correspondent news commentator
Raymond Edwards (Gram) Swing was born on March 25, 1887 in Cortland, New York, the son of Albert Temple Swing, a Congregationalist minister, and Alice Edwards Mead, the daughter of Elizabeth Storrs Mead, the first president of Mount Holyoke College.
After Swing's father served several pastorates, in 1893 the family settled at Oberlin College in Ohio, where his father taught church history and his mother taught German.
In this academic milieu, with its intellectual table talk, Raymond was reared under a strict discipline, which he broke frequently. He seemed destined for the ministry or for teaching, but when he entered Oberlin in 1904, he did not do well in his studies and was suspended after his first year. He was, however, influenced by Oberlin's social radicalism.
After leaving Oberlin, Swing tried a variety of stop-gap jobs, and then, in 1906, he found his vocation when he became a cub reporter for the Cleveland Press. At that time American journalism was developing a new sense of public obligation, which took the form of "muckraking" examinations of political corruption and corporate misbehavior.
These acquaintances nourished his liberalism to the extent that during an interval between jobs in Indianapolis and Cincinnati, Swing did social work on Chicago's West Side.
When the outbreak of World War I transformed the lackadaisical foreign bureaus of American newspapers into vital informational outposts, Swing remained in Berlin, where he amply proved his journalistic aptitude. But his French-born wife was unhappy in a country at war with her own and returned to the United States, ending the marriage in 1915.
Swing continued to report the war from Berlin but also toured Turkey and the Balkans, witnessing naval actions in the Dardanelles and visiting the trenches of Gallipoli. Upon American entry into the war, he returned home to serve with the War Labor Board in Washington.
After the war Swing wrote briefly for the liberal Nation, but he craved to return to Europe and so, in 1919, became correspondent for the New York Herald in Berlin. It was a time of volatile and violent politics, with rival extremist groups, inflation, strikes, and intense diplomatic and trade activity by the new and revolutionary Soviet Union, which, during six years of foreign and civil war, had barred foreign correspondents.
But, in 1921, in anticipation of the American relief mission, Moscow finally allowed newsmen entry, and Swing was one of them. Swing's vivid dispatches about the Volga famine and the Moscow of Lenin and Trotsky were not printed, since the Herald, like the United States government, preferred not to recognize the existence of the Bolshevik state, presumably believing that anything that was not in the Herald was not true.
Swing's dissatisfaction with the paper was compounded at the Genoa Conference of 1922, from which Germany and Russia, the twin pariahs of Europe, adjourned to nearby Rapallo to sign a treaty of cooperation. The paper assigned him a collaborator to cover the Russian delegation, causing Swing to believe the Herald did not trust his objectivity. He therefore resigned to become London correspondent for the Wall Street Journal.
In 1924, Swing joined the foreign-news service of the Philadelphia Public Ledger and the New York Post. The ensuing ten years in London found him in his element, reporting on Britain's first Labour government and the complex problems of Europe between the wars. He was also heard frequently on discussion and interview programs of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).
After the death in 1933 of the publisher Cyrus H. K. Curtis, the Ledger-Post service was discontinued and, with it, Swing's overseas tenure. Back in Washington, Swing wrote for the Nation again and reported for the London News-Chronicle and Britain's weekly Economist.
In 1935 he also took up the newest journalistic craft, becoming the American end of a weekly exchange of broadcasts with Britain undertaken by the BBC. These commentaries continued for ten years. Transmitted by shortwave, they made Swing's voice familiar around the world. During World War II the British-American exchange became one between two Americans, Swing and his London-based friend Edward R. Murrow of the Columbia Broadcasting System.
In 1936, Swing also began nightly commentaries on American networks--first, for the Mutual Broadcasting System and, later, for the National Broadcasting Company and the American Broadcasting Company. In his prewar broadcasts, he condemned the appeasement of Hitler, and long before Pearl Harbor he criticized American isolationism. A supporter of Wilson and a believer in "one world, " he was said to be the Roosevelt administration's "favorite newscaster. " On the air he spoke slowly, distinctly, and calmly, in a whispery voice.
His broadcasts were intended as rational evaluations of events and situations but often sounded like sermons. His radio style went with the man himself, for he was tall, stooped, scholarly in appearance, and reserved in manner. He was usually ranked in opinion polls among the most respected in a galaxy of commentators that included Murrow, H. V. Kaltenborn, Elmer Davis, and Quincy Howe.
By the time the war ended, Swing was being heard on 120 stations. He had also been married again and had become active in the World Federalist movement. Against the rising tide of anti-Soviet feeling in cold-war America, Swing supported "peaceful coexistence" between the two great powers and, for this, was widely criticized. Swing publicly and vigorously opposed the detractors as themselves "un-American. "
He stopped his commercial broadcasting in 1951 to become the first political commentator for the government-operated Voice of America; but its restriction to narrow policy lines and Senator Joseph R. McCarthy's assault on it, during which Swing was among those interrogated by a Senate committee, impelled him to resign, though he had been exonerated and reconfirmed.
He then joined Murrow in the writing of the latter's daily radio commentaries.
The partnership lasted six years, until 1959, when Murrow began a final sabbatical and Swing returned to the Voice, which had been moved from the State Department to the less restrictive United States Information Agency (USIA).
Voice management passed into Murrow's hands when he became USIA director in 1961, and the two men were together once more, though both were failing in health. He retired at the end of 1963, when Murrow was also resigning.
He died in Washington.
Quotes from others about the person
One critic called him "a hair-shirt character. "
Raymond Edwards Swing married Suzanne Morin, a student from France, on July 9, 1912; they had two children. When Swing married, his uncle gave the couple the wedding gift of a year in Europe, and while in Berlin, Swing became a foreign correspondent, joining the overseas service of the Chicago Daily News.
On January 10, 1920, he remarried, acquiring an additional name in the process: Betty Gram, a music student and ardent feminist from Oregon, intended to retain her maiden name after their marriage but agreed to the compromise of the use of both names by both parties. His byline became Raymond Gram Swing and so remained, in print and on the air, until they were divorced in 1942. (They had three children. ) In 1957, Swing married Meisung Euyang Loh, a coworker at the Voice.
Swing spent the next six years working for newspapers in Ohio and Indiana, and during this period frequently visited an uncle, George Herbert Mead, who was a University of Chicago professor of social psychology.
