Washington merry go round 1932

While working for the Washington Bureau of the Christian Science Monitor in , Allen wrote several articles about government officials that appeared anonymously in the American Mercury. Allen expanded the articles for a book and recruited fellow Washington journalist Drew Pearson to write the chapters on capitol society and the military.

In they anonymously published the book, Washington Merry-Go-Round ; a year later they wrote a sequel. Both books were collections of news stories and gossip about government officials during the Hoover Administration. The first, which was considered scandalous by some, became a best-seller.

When the identity of the authors became known, both Allen and Pearson were fired from their respective positions. Shortly before World War II, the Herald terminated the column for its openly interventionist position. In , the columnists were signed by the Washington Post. Because he was over forty, Allen was not eligible for the draft, but he volunteered nevertheless.

In July , the Army called him to active duty, and he ended his association with Pearson. Thereafter Allen served as operations executive with the rank of major under General George S. Patton of the Third Army. Allen was decorated several times, wounded, and lost his arm, and he left the service with the rank of colonel in December He also signed with the North American Newspaper Alliance to write feature articles. In Allen edited Our Fair City and in he produced a similar work, Our Sovereign State ; both books were collections about local politics.

In he wrote Lucky Forward , a history of the Third Army. In he published the Truman Merry-Go Round In , Paul J. When John A. In Allen married Ruth Finney, one of the few women journalists who covered hard news in Washington, D. She continued to write under her own name for the Scripps-Howard newspapers after their marriage.

After her death in , Allen married Adeline Sunday, his former secretary. Allen, who was suffering from a debilitating form of cancer, died on February 23, , from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The Robert S. Allen Papers at the Wisconsin Historical Society document the professional career of one of the nation's best known and most highly regarded journalists of the mid-twentieth century. It was Allen's intention to donate papers concerning his military career, as well as the records he collected as Patton's intelligence operations officer to the Patton Museum at Fort Knox; while his journalism papers were willed to the Wisconsin Historical Society.

However, the division was not precise. The Patton Archives collection includes all of the existing Allen correspondence with government officials, politicians, news agencies, and other journalists during the s and early , while the Wisconsin collection contains some material about his research and writing on Patton.

Carbon copies of some material appear in both collections. Ruth Finney's professional papers are housed at the University of California-Davis and she is seldom mentioned in the collection. Allen's WRITINGS are arranged alphabetically by genre and by subject, with the majority of the series consisting of mimeographed column releases distributed to the syndicated papers. Pertaining to Allen's early career are scrapbooks of stories written by him and other members of the Washington bureau of the Philadelphia Record , and These articles are available only on microfilm.

The printed copies of all of the books presented by Allen are available in the Historical Society Library. Other writings in the collection consist of freelance articles and radio scripts. After completing his history of the Third Army in , Allen was hired by the Twentieth Century Fox studio hired to write a treatment for a motion picture biography of Patton.

The projected biography was not made at this time, apparently due to opposition from the Patton family and internal issues at the studio. The Patton file also includes Allen's correspondence with General Frank McCarthy at the Twentieth Century Fox studio concerning the film that was eventually released in Also included are several articles about Patton written by Allen, as well as his reviews of several Patton books, research material, and notes.

Allen did not save correspondence systematically until late , and even until the mid s the correspondence in the collection is almost entirely incoming.

The content for these years consists of letters from government officials; active and retired military personnel, some of whom were personal friends; newspaper editors who published his column; booking agents for his lectures; and editors of magazines that published his freelance work. Occasional letters from readers and newspaper publishers comment on specific columns.

Some letters such as those from journalist T. After the mids the files include more frequent outgoing letters, with some of sufficient importance that Allen typed a rough draft.

Only two of these files relate to Allen's early career. One contains a souvenir log and correspondence about Herbert Hoover's trip to Central and South America in ; the second consists of typescript copies of letters from General Douglas MacArthur to Isabel Rosario Cooper thought to have figured in a libel suit brought by MacArthur against Pearson. Several folders concern the general topic of presidential politics. Letters to Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, Pierre Salinger, and Theodore Sorenson dating from the Presidential campaign and shortly thereafter suggest that Allen may have sometimes crossed the line of journalistic objectivity.

In addition to the previously mentioned individuals, other prominent correspondents include James T. Allen's exchanges with the Field Newspapers Syndicate and its predecessors concern both column content and administrative matters, and they provide interesting insight into newspaper syndication. Robert G. Cowles, Robert M. Hall, Richard Sherry, and W. Robert Walton are among Allen's most frequent correspondents in this regard.

