Heslep, Charter Papers

The papers of Charter Heslep consist of correspondence, news reports, speeches, handwritten notes, newspaper clippings, magazine articles, itineraries, a diary and other items mostly pertaining to Heslep’s work as a radio broadcaster during the Truman administration.

Size: Less than one linear foot (about 1,600 pages).
Access: Open.
Copyright: The Truman Library received no donation of copyright from the donor of this collection. Documents created by U.S. Government officials in the course of their duties are in the public domain. Copyright interest in other documents presumably belongs to the creators of those documents and their heirs.
Processed by:Willie L. Harriford, Jr., and Philip D. Lagerquist (1964).
Updated by: Caroline Dingli-Attard (2006) as part of the Truman Library Internship Program.
Supervising Archivists: Randy Sowell and David Clark.

The papers of Charter Heslep consist mainly of documents pertaining to his career as a radio broadcaster for the Mutual Broadcasting System. Heslep, a native of Richmond, Virginia, joined the Washington Daily News staff in 1929. In 1941, he was employed by the National Broadcasting Company, and from 1941 to 1945, he acted as chief radio news censor for the government during World War II. From 1946 to 1948, Heslep worked for the Mutual Broadcasting System. In 1949, Heslep was employed as the assistant to the director of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). During a tour of AEC offices on the west coast, he was stricken by a heart attack and died at the age of fifty-nine.

Charter Heslep’s papers are arranged in one series, a Subject File. Much of the collection focuses on the 1948 campaign. Included are President Truman’s campaign speeches, train schedules, and itineraries (some of them annotated by Heslep), as well as news reports, and newspaper and magazine articles relating to the campaign. The collection also contains diary entries by Heslep from 1945 and 1948, handwritten notes, the text of a newscast, correspondence from Heslep to his wife and to President Truman, and momentos from presidential trips to Key West.

The Mutual Broadcasting System (MBS) was created in 1929 as the Quality Network. Initially, the MBS was comprised of four stations: WOR, New York; WLS, Chicago; WLW, Cincinnati; and WXYZ, Detroit. MBS was an arrangement between its founding stations to share programs produced at the stations. This concept differed from practices of networks like the National Broadcasting Company and the Columbia Broadcasting System which distributed programs to associated stations. In reality, most of MBS’s programming originated at WOR in New York, although there were a number of popular shows from other stations. For example, The Lone Ranger hailed from Detroit’s WXYZ.