The War on Dissent
September, 1968
A few months ago, the superintendent of the building where I have an office drew me aside as I was going to the elevator. "Listen," he said very softly, "I shouldn't be telling you this, they told me not to, but a couple of FBI guys were asking about you yesterday."
It was a warm day, but I went cold. "What did they want to know?"
"Oh, do you just work here or do you live here, too? Where do you go in summer? Who comes to see you?"
There was only one possible reason for the FBI's interest in me. I have been writing and speaking against American policy in Vietnam for a long time and, more specifically, I was one of the first few hundred signers of A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority, which pledges support of young men who in conscience resist the draft. Adding my name to that call had hardly seemed to me a revolutionary act. I thought these young men courageous and the least I could do was to say so publicly.
The chill left in the wake of the FBI wore off quickly enough, but a certain amount of apprehension remains. I remember, as today's young cannot, the effect on this country of Senator Joseph McCarthy--the careers blighted, the fear that paralyzed and shamed so many who thought themselves liberals. So does the man who wrote the definitive book on the pathology that was then called McCarthyism. The book is Senator Joc McCarthy and the writer, Richard Rovere, is a calm, moderate political analyst for The New Yorker. Last (continued on page 170) Dissent (continued from page 155) October, Rovere wrote in that magazine: "No government that is not totalitarian can go on indefinitely fighting a hard war that its people hate. Something has to give." There will be a test, he added, of how free we really are. "I cannot figure the odds on the outcome," Rovere continued, reminding us that "repression is the safest, surest, cheapest course for any government to take."
What are the odds? What do the auguries of the present tell us about next year and perhaps five years from now--even if the war ends? It seems relevant here for me to tell you that I am on the board of directors of the New York Civil Liberties Union and that indicates, I trust, my conviction that everyone's right to dissent, regardless of ideology, is due the full protection of the Constitution, specifically including the Bill of Rights. Furthermore, in examining the evidence and the auguries, I have kept in mind what I. F. Stone, editor and publisher of his own newsweekly, said recently. A doughtily independent journalist who was not in the least intimidated by Joseph McCarthy, Stone acknowledged that there is real danger of increasing repression in this country. "But," he emphasized, "our duty as believers in and practitioners of dissent is not to scare ourselves to death unnecessarily. I don't feel very optimistic in terms of the immediate future, but I don't feel hopeless."
Among those I talked to in the months of research for this article was a prominent theologian who has been in active opposition to the war. We spoke after Dr. Benjamin Spock, Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin (subject of last month's Playboy Interview) and three others had been indicted by a Federal Grand Jury in Boston on January fifth for "conspiring" to counsel young men to violate the draft laws. One of the "overt acts" charged against Spock and Coffin in particular was the distribution of A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority. [Spock, Coffin and two others of the five have since been convicted and their cases are on appeal.--Ed.]
"I still speak and write against the war, but I'm more careful now," the theologian said; and he then told me of what had happened to George Huntston Williams, Hollis Professor of Divinity at the Harvard Divinity School. A scholar and not an activist, Professor Williams gave a talk in favor of selective conscientious objection to war during a meeting last October 16 at Boston's Arlington Street Church. Six weeks later, members of the FBI visited the professor at his office and said that since they were questioning him concerning a possible indictment, they had to warn him of his rights.
"Williams," said the theologian, "was very disturbed by the incident. One of his specialties is the history of the German church in the 1930s. He told me he never thought he'd hear the knock on the door in this country, but now he's not so sure. He hasn't done much since then against the war. I expect that's one of the reasons the FBI went to see him."
Across the country, in Oakland, California, another stratagem in the war on dissent is being used to intimidate organizers of and participants in antidraft demonstrations. After a large turnout of antiwar protesters last October during Stop the Draft Week, seven young men were indicted on "conspiracy" charges that could lead to a prison sentence of up to three years and a $5000 fine. Among the counts against the dissenters are such acts as the printing and distribution of leaflets, the mere physical marching to an induction center and the opening of a checking account for Stop the Draft Week. Subsequent anti-draft demonstrations in the Oakland area have been less well attended and much less effective.
The war on dissent is by no means limited to opponents of the war in Vietnam. Even if that war does end soon, attempts to repress free speech and the right of assembly, among other legitimate democratic processes, will continue. Still vulnerable are the nation's black militants and some not so militant who just happen to be black. "Much of the troublemaking in the months and years ahead," Richard Rovere wrote in the same New Yorker article, "will be the work of Negroes, and I can even imagine the imposition of a kind of American apartheid--at least in the North, where Negroes live in ghettos that are easily sealed off."