There are also many detailed exchanges between Allen and his attorney concerning the plagiarism suit brought against Ladislas Farago for use of materials from Allen's Lucky Forward. The suit was eventually settled out of court with a small payment to Allen. This case is of special interest because Farago's book was used as the basis for the screenplay for the Academy Award-winning film about General Patton. Some subject files concern Allen's financial affairs.

Files in this category document legal problems with property investments in Key West; a debt owed to him by Leon Henderson, a former official of the Roosevelt Administration; and an unsuccessful challenge to the WBAL broadcast license, a Hearst-owned station, by Allen's Public Service Radio Corporation.

Numerous folders concern Allen's support of the handicapped. As a member of the War Department's Prosthesis Advisory Committee he collected minutes, correspondence, and material about this subject and the Army Medical Laboratory. Allen's prosthesis is in the Historical Society Museum. They consist of daily typed narratives about reporting and interviews, together with personal comments and reflection.

The diaries began in when Allen was still associated with Pearson. It is possible that Allen's journals represented a reaction to the charge often made about Pearson, that his columns were unsubstantiated by fact.

Some of the journal information ultimately appeared in Allen's columns, but much of it remained unpublished because Allen was aware of its hear-say nature.

The journals should not be discounted as mere gossip, however, for his informants were all highly-placed individuals, a virtual who's who of Washington, D. The individuals mentioned are too numerous to be included in this narrative, but Tom Corcoran and William O.

Douglass are among the individuals with whom he had frequent contract. Although Ruth Finney seldom appears in the collection as a whole, some stories are here attributed to her reporting. The first section of the journals ends in when Allen joined the Army. There is a brief index for the period. For Allen's overseas wartime service, February March , the collection includes ten small handwritten diaries comprised of brief entries, together with a typed transcript.

In March Allen resumed his reporter's journal format. Over time, the journal became increasingly voluminous, frequently including original letters and newspaper clippings on which he commented. This interview of Allen by Ray Moore, dating from sometime during the Eisenhower Administration, documents Allen's forceful personality and some of his journalistic philosophy.

In it, Allen bemoans the rise of press officers in Washington, D. Presented by Robert S. H ome S earch B rowse B ookbag H elp. Summary Information. Wisconsin Historical Society Map. Identifier: MS Series 1. Staff Only. Scope and Contents note This series contains final typescripts as well as early typed and hand-edited drafts of syndicated Merry-Go-Round columns written by Jack Anderson and his staff.

Allen in Alongside a team of reporters, Anderson wrote Merry-Go-Round columns daily until At its peak the column appeared in over American newspapers, reaching 40 million readers a day, making Merry-Go-Round the most popular and longest running political column in the nation. Merry-Go-Round columns are arranged first by type of document typescript or article draft and then chronologically. Typescripts are available from through Examples include the ramifications of free government cookbooks provided by Republican candidates prior to the election, information on the use of the White House limousine, and issues relating to the four million letters sent out to farm states in by Senator Martin of Iowa, as well as information on Doctors Howard Sterns and Frank Fowler, who initiated "one of the most blatant efforts to put the medical profession in politics" Pearson's words.

Among the unique and innovative features of the Pearson broadcasts are the final segments that were then popularly known as the "Drew Pearson predictions. Another significant aspect of the broadcasts was Pearson's manner of presentation which, best described, was hard-hitting commentary tinged with emotion and subjectivity.

Pearson's innovations and manner of delivery inspired a host of similar commentators and broadcasters in the years that followed.

Includes 12 television broadcasts with host Drew Pearson, These broadcasts are cataloged in the library's online catalog and are available for use in Media Services. Other films are in storage waiting processing and therefore are not available to library users. Content: The subjects of these video broadcasts are broad and cover a range of people and places, including Elvis Presley, Alaska, U.

And who better to use as the mouthpiece then Lee Tracy! And Tracy was great in this. Whenever he can run his mouth without hindrance he's on top of his game. And this was a fairly ruthless attack on the Washington system which added to the intrigue. However once the conclusion comes it falls a little flat.

With such a build up to establish the filth of Washington Like a proto Mr. Smith Goes To Washington with a dash of Meet John Doe this story of a young Congressman fighting government corruption and the powers behind the scenes gets remarkably hard hitting, but lacks strong direction and Lee Tracy isn't really up to the part.