:
A joint project of the ND
Humanities Council and
the Dakota Insititute.
59
[eric sevareid legacy symposium]
Schedule of Events
Thursday,
September 30, 2010
Eric Sevareid, 1941, with British officer.
11:00 a.m. Registration
12:30 p.m. Welcome
1:00 p.m. Ray Penn
“The Philosopher for the Common Citizen”
Eric Sevareid can take his place as a twentieth-century practical philosopher in the same league as Marcus
Aurelius, Cicero and Epictetus. He often used the term “we” in his broadcast because he saw himself as
speaking for the common person whose values and common sense could guide everyone (especially their
political leaders) through tough times. He sought to describe the essential nature of democracy and the mission
of America in the world. In doing so he made political philosophy accessible to his audience of voters.
2:00 p.m. John Maxwell Hamilton
“Eric Sevareid and the Golden Age of Correspondence Memoirs”
Waves of hopeful young journalists walked the streets of Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. Would-be foreign
correspondents “rolled up in waves,” as an editor at the Paris Herald put it, in that city and throughout Europe.
Some of the most important names of twentieth-century journalism—Eric Sevareid, William Shirer, and Dorothy
Thompson, to name just a few—wandered in, as cubs, and left as lions. As correspondents who stood witness to
events rushing the world to war, the memoirs they published after WWII dove below the surface of the news to
seek its meaning. And although their books are largely forgotten, they are still a potential beacon for journalists
seeking to recover the purpose and credibility they see slipping from their hands today. 3:15 p.m. Tom Isern
“Little Folded Paws: Sevareid as Memoirist”
Authors who have, as Bill Stafford says, come away from the plains seem compelled to explain, endlessly, where
they come from and why they are the way they are. Eric Sevareid, in his autobiographical writings, is in the
mainstream of this river of what may be called colonialist memoir. Velva, North Dakota, a great place to be from,
60
[eric sevareid legacy symposium]
Sevareid in London, 1960’s.
Eric Sevareid with his wife, Suzanne St. Pierre, 1989.
remains timelessly pickled in the writings of its famous native son. Authors, as memoirists, stray from historical
reality. In light of these tendencies, is there much to learn from the memoirs of a personage such as Sevareid?
Yes, because despite authorial intentions, memoirs tell truths to readers who listen.
4:00 p.m. Donovan Webster
“Sevareid’s Adventure with the Naga Tribe in Burma”
On August 2, 1943, print and CBS Radio correspondent Eric Sevareid was one of seventeen passengers who
stepped aboard a new Allied C-46 to cross the “Burma Hump” into China. An hour into the flight the plane
crashed into the mountains of Burma, and Eric and his fellow passengers were stranded at the mercy of the
Naga tribe of headhunters for fifteen days. Safety lay hundreds of miles away in India, through hostile enemy
terrain. Donavan Webster will recount Sevareid’s near-fatal plane crash and adventure with the tribe and the
perilous trek out of danger.
5:00 - 5:15 p.m. Synthesis
Keynote Address at Belle Mehus Auditorium
7:00 p.m. Bob Scheiffer
“The Legacy of Eric Sevareid”
When longtime CBS News television journalist Bob Schieffer joined the network’s Washington bureau in
1969, he joined the ranks of legends and legends-to-be, including Eric Sevareid, Dan Rather and Roger
Mudd. “I’ll never forget the day I walked in there. It was like a little leaguer suddenly being called to pinchhit for Mickey Mantle in Yankee Stadium.” Forty years later, Schieffer is a legend in his own right and now
occupies Eric Sevareid’s old office at CBS. “He was really my hero,” says Schieffer. “He was the one I kind of
most wanted to be like… I still think of it as his office—I don’t think of it as my office. I feel very honored to
be able to sit in the same room where he sat.” In his keynote address, Schieffer will share his memories of
Sevareid and the lessons he learned from the legendary Murrow Boy.
61
[eric sevareid legacy symposium]
Schedule of Events
Friday,
October 1, 2010
Eric, early 1980s, in Aspen.