Fanciful? Consider this memorandum about Chicago from Jay A. Miller of the American Civil Liberties Union there: "During the summer of 1967, we saw the machine attempt to use every possible and often lawless measure to 'keep a cool summer.' Using a mob-action statute, indiscriminate arrests and excessively high bail ($10,000--$50,000), they swept the streets of, and imprisoned without hearing, some 250--300 black citizens for a minimum of a week."
Several of those "lawless" measures were declared unconstitutional by a United States District Court judge in Chicago this past March. The city council, however, immediately enacted new ordinances that Jay Miller characterizes as being "worse than the old ones." Among them, for instance, is a stipulation that anyone continuing an activity deemed likely to lead to breach of the peace after the police have ordered him to stop can be charged with disorderly conduct. "Deemed likely" is so loose a term that it can encompass anyone the police want to seize. Similarly, there is another stipulation that anyone knowingly entering property open to the public and remaining there with "malicious or mischievous intent" give the police free reign to stop any demonstration they choose.
New York City, meanwhile, has passed emergency measures for "riots and other disorders" that are shocking in view of the fact that Mayor John V. Lindsay has long been considered one of the country's most committed civil libertarians. The new measures, enacted last spring, severely restrict civil liberties by the imposition of curfews and the closing off of "disturbed" areas with accompanying harsh penalties for infractions of these emergency laws. The mayor is permitted to impose these restrictions on the free movement and free assembly of New Yorkers whenever he has "reason to believe that there exists a clear and present danger of a riot or other public disorder." As the New York Civil Liberties Union pointed out in a futile protest, "This condition does not pretend to be objective. It does not even require that a clear and present danger actually exist; it merely requires that the mayor believe it exists. He doesn't have to be right; he only has to be sincere. Such a provision truly substitutes the rule of men for the rule of law."
Just as startling is the power the mayor of New York now has to use his emergency measures if "an act of violence" has taken place. As the N. Y. C. L. U. also charged, "This condition is so vague as to be meaningless. Hardly a day passes without 'an act of violence.' The bill does not even bother to state whether or not the act of violence has to occur in New York City. It would appear that this bill permits the mayor to declare a state of emergency in New York simply because there was a riot in Detroit, without any requirement to show the existence of a similar threat here. Had this bill been passed prior to the assassination of Martin Luther King, it would have permitted the mayor to restrict civil liberties in New York because of the possible effects of 'an act of violence' in Memphis."
And New York City is generally considered to be the most "liberal" in the country.
Philadelphia officials have also become expert in keeping their city "cool," whether or not a clear and present danger to the peace exists. A proclamation last summer prohibited "all persons... from gathering on the public streets or sidewalks in groups of 12 or more... except for recreational purposes in parks or other recreation areas." A similar proclamation was issued and enforced immediately after the murder of Martin Luther King. Precedents for immediate, arbitrary use of "emergency" powers are (continued on page 228) Dissent (continued from page 170) being set throughout the country, and they are dangerous precedents.
At the same time, individual dissenters are being repressed. In recent months, H. Rap Brown, national chairman of SNCC, has been undergoing a complicated series of court cases. When he was first released on bail, it was only on condition that he not leave the 11 counties of the southern district of New York, where the office of his lawyer, William Kunstler, is located. The judge who made the decision did not try to hide his intent: "Mr. Brown is not going to make speeches, because he is going to have to stay in Mr. Kunstler's district except when going to and from trial." For a time, the attempt to silence Brown worked. He had to cancel many speaking engagements in this country and abroad. When he finally did go to California to speak, he was jailed. And last May, he received the maximum sentence of five years in jail and a $2000 fine for violating the National Firearms Act. That law forbids anyone under a felony indictment to transport a gun across state lines. The charge against Brown was that while under an indictment for arson in Maryland, he carried a carbine in his luggage on a plane from New York to Baton Rouge last August. There is not only a serious question as to whether Brown did, indeed, know he was under indictment at the time but there is also the clear likelihood that he is being punished so severely in an attempt to silence him for as long as possible. At the time of Brown's sentencing in New Orleans on May 22, William Kunstler declared: "I would hate to think my country used a little-known law like this to persecute and silence this man." It did; and the case is now on appeal.
