William Hard was born on September 15, 1878 in Painted Post, New York, United States. He was the son of Clark Pettengill Hard, a Methodist minister, and Lydia E. van Someren. When he was four, he went with his parents to India, where they were missionaries.
Hard attended Philander Smith Institute in Mussoorie, India, and the University College in London, England, before returning to the United States to enroll at Northwestern University. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in history in 1900.
Hard received a fellowship at Northwestern and lectured there in medieval history for one year. In 1901 Hard moved to the Northwestern University Settlement House in Chicago as head resident. He wrote on local reform issues for the settlement house's monthly newsletter.
His professional journalism career began in 1902 when he was hired as an editorial writer by the Chicago Tribune, a job he held until 1905. Hard's involvement in the settlement house movement influenced his early journalism. Like many of his colleagues, he developed strong sympathies for urban workers and ties to the organized labor movement. In 1903 he was a resident at Hull House. His first magazine article was published in the Commons in October 1903, and the following year he worked with Ernest Poole on an article on the stockyards strike for the August 13 issue of Outlook.
Hard also served briefly in 1905 and 1906 as assistant to Joseph Medill Patterson, public works commissioner, in Chicago in a reform administration. In 1905 and 1906 Hard's articles on reformers, reform issues, and workingmen appeared with increasing frequency in such magazines as Outlook, World To-Day, Saturday Evening Post, and American.
He soon began a productive association with Everybody's Magazine and its publisher, Erman J. Ridgway, that continued through 1916. After working as Chicago editor of Ridgway's Weekly, which first appeared in late 1906 and folded early in 1907, Hard began muckraking for Everybody's in 1907, writing on unsafe conditions in industry. In January 1908, the magazine ran his "De Kid Wot Works at Night, " a journey through the night world of the Chicago newsboy and messenger boy. Hard later claimed that the article was influential in the passage of protective child labor laws in Illinois.
From 1908 to 1914, Hard wrote four major series of articles for Everybody's and Delineator on the social, economic, political, and legal issues related to modern woman's role, status, and problems. Throughout this period, Hard continued writing articles for numerous other public affairs journals and general-circulation magazines, pursuing the free-lance career that was to continue over three decades.
After 1914, his attention was directed almost exclusively to national and international political and economic issues. Working out of Washington, he was a correspondent first for the Metropolitan, then for the New Republic. He was a weekly contributor to the latter from 1917 through 1920.
Hard's long friendship with Raymond Robins, which dated from their Chicago settlement worker days, led to the publication of Raymond Robins' Own Story (1920), Hard's account of Robins' eighteen-month experience as an observer in Russia.
During the 1920's, Hard wrote the "Weekly Washington Letter" for the Nation (1923 - 1925), and articles for Asia, Collier's, Century, and Review of Reviews, among others, and supplied newspapers with Washington correspondence through his own Hard News Service and David Lawrence's Consolidated News Service. He was an early supporter of Herbert Hoover and wrote a campaign biography, Who's Hoover? , in 1928. After the election, Hard was a member of Hoover's "Medicine-Ball Cabinet, " which gathered at 7 a. m. six days a week on the south grounds of the White House to throw the ball around.
The coming of radio brought a new career for Hard, and by 1929 he was a regular correspondent and commentator for the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC). In January 1930 he provided daily summaries from the London Naval Arms Conference, participating in the first regular international broadcasts.
Between 1930 and 1935, Hard, with his resonant baritone voice, broadcast weekly reports and interviews from Washington, daily summaries from the 1932 Republican Convention in Chicago, and coverage of international conferences and events from Geneva, London, and Berlin.
In 1939 he began writing regularly for Reader's Digest, and he was a roving editor for the magazine until his death in New Canaan, Connecticut.
William Hard went down in history as a prominent journalist. He is perhaps best known for his "The Great Jewish Conspiracy" which was an attack upon the Protocols and those who believed the Bolshevik Revolution was carried out by Jews. His career in public-affairs journalism was productive and consistent, although his associations with various sides of public issues were usually short-lived.
(Excerpt from The Women of Tomorrow The woman of to-morro...)
(Excerpt from Injured in the Course of Duty From these st...)
(Excerpt from Theodore Roosevelt: A Tribute Of the most b...)
( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)
During the immediate postwar years Hard was actively involved in the fight against the League of Nations and the debate over Bolshevik Russia, both in print and privately.
He was an early supporter of Herbert Hoover.
By 1936 he had become an outspoken critic of the New Deal, and in July of that year he began a schedule of daily fifteen-minute commentaries on the presidential campaign, under the sponsorship of the Republicans. Each night, the Literary Digest observed, "Republicans sat comfortably beside their radios and nodded in agreement while William Hard riddled this or that foible of the New Deal. "
In February 1937 he was appointed executive assistant to the chairman of the Republican National Committee, and served as secretary of the Republican Program Committee until he resigned his party posts in October 1938, saying he wished to return to "independent political journalism. "
Writing in 1942 of Hard's long career as "an interpreter of the feverish chronicle of the present, " Alva S. Johnston, a fellow Reader's Digest editor, said Hard "practices journalism with the historian's freedom from narrowness and prejudice. " This quality of journalistic integrity that characterized Hard's work was widely acknowledged among his colleagues, as was his brilliance as a writer. To them he was, as Everybody's Magazine stated, "the man who can put drama even into figures and without distorting the figures, (who) adds to his uncommon qualities as an investigator the gifts of clear and convincing statement, good humor, and imagination based on facts rather than on rainbows. "
Ernest Poole described Hard as "a brilliant witty dark little man who was later to win such a name as a writer. "
His colleague recalled later that Hard was "a man of about forty, small of stature, who carried on his slight body a head with a magnificent dome and a face out of a gallery of Rembrandts. "
Quotes from others about the person
One writer described Hard as "perhaps the most vivid reporter The New Republic ever had, whose spare and racy style approximated the first true 'reportage' in America. "
Alva S. Johnston said, was that he was "a cause man, not an organization man. .. He has been a real free-lance - free, and a lance at every evil he has seen. "
On November 3, 1903, Hard married Anne Nyhan Scribner, an editor for the Chicago Post. They had two children, both of whom followed their parents into careers in journalism.
