Page 45 - Historical Dictionary of Political Communication in the United States

DAVIS,
ELMER
34
statement, action, or event. It is done with the recognition and admission that
there is a problem, but with the suggestion that it is minimal or that the state-
ment, action, or event has been misunderstood. The term was once jargon of
those in the political arena, but now even the media use it.
SOURCE: Jay M. Shafritz, The HarperCollins Dictionary of American Government and
Politics, 1992.
Guido H. Stempel III

DAVIS, ELMER (1890-1958), newspaper reporter and radio commentator,
born in Aurora, Indiana. A graduate of Franklin College and a Rhodes scholar,
Davis worked for the New York Times for 10 years beginning in 1914. Davis
quit the paper in 1923 to write novels and occasionally contribute political anal-
yses to the Times and to magazines. After a troubling visit to Europe in 1936,
Davis devoted most of his energies to warning Americans of Germany's threat
to world peace. On the eve of World War II, in August 1939, Davis joined the
staff of CBS News. He anchored live reports from Europe and presented anal-
ysis. Although Davis had a midwestern twang, his concise and informed com-
mentary endeared him to his superiors at CBS and to many listeners. "He was
telling you in the fewest possible words what you wanted to know," his biog-
rapher Roger Blassingame observed. Davis, Blassingame wrote, possessed "a
state of mind that is always ready for split-second interpretation."
After Hitler's invasion of the Low Countries in May 1940, Davis made no
effort to cloak his support of U.S. involvement in the European war. Soon after
America entered the war, President Franklin D. Roosevelt named Davis to head
the new Office of War Information (OWI). OWI assumed all war-related func-
tions. Davis, though admired by many Americans, was a curious choice. He had
no administrative experience. Furthermore, the agency operated under severe
handicaps. Roosevelt himself had little enthusiasm for creating the OWI and
lent Davis, whom he barely knew, little support. The navy and sometimes the
army proved uncooperative. Congress, suspicious that the OWI was doing the
partisan work of the administration, slashed the agency's budget.
When the OWI ceased operation late in 1945, Davis became a commentator
for ABC. He tended to take progressive positions while criticizing the Soviet
Union's growing hegemony in Eastern Europe. He was an early and relentless
critic of the excesses of domestic, anticommunist crusades led by Senator Joseph
R. McCarthy and others, and a tireless champion of civil liberties. He retired in
1955.

SOURCES: Roger Blassingame, Don't Let Them Scare You: The Life and Times of
Elmer Davis, 1961; Alfred Haworth Jones, "The Making of an Interventionist on the
Air: Elmer Davis and CBS News, 1939-1941," Pacific Historical Review, February
1973, pp. 74-93; Allan M. Winkler, The Politics of Propaganda: The Office of War
Information, 1942-1945, 1978.
James L. Baughman