{"id":673,"date":"2010-11-24T02:24:27","date_gmt":"2010-11-24T01:24:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/History-of-the-OU\/?p=673"},"modified":"2012-07-10T12:00:02","modified_gmt":"2012-07-10T11:00:02","slug":"william-bentons-papers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/History-of-the-OU\/?p=673","title":{"rendered":"William Benton&#8217;s papers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The wealthy and philanthropic American, <a href=\"http:\/\/ead.lib.uchicago.edu\/rs3.php?eadid=ICU.SPCL.BENTON&amp;q=benton\" onclick=\"javascript:urchinTracker ('\/outbound\/article\/ead.lib.uchicago.edu');\">William Benton <\/a>(1900-1973) was an early enthusiast for The Open University. A staunch Democrat he played an important part in bringing down Joseph McCarthy when he challenged McCarthy&#8217;s claims that the State Department was infiltrated by numerous Communists. Despite lack of support from at least some on his side of the House Benton was victorious over McCarthy. The owner of the Encyclopedia Britannica, Benton was\u00a0a keen advocate of using radio and television to support learning.\u00a0 He \u00a0financed Harold Wilson&#8217;s trips to the USA and maintained a relationship with the Wilson family for many years, including with Harold&#8217;s son Robin, who later worked at the OU. He was also close to Geoffrey Crowther and met Arnold Goodman and Walter Perry.\u00a0 His papers can be used as evidence as to how influential he was on Wilson&#8217;s development of the idea of what became the OU. They are housed in the University of Chicago and I&#8217;m there at present, taking a look at them. One thing I&#8217;d like to check is\u00a0the statement by B. MacArthur, &#8216;An interim history of the Open University&#8217; in J. Tunstall (ed.) <em>The Open University Opens, <\/em>Routledge<em>,<\/em>\u00a0London 1974, that the\u00a0idea of the Open University was really\u00a0born at Easter 1963 in Wilson&#8217;s home in discussion with officials of the Labour Party. My suspicion is that it has longer roots and that\u00a0Wilson&#8217;s connection with Benton is of significance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The wealthy and philanthropic American, William Benton (1900-1973) was an early enthusiast for The Open University. A staunch Democrat he played an important part in bringing down Joseph McCarthy when he challenged McCarthy&#8217;s claims that the State Department was infiltrated by numerous Communists. Despite lack of support from at least some on his side of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[68,44],"tags":[142,120,141,3],"class_list":["post-673","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ideas","category-people","tag-arnold-goodman","tag-geoffrey-crowther","tag-william-benton","tag-wilson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/History-of-the-OU\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/673","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/History-of-the-OU\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/History-of-the-OU\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/History-of-the-OU\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/History-of-the-OU\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=673"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/History-of-the-OU\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/673\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2404,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/History-of-the-OU\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/673\/revisions\/2404"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/History-of-the-OU\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=673"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/History-of-the-OU\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=673"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/History-of-the-OU\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=673"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}