Another illustration of how dangerous it is becoming to be a militant black dissenter is what happened to Clifton Thirley Haywood, a Negro and a Muslim. Last October, he was given two consecutive five-year sentences and two $10,000 fines for violations of the Selective Service Act--the heaviest sentence for such violations of the Selective Service Act since World War One. The jail term and fines were imposed even though Haywood had told Judge Frank M. Scarlett of the United States District Court in Brunswick, Georgia, that he was willing to violate his religious beliefs and enter the Armed Forces. If Haywood were not black, and a Muslim besides, would the sentence have been that severe? Even Senator Richard Russell of Georgia knows the answer to that question.
In January of this year, poet-polemicist LeRoi Jones, charged with the possession of guns during the violence in Newark last summer, received nearly a maximum sentence--two and a half to three years, plus a $1000 fine, with no probation permitted. The reason: because of what LeRoi Jones has written--the First Amendment notwithstanding. The judge said explicitly that he made the sentence so severe in large part because of a poem by Jones that had appeared in the previous month's Evergreen Review. The poem, the judge stated, was "antiwhite and full of obscenities." Only on the day of the sentencing was Jones or anyone else aware that he was also on trial for writing a poem. Reflecting on this ominous augury, Allen Ginsberg, gathering signatures for a writers' petition protesting the sentence, said: "I'm getting scared because of police-state purposes in this country. A lot of things I imagined in Howl are, unfortunately, coming true.... LeRoi didn't have any pistols. I talked to his father and his wife and they both told me that LeRoi had told them in private that he didn't have any guns. I called California the other day to get people to sign the petition and found that Ferlinghetti and Baez were in jail. And now Spock. Everything has gotten serious in a very weird way."
The growing thrust toward repression of dissenting views and of "troublemakers" is not limited to black militants and objectors to the war. The undernourished "war on poverty," for instance, has increasingly limited the possibilities of dissent for those of the poor who have been sufficiently "uplifted" to be hired as subprofessionals or in other roles in Federally aided projects under the Economic Opportunity Act. At the end of last year, new legislation gave local government officials throughout the country much more control over antipoverty programs, thereby making it much easier to dismiss staff members who are critical of those same local government officials. Previously, bars had been placed on political activity by antipoverty personnel, and these have now been extended to include nonpartisan political activity. Another way of describing this process is co-optation: If you want to get on the payroll and stay there, don't make waves.
Another group experiencing penalties for dissent and nonconformity are the young--not only those who resist the draft but young people as a whole. In Youth--The Oppressed Majority (Playboy, September 1967), I indicated the scope and variety of pressures on the young. Those pressures are increasing. Recently, Ira Glasser of the New York Civil Liberties Union reported in a memorandum to all chapters in the state: "The number of violations of students' civil liberties by school administrators is growing at an alarming rate. These violations have, to my knowledge, fallen roughly into three categories: 1. Denial of due process; 2. Repression of individual expression (mainly long hair and dress codes); and 3. Harassment of political activity.
"Denial of due process cases have involved things like summary suspension, hearing without counsel, permitting police to interrogate young children for hours without notifying parents, etc. The long-hair and dress-code cases have included some of the most bizarre and arbitrary standards imaginable, despite orders from State Commissioner of Education James Allen to the effect that school administrators had no right to impose such standards if they did not relate directly to educational goals. Harassment of political activity has taken many forms, including illegal search and seizure, threats of suspension for distributing leaflets or circulating petitions, repression of student clubs organized for political purposes." And New York is far from the only state in which the Bill of Rights is not considered to apply to the young.
But is there really that much cause for urgent concern that the right to dissent may become emasculated? After all, there have always been repressive forces throughout our history. What determines the strength and effectiveness of those forces of repression, however, is the mood of the nation at any given time--and also the degree to which the majority of us understand and are committed to the Bill of Rights. A few years ago, Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren said he was not sure the American people would vote for the Bill of Rights if it were up for ratification today. In December 1967, the Harris Poll posed this question: "Do you feel that people who are against the war in Vietnam have the right to undertake peaceful demonstrations against the war?" When the same question had been asked the previous July, 30 percent said opponents of the war do not have that right. By December, 40 percent took that position, one that in effect ignores the First Amendment. If peace talks break down and the war escalates again, with correspondingly larger numbers of American deaths, what percentage of the citizenry will continue to support the right of dissent under the First Amendment? And if the racial divide grows wider and deeper, leading to more violence, how much opposition will there be to loosely phrased "emergency laws" in cities and states?
