William Benton

I had forgotten about William Benton, who played an important role over half a century ago, until I received this bio of him from John Gehl: The American businessman and politician William Burnett Benton (1900-1973) was assistant secretary of state from 1945 to 1947 and a United States senator from Connecticut from 1949 to 1953. Prior to entering public life, Benton had a successful career in advertising and educational administration. In 1929 Benton teamed up with Chester Bowles, later to be governor of Connecticut and ambassador to India, to found what turned out to be the highly successful Benton & Bowles Advertising Agency. In 1936 Benton sold his interest in the agency to become vice-president of the University of Chicago, a position urged on him by his Yale classmate Robert M. Hutchins, who was the university's president. In 1943, Benton added the responsibility of serving the university as publisher and chairman of the board of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. (Benton had convinced the Sears, Roebuck Company, EB's previous owners, to donate the publishing enterprise to the university, but had to put up his own money as working capital before the trustees would accept the donation.) In 1945 Benton left the university to join the U.S. State Department, until he was appointed to a vacant U.S. Senate seat in 1949. He finished his public service as a member of the executive board of UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), which he joined in 1963.

Benton was born in Minneapolis, the descendent of Connecticut farmers, educators, and ministers. He grew up in Minneapolis and in Montana, where his widowed mother had become a homesteader. After a year at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, Benton transferred to Yale University, where he excelled academically, becoming chairman of the Yale Record and graduating in 1921. For the next eight years Benton worked in New York and Chicago advertising agencies, striking out on his own with Chester Bowles in 1929.  His life thereafter was a series of successful accomplishments. By 1935 he had turned Benton & Bowles into the sixth largest advertising agency in the world, mostly by writing innovative advertisements for the radio entertainment programs so popular during the Great Depression of the 1930s. When he moved to the University of Chicago, he used his advertising and radio background to develop the "University of Chicago Round Table" into an extremely popular national radio forum.

When Benton was secretary of state for public affairs, he converted for peacetime use the U.S. Information Service, the cultural exchange programs, and the Voice of America. He also lobbied the Fulbright Scholarship Act and the Foreign Service Act of 1946 through Congress, and succeeded in organizing U.S. participation in the establishment of UNESCO, on whose board he would later serve. While in the Senate, Benton supported Truman's foreign aid and Point Four programs and was active on behalf of civil rights. He was also among the first to decry the tactics for which Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin was eventually censured. Benton's lifetime interest in "the high significance of the media communications" to education and citizenship is reflected in the ongoing activities of the Benton Foundation, which focus on the Internet's potential as an "open university" devoted to helping ordinary citizens become more civically engaged, leading to the enrichment of the entire community. The Foundation is now chaired by its founder's son, Charles Benton, chairman of Public Media, Inc., and a longstanding champion of public
broadcasting, public information and public debate.

See
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0226365484/newsscancom/ref=nosim