THE LAST WORD
Seldes, George
THE LAST WORD George Seldes The FBI and I My first inkling that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was taking an extraordinary interest in me came from the commanding officer of a U.S. Army...
...I still don't know whether it was sent to me by mistake or because someone wanted to let me know...
...I wrote again to J. Edgar Hoover, informing him that I now had documentary proof that the FBI was spying on me...
...All I asked in return was to be put on the free list, which was done...
...The correspondence began when an Atlanta-based hate group, the Knights of the White Camelia, sent me a death threat in which the author mentioned, in passing, "On my way to New York I am going to stop in Washington and get the President...
...This probably happened before your time, but The Progressive once asked me if it could publish a chapter a month from one of my books on the press, and I gave permission...
...I am glad to have it published...
...In a note that accompanied this submission, Seldes wrote: "Please do not send me any payment for this little item...
...U Editor's Note George Seldes, who edited and published In Fact from 1940 to 1950, observed his ninety-eighth birthday last fall...
...Just send me ten copies so I can send them to my friends...
...he didn't reply, and I never heard from him again...
...And then my wife Helen, who ran my New York City office, received a similar tip about postal surveillance of our mailing list at the behest of the FBI...
...But it wasn't much later that my rural letter-carrier in South Norwalk, Connecticut, where I then lived, told me he had been instructed to compile a list of all subscribers to In Fact...
...Finally, I received a piece of mail that wasn't supposed to come to me: It was from my postmaster, addressed to the FBI's agent in charge in Connecticut, and it listed all of the publications and letters my wife and I had received that day...
...I had relayed this threat to the FBI, and in reply had received a warm note of appreciation from Hoover...
...And I accused the FBI of trying to put In Fact out of business—which, eventually, it did...
...So when I heard that GI subscribers to In Fact were coming under FBI scrutiny, I wrote at once to Hoover, and received a firm denial...
...Army recruiting base at Marfa, Texas...
...We exchanged occasional letters after that...
...His memoirs, Witness to a Century, were published in 1987...
...That ended my correspondence with Hoover...
...He wrote to tell me that an FBI agent had been sent to sit in the main post office there and take down the names of all recruits who received my weekly, In Fact...
...As it happened, I had been corresponding for some time with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover...
...Some ten or eleven letters from him are among my "literary remains" at the University of Pennsylvania, which asked for my files thirteen years ago when I was eighty-five...
...The list would go to his postmaster, who would send it on to the FBI...
Vol. 53 • February 1989 • No. 2