9:00 a.m. Welcome
9:30 a.m. Mark Bernstein
“World War II on the Air”
In 1937, Edward R. Murrow sailed to London to become chief CBS correspondent in Europe. Murrow—then
29—had never written a news story in his life. Three years later, his was among the world’s best-known voices.
Murrow created the forms of broadcast journalism that stand to this day. He did this by recruiting a team
of reporters who, in his words, could “think and write.” The first hired was William Shirer, later the famed
author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. The second was a North Dakotan, Eric Sevareid, who, postwar,
would for decades be the editorial voice of CBS. Along with Howard K. Smith, Charles Collingwood, and
others, these were the voices that brought Americans at home the news from the front. This presentation
will include audio segments of actual broadcasts.
11:00 a.m. Alan Bjerga
“Severeid’s Washington Legacy: Enduring, or Obscured”
As president of the National Press Club, Alan Bjerga is seeing a press corps that’s fractured, with a chorus of
discordant voices and business models that’s leading to major shakeups related to job losses, the decline
of major media institutions like Severeid’s CBS and the rise of bloggers, niche media and numerous tiny
outlets of varying audience reaches and quality. So, what example does Eric Sevareid hold for today’s
media? Bjerga will explore Eric Sevareid’s relevance for younger journalists working in traditional and newer
forms of media today.
12:00 Lunch
National Energy Center of Excellence (4th floor)
Tickets for meal required
62
[eric sevareid legacy symposium]
Sevareid visiting Bill Frances at the Velva Journal, 1952.
Eric, age 12, second from top.
1 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.
A recreation of the moment when broadcast news was born in the spring of 1938--not an imitation, but a live
radio news roundup. Sirius (formerly NPR) anchor Bob Edwards will participate, and will make remarks about
the Murrow Boys and broadcast journalism.
4:00 p.m. Raymond Schroth
“Eric Sevareid and the Search for an American Identity”
Eric Sevareid believed that the purpose of America was to be an American. He did his reasoning as an
American intellectual, and in his mind being an American meant giving oneself over to the idea that at the
core of our democracy is “the conscience of a people demanding the best of themselves.” It allowed Eric
Sevareid to achieve the rarest and most sought-after ideal of journalism: He became America’s conscience
staring back at the nation through the mirror of the media. Eric didn’t so much tell people what to think,
as how to think critically and self reflectively as a nation. Raymond Schroth will examine Sevareid’s idea of
America and discuss its relevance for today’s Americans.
5:00 - 5:15 p.m. Synthesis
Keynote Address at Belle Mehus Auditorium
7 p.m. Nick Clooney
“The Role of the Press in a Democratic Society”
Gathering and delivering news has been Nick Clooney’s passion since he was a little boy in Maysville,
Kentucky, listening to the unforgettable voices of Ed Murrow, Eric Sevareid, and William Shirer describing
the panorams a of World War II on the radio. Drawing on his own experience Clooney will contextualize the
ethics of journalism from WII through the present.
63
[eric sevareid legacy symposium]
Schedule of Events
Saturday & Sunday,
October 2-3, 2010
Eighteen-year-old Eric fishing on God’s River.
9:00 a.m Welcome
9:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
The Chorus of America, 1963-1977
Assessing Eric Sevareid’s commentaries on America and the world on the CBS Evening News.
Clips of Sevareid commentaries on a range of subjects, followed by panel discussion and exploration.
Sevareid and the Space Program
Sevareid and Civil Rights
Sevareid and the Assassinations
Sevareid and Vietnam
Sevareid and Watergate
Sevareid the 60s’ Youth Movement
Panelists: T. Harrel Allen, Camille D’Arienzo, Craig Nelson, Randall Kennedy, Raymond Schroth, and others.
12:00 – 1:00 p.m.