Another way of measuring and predicting the national mood--in addition to public-opinion polls--is by listening to Congress and watching what it does. The present Congress has quite clearly moved to the right. Its most enthusiastic response during the President's State of the Union Message in January was to the section that began: "Now we at every level of government--state, local, Federal--know that the American people have had enough of rising crime and lawlessness in this country." There were cheers, whistles and 11 bursts of applause. That section, incidentally, contained this chilling Orwellian line: "And finally, I ask you to add one hundred FBI agents to strengthen law enforcement in the nation and to protect the individual rights of every citizen."
True, there have always been voices for repression in Congress; but during the past two years, they have become louder and more insistent than at any time since the presence of Joe McCarthy loomed over Capitol Hill. In May 1967, Assistant Attorney General Fred Vinson was testifying before the House Armed Services Committee. Many of its members were pushing for immediate and relentless prosecution of all those who had given support to young men resisting the draft. Vinson explained that the First Amendment protects the right of free speech unless utterances constitute a "clear and present danger to the country." Responded Representative F. Edward Hébert of Louisiana: "Let's forget the First Amendment!"
On the House floor in September 1967, Emanuel Celler of New York, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and generally considered a liberal, spoke sternly of "the responsibilities which march along with dissent" and asked whether dissenters are "aware of the point where the flow of the First Amendment reaches the wall of a clear and present danger." The time has come, Celler added, "to extend the rule of law within and without the boundaries of this land." Imprecise, but threatening, and further limning the mood of Congress. It is not a mood consonant with the conviction of Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black that "the First Amendment grants an absolute right to believe in any governmental system, [to] discuss all governmental affairs and [to] argue for desired changes in the existing order."
In December 1967, as news broke that Stokely Carmichael was coming home from his travels abroad, a number of Congressmen prepared special greetings. While overseas, Carmichael had, indeed, spoken vehemently against American policies; but that was all he had done. He had given his opinions. Proclaimed Congressman Robert Michel of Illinois: "I rise to express my complete agreement with President Johnson on one point. I am referring to press reports that the President feels very strongly that Stokely Carmichael should be prosecuted for sedition if and when he returns to the United States."
This past spring, there were passionate speeches in Congress in opposition to the right of assembly in Washington of the members of the Poor People's Campaign that had been initiated by the late Martin Luther King. Bills were submitted to forbid the march, to deny the demonstrators access to the Capitol or its grounds and to campsites on public parkland. Senator Karl Mundt even accused Government officials of "lacking courage" to stand up against dissent. Meanwhile, other Congressmen were volubly exacerbated by the waves of dissent on college campuses throughout the country, particularly the rebellion at Columbia University.
But, it can be claimed, these are just Congressmen who are themselves exercising free speech. What is Congress actually doing and planning with regard to the suppression of dissent? The answers are hardly encouraging to believers in the Bill of Rights. Last May, by an overwhelming vote of 306 to 54, the House voted to cut off Federal financial aid--loans, grants, traineeships, fellowships--to students who take part in campus sit-ins or other disruptions of academic operations. The New York Times observed: "To turn Federal stipends into a device to regulate student views and behavior is to stoop to methods generally associated with totalitarian states.... Federal interference with higher education is an intolerable violation of academic freedom."
Also last spring, as part of a civil rights bill, Congress made it a Federal crime to travel from one state to another--or to use radio, television or other interstate facilities--with an intent to incite a riot. The maximum penalty is five years in prison and a $10,000 fine. The bill defines a riot as a public disturbance involving three or more persons endangering either property or persons. Here, too, as in various local antiriot measures, the language is dangerously ambiguous. How is "intent" determined? As Attorney General Ramsey Clark said last year, "The state of mind of an individual when he travels ... interstate ... is very difficult to prove." What does "incite" mean? And what of free speech under the First Amendment?
Also alarming was the sweeping 72-to-4 vote by which the Senate in May passed a crime-control bill that allows wide latitude in the use of wire tapping and electronic surveillance and the admission of evidence obtained through such means into court cases. Under the bill's provisions, not only can the Federal Government tap wires and use bugging devices with much greater legal freedom but state and local law-enforcement officials can use electronic surveillance against any crime "dangerous to life, limb or property and punishable by imprisonment for more than one year." Included, therefore, would be all the alleged crimes so broadly designated in the increasing number of local and state "antiriot" and "conspiracy" statutes. Understating the perils in this new bill, The New York Times noted that the voting indicated the Congressional mood "is against safeguarding privacy. Snooping and tapping were approved not for a few serious crimes but for a wide variety. Furthermore, wire taps would be permitted for up to 48 hours even without a court order."
