The U.S. Postal Service® Commemorative Stamp Program: American Journalists recognizes the contributions of American journalists to the betterment of American society — exposing and exploring the people, processes, challenges and accomplishments of a country, its people, and its role in the world.
With this stamp sheet, the U.S. Postal Service honors five distinguished journalists who reported — often at great personal sacrifice — some of the most important stories of the 20th century. Working in radio, television, or print, the distinguished members of this group did their part to keep citizens informed about the world around them. They were drawn to hot spots, and their description of conflicts and issues helped people respond more intelligently to events.
The American Journalists stamp series honors the following journalists:
Ruben Salazar was the first Mexican-American journalist to have a major voice in mainstream news media in the United States. He wrote many influential articles for the Los Angeles Times in the 1960s; his work presents a valuable view of the evolution of Mexican-American politics into the larger Chicano movement.
As a young reporter for his hometown newspaper, the El Paso Herald-Post, Salazar distinguished himself with a series of investigative articles exploring the lives of poor Mexican-Americans.
Salazar’s professional ambition soon took him to California, where he eventually joined the staff of the Los Angeles Times. There, he wrote articles on many aspects of Mexican-American life, including a series of influential reports on a variety of issues such as politics, labor (he interviewed the young activist Cesar Chavez), and education.
In 1965, Salazar became a foreign correspondent, traveling to the Dominican Republic and South Vietnam before becoming chief of his paper’s Mexico City bureau. When he returned to Los Angeles, he described the discrimination faced by members of the Mexican-American community, killed in disproportionate numbers in Vietnam and frequently abused by police and other institutional forces at home.
In 1970, Salazar became news director of KMEX, a Spanish-language television station, and scaled back his writing for the Times to a weekly column that attracted wide notice.
On August 29, 1970, while covering the National Chicano Moratorium against the Vietnam War, Salazar was shot and killed by a member of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Salazar has been awarded many posthumous honors, including a special Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award “for his columns which communicated effectively and compassionately the culture and alienation of Chicanos.” Laguna Park, the site of the Chicano Moratorium rally, was renamed Salazar Park.
Martha Gellhorn was one of the most acclaimed war reporters of her era. In a long career that broke new ground for women in journalism, she covered many major conflicts of the 20th century, including the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the Vietnam War. Well past the age when most people retire, she filed reports from Central America in the 1980s.
Early in her career, Gellhorn worked as a crime reporter in Albany, NY. During the Depression, she interviewed textile workers in New England and the South for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA). She spent time at the White House as a guest of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who became a lifelong friend.
In Europe, Gellhorn covered the Spanish Civil War for Collier’s. During World War II, she reported on the Allied landing on D-Day and, later, the liberation of Dachau concentration camp. Later, she covered the war crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann for Atlantic Monthly. For many years, Gellhorn made her home in London; a British paper, the Guardian, published pieces she wrote on Vietnam in 1966 and on Israel in 1967.
A collection of Gellhorn’s war reportage, entitled The Face of War, was first published in 1959. A later book, Travels with Myself and Another (1978), is a popular and funny memoir.
John Hersey was a versatile writer whose most famous work, Hiroshima, is a nonfiction account of what happened when the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city that gave the book its title.
Hersey was born on June 17, 1914, in Tientsin, China, where his parents were Christian missionaries, and where he spent much of his childhood. After his family returned to the U.S., Hersey went to college at Yale, where he played varsity football and was music critic for the Yale Daily News. Graduate study at Cambridge and a short stint as secretary to writer Sinclair Lewis preceded Hersey’s employment as a reporter for Time. Journalistic work during World War II took Hersey to both Europe and Asia; his articles appeared in Time, Life, and The New Yorker.
Hersey also wrote several books during the war. One of these, the novel A Bell for Adano (1944), was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1945; it tells of Sicilian villagers searching for a replacement for their antique bell, which Fascists had melted down for bullets.
In May 1946, Hersey began work on an article describing the effects of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima the preceding August. It filled an entire issue of The New Yorker dated August 31, 1946, which sold out quickly and elicited wide comment.