Lunch with Suzanne St. Pierre, National Energy Center of Excellence (4th floor)
Tickets for meal required
1:30 p.m Dr. Jim Leach, Chairman, National Endowment for the Humanities
“Sevareid and Civil Discourse in a Noisy Democracy”
Eric Sevareid understood that words reflect emotion as well as meaning. They clarify—or cloud—thought and energize
action, sometimes bringing out the better angels in our nature, sometimes lesser instincts. In the current political
climate of America words like “fascist” or “communist” are being used with increasing frequency and creating a
culture of incivility. Jim Leach will explore Eric Sevareid’s approach to civil discourse and draw lessons for today’s
caustic discourse.
3:00 p.m. Sean Bloomfield and Colton Witte
“Retracing Canoeing with the Cree”
Both 18, Witte and Bloomfield canoed from the Twin Cities to the Arctic Ocean in 2008. The 2,200-mile journey
was inspired by legendary journalist Eric Sevareid’s book Canoeing with the Cree, which described his trek from
Minnesota to Hudson Bay. Witte and Bloomfield made the trip in 49 days. Providing a fitting congratulations, Star
Tribune columnist Nick Coleman wrote of Witte and Bloomfield’s excellent canoe adventure: “Others have done it
before. But none, to my knowledge, have done it faster, and few since Sevareid and his paddling partner Walter Port
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[eric sevareid legacy symposium]
Sevareid, 1948, broadcasting for CBS.
Eric with his daughter, Tina, 1974.
have captured the public’s imagination more effectively.” Bloomfield and Witte will compare and contrast their epic
adventure with Sevareid’s during this presentation and slideshow.
4:00 p.m. Clay Jenkinson
“The Ordeal of William Shirer”
Featuring clips from the upcoming Dakota Institute documentary film on Eric Sevareid
William L. Shirer (1904-93) was recruited by Edward R. Murrow before Sevareid, and he, not Murrow, served as the
anchor of the first news roundup on March 13, 1938. Shirer, like Sevareid, was a serious intellectual who regarded
himself as a writer at least as much as a broadcaster. Unlike Sevareid, Shirer could not settle into a sustainable role
as a Sunday news magazine host on CBS. He was the author of three remarkable books: The Berlin Diaries, The Rise
and Fall of the Third Reich, and one of the twentieth-century’s greatest autobiographies, the three-volume Twentieth
Century Journey. The contrast of the Murrow Boys’ “other intellectual” creates a historical context for the life and
achievement of Eric Sevareid.
The Dakota Institute is working on a documentary film about the life and achievement of Eric Sevareid. The film will
be released in 2012 on the occasion of Sevareid’s centennial. A short series of clips of the interviews that have already
occurred will be shown.
5:00 - 5:15 p.m. Synthesis
Keynote Address at Belle Mehus Auditorium
7:00 p.m. A conversation with Dan Rather and Nick Clooney
“Knowing Eric”
Internationally renowned journalist Dan Rather was one of Eric Sevareid’s favorite protégés. Rather will share his
memories of Eric and discuss the enduring values Sevareid instilled in him during an informal conversation with close
friend Emmy-winning commentator Nick Clooney.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
8:30 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Field Trip to Eric Sevareid’s hometown of Velva, ND (Buses leave from Bismarck State College)
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North Dakota Humanities Council
418 E. Broadway, Suite 8
Bismarck, ND 58501
800-338-6543
[email protected]
www.ndhumanities.org
We have ways of
making you think.
Board of Directors
CHAIR
Tami Carmichael, Grand Forks
VICE CHAIR
Virginia Dambach, Fargo
Najla Amundson, Fargo
Barbara Andrist, Crosby
Paige Baker, Mandaree
Jay Basquiat, Mandan
Eric Furuseth, Minot
Kara Geiger, Mandan
Eliot Glassheim, Grand Forks
Kate Haugen, Fargo
Joseph Jastrzembski, Minot
Carole L. Kline, Fargo
Janelle Masters, Mandan
Christopher Rausch, Bismarck
Susan Wefald, Bismarck
STAFF
Brenna Daugherty, Executive Director
Kenneth Glass, Associate Director
Sarah Smith Warren, Program Officer
The North Dakota Humanities Council is a
state affiliate of the National Endowment
for the Humanities.
“You can’t know who
you are, as a nation or a
people, unless you know
where you’ve been.”
— Eric Sevareid
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