George Howard Earle III was the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania from 1935 to 1939, succeeding Gifford Pinchot. At the time, he was the first Democrat elected governor in the state in over 40 years.

During the publishers' war of 1938, Earle became entangled with Moses Annenberg, publisher of the Philadelphia Inquirer and a staunch Republican. J. David Stern, the Democratic publisher of the Philadelphia Record and an Earle supporter, frequently clashed with Annenberg, who publicly accused Earle of corruption. Annenberg claimed that Earle provided political favor and jobs in the Works Progress Administration to state employees in return for campaign contributions. Although Earle was never directly implicated with corruption, the numerous battles waged in the news likely did significant damage to his political reputation, as he ran for the U.S. Senate in 1938 but lost to Republican James J. Davis.

For his part in the publishers' war, Earle appointed a legislative committee to investigate the dissemination of horseracing information in Pennsylvania. Annenberg was heavily involved in this enterprise as the owner of Nationwide News Service, which dominated the racing wire business. In 1938, the state legislature under Earle reported that Annenberg's racing wire business was making $1 million each day. This likely caught the attention of the federal government, as Annenberg was indicted for federal income tax evasion one year later.

Before his stint as governor, Earle was involved in various business activities, serving as the director of the Pennsylvania Sugar Company, the Philadelphia-based Tradesmens National Bank and Trust Company, and the Horn & Hardart food services company. He became galvanized into politics during the economic turmoil of the early 1930s, stating, "I kept watching Herbert Hoover's feeble effort to deal with the depression – the puny attempt to let prosperity dribble down from the top … The more I watched, the madder I got." In 1932, he was a prominent supporter of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who in return appointed Earle as the Minister Plenipotentiary to the Republic of Austria. In this capacity, Earle played an important foreign policy role in sounding the alarm over the dangers of Nazism, warning the Austrian government that it would lose American sympathy if Austrians encouraged the spread of anti-Semitism. He resigned from this post to run for governor of Pennsylvania in 1934.