In Hiroshima, Hersey followed closely six hibakusha (“explosion-affected persons”) before, during, and after the blast. In deliberately plain language, Hersey gave readers a vivid sense of what it was like to live through a nuclear explosion.
Hersey returned to Hiroshima in 1985 and wrote a follow-up article, “The Aftermath,” which was published in The New Yorker and subsequently added to a revised edition of the book. In February 1999, Hiroshima was voted the top work of journalism of the 20th century by members of the journalism faculty at New York University along with 17 distinguished guest judges.
A sampling of Hersey’s many books suggests the wide range of his subject matter. The Wall (1950) is a novel centered on the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. The Algiers Motel Incident (1968), a nonfiction comment on American race relations, focused on the killing of three black men in Detroit. In Letter to the Alumni (1970), Hersey attempted to explain contemporary student attitudes to older readers. His love for music was reflected in his last novel, Antonietta (1991), about a Stradivarius violin.
Hersey taught writing for several years at Yale, his alma mater, where he also served for a time as master of Pierson College. In later life, Hersey divided his time between Key West, Florida, and Martha’s Vineyard, in Massachusetts. He died on March 24, 1993, at his home in Key West.
George Polk was a talented young CBS radio correspondent who filed hard-hitting reports from Greece describing the civil strife that erupted there in the aftermath of World War II.
In 1938, he graduated from the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, having majored in history and political science. During his time there, Polk became a reporter, writing a column on Alaska for his hometown paper, the Fort Worth Press.
Polk traveled through Asia before making his way to Europe and landing a job with the Paris bureau of the New York Herald Tribune. On February 23, 1942, soon after receiving news of the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, Polk enlisted with the United States Naval Reserve. He served at a naval air base in the South Pacific with a unit specializing in the repair and maintenance of aircraft.
In 1945, Polk began work as a freelance foreign correspondent. Back in Europe once more, he met CBS radio newsman Edward R. Murrow, who encouraged him to join the CBS staff. In 1946, Polk became the network’s Middle East correspondent, based in Cairo. Soon, he began providing impassioned coverage of the Greek civil war.
He was on the trail of a story about corruption involving U.S. aid to Greece when he disappeared in Salonika on the night of May 8, 1948, at the age of 34; his bound body was found floating in the bay a week later. The exact circumstances of his death remain a mystery, but Polk was shot before his body was put in the water.
Polk was eulogized on the air by Edward R. Murrow, who told his listeners, “Certain it is that you have lost one of the ablest, most conscientious and courageous reporters who has ever served you.” In 1949, Long Island University established the annual George Polk Awards, among journalism’s most prestigious honors. Its many acclaimed recipients have included Eric Sevareid, Susan Sontag, Marguerite Higgins, and Seymour Hersh.
Eric Sevareid, writer and broadcast journalist, is particularly remembered for his reporting on World War II and the Vietnam War, and for his commentary on American politics in the 1960s and 1970s. His rugged good looks and confident tones concealed the reticence he overcame to interview statesmen, Supreme Court justices, novelists, and other leading figures of the day.
Sevareid served his apprenticeship as a reporter while studying political science and journalism at the University of Minnesota, where he wrote for the campus daily and for two Minneapolis newspapers. He graduated in 1935.
In 1937, he went to Paris, where he joined the staff of the New York Herald Tribune and was noticed by Edward R. Murrow, the respected CBS newsman. When Murrow offered him a job, Sevareid was at first reluctant because he preferred to concentrate on writing. But he duly accepted the offer, becoming one of “Murrow’s boys” who provided unforgettable radio commentary on World War II. Sevareid reported on the approach of the Germans to Paris, the exodus from the city, and on life in London during wartime.
After the war, Sevareid was an early critic of the anticommunist witch-hunting tactics of Senator Joe McCarthy. He produced several books and magazine articles. Collections of his work include In One Ear (1952) and Small Sounds in the Night (1956).
In 1963, Sevareid joined Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News, which had recently expanded to a half-hour format, as a regular commentator, delivering carefully crafted 2-minute analyses three or four times a week. After retirement in 1977, he occasionally was host for special news programs and documentaries. As he grew older, he noted that he tended to favor conservatism regarding foreign policy and liberalism in domestic affairs.
