(Excerpt from Made in U. S. A
States, has grown more domi...)
Excerpt from Made in U. S. A
States, has grown more dominating and coercive in its legislation than at any time in the history of the United States. How can this paradox be when true Liberalism has always sought to restrain or diminish that which is the essence Of Toryism? It was the Tory who, Obtaining more power, became more oppressive in his legislation. Yet we have the New Deal dictating more and more the actions Of the citizens Of the United States, limiting still further the Scope Of their free actions, as would the Tories, yet blandly insisting it is Liberalism reincarnated.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
Boake Carter, an American journalist and radio commentator.
Background
Boake Carter, christened Harold Thomas Henry Carter, was born on September 28, 1898 in Baku, Russia, now Azerbaijan; the son of Thomas Carter, a British oilman and consular agent at Baku, and Edith (Harwood-Yarred) Carter, of Irish birth; they also had a daughter, Sheelah. The boy was brought to England by his parents at the age of five.
Education
After preparatory schooling at Tunbridge Wells, he enrolled at Christ College, Cambridge University, where he took an active part in sports and served as a reporter on the Cantabrian. During World War I he attended a Royal Air Force training school in Scotland, later studying at the Slade School of Art in London.
Career
After a period of study at the Slade School of Art in London and some work for the London Daily Mail, Carter went to the United States in 1920 and for several years wandered through the Southwest, Mexico, and Central America, working in the oil fields and writing for newspapers. He then moved to Philadelphia, where his parents had settled after the war, and became rewrite man, copyreader, and assistant city editor on the Philadelphia Daily News. He took out American citizenship in 1933. Carter got his start in radio in 1930, when he was asked to describe a local rugby match over a Philadelphia radio station, WCAU; he later broadcast a simulated description of the Cambridge-Oxford boat race. Encouraged by his success, he took a month's leave from his newspaper job and tried to sell a program as news commentator but, failing to find a sponsor, returned to the Daily News. At about this time, on the advice of the station director, he adopted the first name Boake, common in his mother's family, as more distinctive for broadcasting purposes. The next year he began to give regular news broadcasts for his paper.
Carter first achieved national fame in 1932, when the Columbia Broadcasting System engaged him to make daily reports and comments on the Lindbergh kidnapping case. Speaking from studios in Trenton, N. J. , he was assisted by two network reporters who collected the material. Carter later covered the trial of the accused kidnapper, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, for the network, but instead of merely giving factual reports, he editorialized freely and infused his accounts with drama and emotion. His sensationalism caused CBS to discharge him, but public protest forced his reinstatement. In January 1933 Carter signed a contract with the Philco Corporation to give a fifteen-minute news broadcast under their sponsorship five nights weekly over the CBS network at a salary of $50, 000 a year. He soon became the most popular commentator on the air. Stressing interpretation rather than factual narration of the news, speaking vividly and dramatically, he had a nightly audience estimated at more than ten million; he ended each broadcast with his familiar sign-off, "Cheerio. " Carter prepared his own 2, 000-word script for each program. He subscribed to a radio news service and obtained material from two teletype machines installed in his home at Torresdale, near Philadelphia, and from telephone conversations with a full-time representative in Washington, D. C. In addition to his radio work, Carter wrote several books, including Black Shirt, Black Skin (1935), I Talk as I Like (1937), and Why Meddle in Europe? (1939). In 1937 he also began writing a syndicated news column, "But--, " which eventually appeared in some sixty daily papers. Carter thrived on controversy, and preferred argument to neutrality. Since frequent targets of his acerbic criticism were the Roosevelt administration, labor unions, and naval policy, he made many enemies. He greatly admired the columnist Westbrook Pegler and from time to time conferred with Father Charles E. Coughlin--both archcritics of the New Deal. By the end of the 1930's angry reactions from labor and other groups he had attacked, together with accusations of fascist sympathies, had undermined Carter's popularity. Philco failed to renew his contract in January 1938, and though he soon acquired a new sponsor, General Foods Corporation, this contract was canceled in December 1938, largely because union members threatened to boycott the firm's products. Carter charged that the Roosevelt administration was persecuting him, but other factors probably were more important in his gradual eclipse. The open commercialism accompanying his broadcasts was out of key with the growing tension preceding World War II. By contrast, Raymond Gram Swing, a commentator whose popularity was rising, refused to read any commercials, even after a pause to separate news from advertising. Listeners were coming to prefer a straight account of events to a dramatized interpretation. In September 1939 Carter became a commentator for the Mutual Broadcasting System, but he never regained his old popularity.
Carter devoted much of the energies of his final years to this group, which shared the "Anglo-Israel" doctrine that the Anglo-Saxon-Celtic races were in fact the lost tribes of Israel, and which sponsored the publication of a new translation of the Bible by a Palestinian mystic, Moses Guibbory. He died apparently of a cerebral hemorrhage, at the Presbyterian Hospital in Hollywood. A Los Angeles rabbi conducted the funeral service, and Carter was buried at the Home of Peace Mausoleum in Los Angeles.
He published several books in the 1930s, and began writing a widely syndicated column in 1937. But by 1937, the Roosevelt White House already had three federal agencies investigating him. In 1938, under pressure from Roosevelt's allies, he lost his WCAU job, was barred from CBS, and lost his General Foods sponsorship that had replaced Philco. With his removal, there was no longer any popular radio commentator who opposed Roosevelt's foreign policy.
In the early 1940s, Carter was drawn into a 'British Israelite' cult led by a Moses Guibbory.
In 1942, workers on the New York Mirror, which carried his column, charged Carter with being implicated in anti-Semitism and enemy propaganda, although the Jewish Daily Forward protested the charge. In self-defense, Carter pointed out that he had recently joined a religious group based on Jewish practices and called by its founder, David Horowitz, the "Biblical Hebrew" movement.
Personality
He was five feet six inches tall, red-haired and wearing a trim mustache, he retained his British mannerisms and accent; his deep baritone voice made him an impressive commentator.
Connections
Carter had married Beatrice Olive Richter, assistant society editor of the Philadelphia Bulletin, in 1924. Their two children were Gwladys Sheleagh Boake and Michael Boake. He and his wife were divorced on November 7, 1941, and in August 1944, after he had moved to California, he married Paula Nicoll.