Gift Expands MHC's Murrow Collection

The Murrow family recently donated to MHC a collection of the personal papers of renowned journalist Edward R. Murrow. Mount Holyoke is now one of the primary repositories of Murrow's personal documents. Photo courtesy of the MHC archives.

A substantial installment of the personal papers of a giant in the world of broadcast journalism—Edward R. Murrow—has recently been donated to Mount Holyoke. The materials are a gift from the Murrow family, who first donated the pioneering CBS journalist's papers in 1984. Mount Holyoke is now one of the primary repositories of Murrow's personal documents.

The seven boxes of letters, diaries, notes, and photographs provide insights into the life and work of Murrow and his relationship with his wife, Janet Brewster Murrow '33. The documents span Brewster Murrow's life, including the years just after her graduation from MHC; their first years of marriage in the mid-1930s; Brewster Murrow's career in journalism and her war relief efforts during World War II; the couple's war years in London and their relationship with an elite social circle there; and, during the McCarthy era, CBS's blacklisting of accused “communists.” The documents expand the current archive of correspondence with family and friends; broadcasts, speeches, articles, and notes; documents relating to Murrow's work in radio and television and with the United States Information Agency; and biographical sketches and memorabilia.

“Something of this national importance comes our way only about every twenty years,” says Peter Carini, director of archives and special collections at MHC. “It's a very meaty collection; Edward R. Murrow was a seminal figure in broadcast journalism, and Janet Brewster Murrow, too, was a person of significant accomplishment. Now we have an expanded record of their years together. It's very exciting.” Carini says the contents of the boxes, donated by Murrows' son, Casey, who lives in Vermont, will not be fully identified for another three to four years, the time it will take to study, organize, and prepare the material for public access.

Daniel Czitrom, professor and chair of history at MHC, says the new material on the man universally recognized as the “patron saint of broadcast journalism” will help “open up our understanding of Murrow's work and the emergence of broadcast journalism in the postwar era.” Documents relating to CBS's activities during the period in which Joseph R. McCarthy chaired the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and led America's anti-Communist witchhunt in the 1950s will be of particular interest to scholars, he says.

Murrow (1908–1965) met Janet Huntington Brewster during a visit to Mount Holyoke in 1933 when he was president of the National Student Federation of America. They married in 1934, and he began his CBS career a year later, during the earliest years of news and public affairs programming on radio. His career spanned television's ascendancy through the 1950s and its emergence as the dominant medium for the news.

Murrow broadcast for radio news from streets and rooftops during the Battle of Britain and the German blitz of London in World War II, and he created the award-winning CBS See it Now news and public affairs program, which ran from 1951 to 1958. The program included such breakthrough programming as Murrow's “on location” reports from Korea during the war and, in the most celebrated piece from the series, his interview excerpts of Senator Joseph McCarthy speaking in 1954. From 1953 to 1958 he interviewed well-known figures such as Eleanor Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Marilyn Monroe for his Person to Person show, and his subsequent program, Small World, featured Murrow as the moderator of remote-telecast discussions among world figures.

Known for his extraordinary courage, integrity, sense of social responsibility, and journalistic excellence, Murrow was also an outspoken advocate of democratic ideals. In 1961 he was appointed by President John F. Kennedy to head the United States Information Agency (USIA), a post he remained in until 1964. That same year he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Janet Brewster Murrow (1910–1998), was president of her graduating class at Mount Holyoke when she met her future husband during his 1933 visit to the College. She moved to London with him in 1937. In England, she wrote scripts about the United States for the British Broadcasting Corporation and about American history for a 1942 BBC radio series. During World War II, she was active in the evacuation of children from England to the United States, and was chairperson of the London Committee of the Bundles for Britain program, which provided supplies, medicine, and hospital equipment. Her service later earned her the Ribbon of the King's Medal.

The war years were among the most eventful of the Murrows' careers. The night of the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, the two were in the United States on a speaking tour and dining at the White House with President and Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt when the news arrived. Their social circle in London included such elite figures as Lady Clementine Spencer-Churchill (Mrs. Winston) and the Marquess and Marchioness of Salisbury. After America entered the war, Brewster Murrow, an accredited war correspondent, accompanied the first Army field hospitals set up after the D-Day invasion of Europe. She flew with the Air Ambulance Service as a reporter and served on a crisis team of British and American officials.

After the war, Janet Brewster Murrow became active in addressing issues of poverty in New York City and twice hosted her husband's Person to Person show. She also became a member of Mount Holyoke's board of trustees and served for twenty years, from 1949 to 1959, and from 1960 to 1970. After her husband's death in 1965, Brewster Murrow moved to South Hadley and worked for the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum until her retirement in 1978. She died in 1998.