William
Burnett Benton, was
born in Minneapolis on 1st
April, 1900. After graduating from Yale University
in 1921 he entered the advertising business. He worked for eight years
in New York City and Chicago before in 1929 forming his own agency
with Chester Bowles.
By 1935 the Benton and Bowles agency was the sixth-largest advertising
firm in the world. In 1936 Benton decided he wanted a change in his
career and after selling the agency to his partners for over $1,000,000,
he became vice president of the University of Chicago. In 1941 Benton
purchased the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
A supporter of the Democratic
Party, in 1945 Benton became U.S. assistant secretary
of state where he took charge of the overseas information programs.
While in office he was associated with the establishment of UNESCO
and the Fulbright Scholarship Act
(1946).
Benton was elected to the Senate in 1949. On 22nd March 1950, Benton
became the first Democrat politician to support Dean
Acheson against attacks from Joe McCarthy.
Over the next year Benton emerged as as one of the leaders in the
Senate against what now became known as McCarthyism.
On 6th August, 1951, Benton introduced a resolution in the Senate
calling for McCarthy's expulsion. Benton claimed that McCarthy had
"lied" and "practiced deception" with his claims
that he had a list of communists working for the State Department
Joe McCarthy
retaliated by accusing Benton of purchasing
and displaying "lewd works of art" while in the State Department.
As well as employing Known communists, Benton was accused of anti-American
behaviour by having the Encyclopaedia Britannica printed in England
rather than in the United States. According to McCarthy, Benton was
the "hero of every Communist and crook in and out of Government."
In November 1951 Benton came up for re-election. McCarthy continued
his smear campaign against Benton accusing him of hiring "communists,
fellow travellers, or dupes of the Kremlin" and used government
money to send "lewed and licentious" materials abroad through
the U.S. information program. Benton was defeated in the election
and decided to retire from politics.
Benton's final years was spentworking in publishing. In 1952 he published
the 54 volume
Great Books of the Western World
and published encyclopaedias in French, Spanish
and Japanese. In 1964 he acquired the Merriam Company, the publishers
of the Webster's dictionaries. Benton also worked on the 15th edition
of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The editorial creation of the work
cost $32,000,000: the largest single private investment in publishing
history. William
Benton died in New York on 18th March,
1973.
(1) William Benton, The
Economics of a Free Society (1944)
The Free Enterprise System is
a system of production, investment, and consumption under which private
individuals and business firms, largely by their own initiative and
responsibility, combine the community's labor skills, managerial skills,
and capital to produce the bulk of the goods and services men want.
Its most characteristic features as compared with other economic systems
are: maximum dependence upon competition and the free play of prices
to determine who shall produce what, maximum dependence on profit
as an incentive rather than on compulsion or prestige, and maximum
emphasis on free personal choice among the economic opportunities
- be they goods or jobs - that are available to men.
Under
a free-enterprise system, men risk their resources in private venture
in the hope of personal gain. A free enterpriser is a young man going
to night school to train himself for a profession, a lawyer moving
to another locality in the hope of developing a better practice, a
worker taking special training to achieve a skilled status, a man
shifting from one job to another in search; of a better opportunity.
In a system of free enterprise, private assets, whether of money,
talent, ambition, or energy, are risked in the hope of gain - whether
by a businessman seeking profit at the risk of loss, by a tenant buying
his own farm at the risk of a mortgage debt, or by a young man starting
his own small business at the risk of losing his savings and the steady
job he held. A true system of free enterprise thus encourages venture
and risk taking, whether by an individual worker or by a group of
individuals in the form of a cooperative or a big corporation.
In
the U.S. there are 4 million or more farm enterprisers, more than
1 million self-employed who work as their own bosses, more than 2
million private businesses with one or more employees. These provide
enormous opportunities for innovation and experimentation. After the
war, America must create an economic climate that will develop millions
more. Can any centrally controlled economy hope to maintain the dynamic
drive, the ingenuity, or the diversity of creative impulse of these
millions of enterprises? Their persistent search for improvement results
in progress: better products and services adapted more closely to
the desires of the buyers at ever lower prices. The driving energy
of private incentive thus serves the economic good of the nation as
a whole.
(2) Roy
Cohn, who worked closely with Joseph
McCarthy in the early 1950s wrote about William Benton in his
book McCarthy (1968)
The fact that Joe McCarthy lived
well within his means did not prevent his enemies from accusing him
of trying to line his pockets out of hours. The chief harassment along
these lines was led by William Benton who launched an investigation
into his income-tax payments and occasional sources of outside income.
this grew into a campaign that plagued McCarthy for years, even after
the charges were dropped.
(3)
Willis Smith, on Benton's decision to try and get Joe McCarthy expelled
from the Senate.
Benton got himself in a fight
unnecessarily. He was making a mistake because there was no chance
whatever of expelling McCarthy since it would take a two-thirds vote
and there were more than enough Republicans to prevent it.
(4)
In January, 1952, Ralph Mann and sent to William Benton. The memo
was eventually passed on to Drew
Pearson.
Today we received a letter from
a purported Army lieutenant claiming that he had been picked up in
the Wardman Park by McCarthy, gone with him to McCarthy's home, and
while the lieutenant was half-drunk, McCarthy committed sodomy. He
offered to testify and said he knew other officers McCarthy had picked
up. He claims McCarthy promised him a transfer and never got it.
(5)
Drew
Pearson, diary entry (16th January, 1952)
Benton told me that McGraph and
the President both were working on the matter of the young lieutenant
involved with McCarthy. This is the third report on McCarthy's homosexual
activity and the most definite of all.
(6)
Harold
Wilson, Memoirs: The Making
of a Prime Minister, 1916-64 (1986)
On a number of occasions
in the late 1950s and early 1960s, I had been in the habit of visiting
the United States on short lecture tours. These were organized for
me by Senator William Benton. Bill was an interesting and very American
character. In his youth he had set up a small shop in the centre of
New York and was a dollar millionaire before he was thirty. His heart
was in academics and in politics. He returned to the university where
he had graduated, Chicago, and became an administrator.
One of his earliest tasks
concerned the Encyclopedia Britannica, then the property of Chicago
University and losing money. The University authorities sought means
of getting rid of it and Benton bought it, speedily turning it into
a profitable concern and extending its scope by publishing annually
a topical volume, the Encyclopedia Book of the Year.
In 1945 he resigned from
the University to become Assistant Secretary of State in President
Truman's administration, where he initiated the Voice of America broadcasts,
including those to the Soviet Union. He led America's entry into the
UN Educational and Scientific Organization. He was also responsible
for the Smith-Mundt Act, the Fulbright legislation on international
educational interchange programmes. In 1950 he became a senator, representing
the state of Connecticut. The incumbent had died and the state party
organization nominated Bill to fill the vacancy. Not the least of
his senatorial achievements was to introduce the resolution calling
for Senator Joseph McCarthy's expulsion from the Senate and the subsequent
censure of McCarthy. He was a senator, in fact, for only two years,
and was defeated in the election of 1952, though in accordance with
US practice he was entitled to be called Senator Benton to the end
of his days.
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