(From The Dish List)
Born in Topeka, Indiana on March 25, 1891, Byron Price graduated from Topeka High School (1908). While his father, John Price, was a farmer, Bryon Price chose to be a reporter. As a student at Wabash College, Price worked as cub reporter for the Crawfordsville Journal and Review and Indianapolis Star and News. After earning his B.A. degree, he joined the United Press staff and worked as a reporter and editor for the Chicago and Omaha bureaus before joining the Associated Press (AP) staff in 1912.
With the AP, Price served as a day editor for the Atlanta Bureau, acting correspondent and bureau chief in New Orleans, before being transferred to Washington, D.C. During WWI, Price took a leave of absence from the AP and enlisted in the Army (1917). At the end of his service (1919), Price returned to AP's Washington Bureau; the following year, he married Priscilla
Alden.
In 1922, Price was promoted to news editor of the Washington Bureau and bureau chief in 1927. Ten years later, he became executive news editor, a position he held until December 16, 1941, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt tapped him to head the newly created Office of Censorship.
On January 15, 1942, Price's office issued the Code of Wartime Practices for the American Press. While the code had no built-in legal penalties, the media were urged to avoid printing information deemed national security interests or demoralizing, such as troop and ship movements and photographs of dead American soldiers.
Reporters continued to seek out their usual sources, and government departments and agencies still issued press releases, but each department had a list of things that could not be published. Price's voluntary self-censorship program worked well. With the single exception of a Chicago Tribune 1942 report of the battle of Midway, no code violation was considered severe enough to warrant prosecution under the Espionage Act. Thus, wartime reporting tended to run heavily toward human-interest stories.
Price's office employed 14,462 people between 1942 and 1945. Weekly, these civil servants read and censored a million pieces of mail. US soldiers, subject to censorship by officers, were prohibited from mentioning anything about the surrounding military situation when writing home. US soldiers' families were encouraged to write light, happy, non-specific letters. The Office of Censorship kept records of every telephone, mail and telegraph inquiry it received between mid-January 1942 and August 1945.
The Office of Censorship was closed down on August 14, 1945. Price received numerous awards for his work, including an honorary LL.D. degree (1943) from Wabash College, a special Pulitzer citation (1944) for the creation and administration of the newspaper and radio censorship codes from Columbia University, an honorary M.A. from Harvard University (1946) and the Medal for Merit (1946) presented by President Harry Truman. The American Society of Newspaper Editors and ten other associations of the press, radio and photographers awarded Price special commendatory citations in 1945 and 1946.
After closing the Office of Censorship, Price served as President Truman's representative to occupied Germany. Appointed vice president of the Motion Picture Association of America (1945), he became chairman of the board for the Association of Motion Picture Productions, president of the Central Casting Corporation, first vice president of the Educational Films Research Corporation, and director of the Hollywood Coordinating Committee (1946).
In 1947, Price became Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations for Administrative and Financial Affairs. The only American among eight assistant secretary-generals, he supervised arrangements for construction of the new UN building in New York City. Price died August 6, 1981, at his Hendersonville, N.C. home; Price was 90.
(Sources: www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/2WWpriceB.htm, www.depauw.edu/library/archives/ijhof/inductees/priceb.htm,
http://uncpress.unc.edu/chapters/sweeney_secrets.html, and www.cameron.edu/~johnh/defpg2.html)
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