Frazier Hunt

Frazier Hunt (December 1, 1885 – December 24, 1967) was an American radio announcer, writer and war correspondent during World War I and World War II. He wrote several books about his experience during both World Wars as well as historical biographies on famous Americans such as General George Armstrong Custer, Billy the Kid, and Douglas MacArthur.

Biography

Hunt on the cover of Editor & Publisher (October 30, 1919)

Amanda Frazier "Spike" Hunt was born on December 1, 1885 in Rock Island, Illinois. He was the second son of Jasper Newton Hunt, the author of the Hunt Speller, which is a series of grade schoolbooks, and Amanda Frazier, the Superintendent of Schools for Rock Island. Along with his older brother Jasper, Frazier was principally reared by his maternal aunt and uncle as his mother, Amanda Frazier Hunt, had died while giving birth to Frazier (he was thereafter named after his mother) and his father was a travelling schoolbook writer, publisher, and salesman. After graduating from the University of Illinois in 1908, Frazier worked in Chicago for various newspapers and magazines and married his college sweetheart, Miss Emma Ruth Kern, an old-stock Quaker from Indiana, in 1911. In 1912, Frazier, Emma, and Frazier's his older brother Jasper unsuccessfully ran a sugar cane plantation near Vera Cruz, Mexico. In 1913, Frazier returned to the States to become the editor of a small-town newspaper in Alexis, Illinois. In 1914, Frazier's and Emma's only child, Robert Frazier Hunt, was born in Alexis. In 1916, the Hunts moved to New York City where Frazier joined the staff of The Sun. Publisher Randolf Hearst soon after sent him back to Mexico where he tracked down and questioned Pancho Villa during the Villa Punitive Expedition, one of the few Americans to do so. After the U.S. declared war in 1917, Hunt was sent to Camp Upton, New York, to report on the assemblage and training of the polyglot draftees of New York's 77th Division. These articles later became his first book, Blown in By the Draft, which was published by Doubleday in 1918. He stated that "It was the first of all the American war books and probably the worst." Frazier was next sent to France to cover the war, first for the American Red Cross Magazine and then for The Chicago Tribune, honing his trade with none other than the famous American war correspondent Floyd Gibbons. As a front-line combat correspondent, Hunt (known as "Spike" to his friends due to his lanky visage) witnessed part of the Second Battle of the Marne from a shell hole with the American 42nd Division and followed them to the Meuse-Argonne front. It was during this time he met Douglas MacArthur, commander of one of its brigades. Toward the end of the fighting in Europe, he was assigned to cover the Allied Intervention in the Russian Civil War. The presence of some 5,000 troops in the Arctic, near Archangel, was then little known. His dramatic dispatches, filed from Norway after he had left the front, were credited with forcing President Wilson to order the withdrawal of these soldiers. He later journeyed to Petrograd, now Saint Petersburg, and to Moscow, where he interviewed the principal Bolshevik leaders such as Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin. His cordial reception owed much to the sympathy he then expressed for the aims of the revolution and to his friendship with Lincoln Steffens, another American journalist. In 1919, he smuggled out a copy of the Treaty of Versailles, scooping the story.

After the war, Hunt was promoted to chief European editor for Cosmopolitan Magazine and roamed the world. In this capacity, he interviewed Sun Yat-sen in China and Mohatma Gandi in India, becoming the first American to broadcast from Asia. He covered the bizarre attempt of Gabriel D'Annunzio, the Italian poet, to capture to port of Fiume. In Detroit, he interviewed Henry Ford on mysticism and religion. He then took his notebooks and typewriter back to Europe in 1922, where he developed a close friendship with Sinclair Lewis, covered Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and the rise of Turkish nationalism, interviewed (and dismissed) Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, trekked across Siberia, and interviewed Chinese and Japanese leaders during the Second Sino-Japanese War.

Frazier Hunt, early career

Returning to the United States in 1932, Mr. Hunt reported the first years of the New Deal, for which he had warm personal sympathies, despite his friendship with Herbert Hoover. During this time, he became a syndicated radio newscaster for the General Electric Company and forged enduring friendships with various luminaries such as T.S. Eliot, Ross Santee, Kitty Carlisle, and Pearl S. Buck. In 1935. he purchased the ranch "Eden Valley" in western Alberta, Canada, which was next to a ranch owned by Edward, the Prince of Wales (future Edward VIII), in order to write the book The Bachelor Prince: An Informal Biography of H.R.H. the Prince of Wales by His Neighbor in Canada. Here he taught the crown prince how to play Craps by rolling the dice on the floor with cash in hand and his son, Robert, married the daughter of Anglican Canon Samuel Middleton, a leading figure in the creation of the International Peace Park at Glacier and Waterton in 1932 and an honorary Kainai Chief of the Bloods who called him "Chief Mountain." In 1940, Hunt returned to Europe to report on World War II, shifting to the Southwest Pacific Theater after the United States entered the conflict in 1941. In conjunction with his close friend Brig. Gen. Bonner Fellers, MacArthur's Military Secretary, Hunt wrote the book MacArthur and the War Against Japan in order to bring more attention to the seemingly forgotten theater. In 1944, he joined Generals MacArthur and Walter Krueger in the landing at Hollandia, thus earning the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal. There is a famous photograph of the three in the National Archives.

As a broadcaster, Hunt presented Frazier Hunt and the News on the CBS Radio Network in the early 1940s and hosted one of television's first news commentary programs on CBS's Longines Chronoscope. In 1951, he was fired from his radio show on CBS when he harshly criticized President Harry S. Truman for firing MacArthur during the Korean War. In 1954, Hunt wrote The Untold Story of General MacArthur in order to help rebuild MacArthur's tarnished reputation.

MacArthur, Hunt, and Krueger at Hollandia

For his work on radio and TV, Hunt has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at Hollywood and Vine; he was inducted on February 8, 1960. He died in Newtown, Bucks County, Pennsylvania in 1967.

Other books

• "The Tragic Days of Billy the Kid"
• The Rising Temper of the East
• Sycamore Bend
• Custer: The Last of the Cavaliers
• The Bachelor Prince: An Informal Biography of H.R.H. the Prince of Wales by His Neighbor in Canada
• One American
• Little Doc
• The Long Trail from Texas
• The Untold Story of Douglas Macarthur
• MacArthur and the War Against Japan
• Cap Mossman: Last of the Great Cowmen

In collaboration with son Robert Hunt

• I Fought with Custer
• Horses & Heroes

Other sources

• World War I, Adriane Ruggiero, 2003
• Blow in the Draft: Camp Yarns Collected at One of the Great National Army Cantonments by an Amateur War Correspondent, Frazier Hunt, 1918, Doubleday, Page, and Co., pp 372
• The Untold Story of Douglas MacArthur, Frazier Hunt, Devin-Adair Co., 1954
• One American, Frazier Hunt, Simon & Schuster, 1938, "About the author"
• The Batchelor Prince, Frazier Hunt, Harper & Brothers, 1935

External links

• Frazier Hunt at Find a Grave