A further indication of the mood of Congress is a proposal this year by 19 Senators, led by James Eastland of Mississippi, that peacetime treason be declared a Federal crime. If the bill is passed, anyone convicted of giving "aid or comfort" to the Viet Cong or North Vietnamese or "any other nation or armed group engaged in open hostilities against the United States" would be liable to a prison term of up to ten years and a fine of up to $10,000. Without a declaration of war, then, dissent against a particular act of foreign policy could be interpreted as giving aid or comfort--and we would be close to a peacetime police state. "Evidence" of such aid or comfort would be all the more easily obtained through the expansion of permissible wire tapping and bugging.
Congress, meanwhile, is not only passing and considering repressive bills. In recent months, there has been a marked resurgence of activities by various Congressional investigating committees. The venerable House Un-American Activities Committee has been looking into "the Communist instigation behind Northern ghetto riots" and is also exploring the "infiltrated" Draft Resister's League in Dallas. Representative Joe Pool of Texas, one of the committee's more fervent members, has also been urging an investigation of the Students for a Democratic Society, the largest national organization of the New Left.
In addition, the energetic Congressman Pool has called for a "preliminary investigation" of underground newspapers. "These smut sheets," he said during a speech at Yale last November, "are today's Molotov cocktails thrown at respectability and decency in our nation.... Responsible publishers know that freedom of speech can be lost if the First Amendment is abused by the mudslingers who tell one lie after another to destroy those who oppose them." But this is just rhetoric. Who would take Pool seriously? The Liberation News Service, which provides material for much of the underground press, reported in November: "In Dallas, the Southern Methodist University S. D. S. chapter dissolved itself under the heat of Pool's attack last month, the Dallas Draft Information Center was illegally evicted from its office and Notes from the Underground (an independent student newspaper) was banned from campus in a double-think statement by the president of SMU defending freedom of the press." Congressman Pool, furthermore, as a self-proclaimed champion of "our beloved freedoms," has proposed that "Congress should deny funds to any university that permits S. D. S. to have an organized chapter on its campus."
While Congressman Pool beats the campus bushes for subversives, the Senate's Internal Security Subcommittee has undertaken a large-scale investigation of the New Left, including civil rights and antiwar groups. As The New York Times observed on October 29, 1967, the chairman of the subcommittee, Senator Eastland, "obtained the unanimous approval of his subcommittee--including Senate Minority Leader Everett McKinley Dirksen of Illinois and Democratic liberal Birch Bayh of Indiana--for an investigation-authorizing resolution that amounts to a license to hunt for subversion in practically every organization of dissent now in existence."
The immediate focus of Eastland's resolution was on the Chicago meeting of the National Conference of New Politics at the Palmer House last September. Represented at that convention were 367 groups, from Dr. Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference and SANE to the Communist Party, which, by the way, is a legal organization. (And out of more than 2000 delegates to that conference, only seven registered as Communists.) Before Eastland had his resolution to investigate, agents of the subcommittee were at the conference; and when they left, letters, files and other documents of the participating groups disappeared with them.
Another Senate unit, John McClellan's permanent Investigating Subcommittee, is also resurgent. It is engaged in, among other expeditions, a search to determine whether the violence in the ghettos has been "instigated and precipitated by the calculated design of agitators, militant activists or lawless elements."
Are we at the start of a new period of McCarthyism? Seven prominent religious and civil-liberties leaders sent a letter to Congress last spring expressing exactly that fear. Among them were the late Martin Luther King; Roger Baldwin, founder of the American Civil Liberties Union; the Reverend John C. Bennett, president of Union Theological Seminary; Father Robert F. Drinan, S. J., dean of Boston College Law School; Rabbi Maurice Eisendrath, president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations; Robert M. Hutchins, president of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions; and Dr. Benjamin Spock. "The dangers," their letter said, "are manifest. These investigations are not aimed at determining the adequacy of laws concerning overt acts that actually threaten national security.... These investigations are aimed at the sacrosanct areas of First Amendment freedoms--freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and association and freedom of the press. They threaten to repeat the experience of the 1950s, when the cry of communism by Senator McCarthy and his acolytes stifled all but the most orthodox politics. Though we believe that today's dissenters and protesters will not be easily intimidated, the fact remains that the effect of simplistic name-calling will be to intimidate some people. The more intensive the name-calling and the guilt by association, the greater the number of those who will prefer anonymity to visibility and will prefer to remain outside the political dialog. More than that, however, it may well lead, as in the Fifties, not only to silence but also to persecution, prosecution and loss of employment.
"Perhaps the most serious consequence," the letter concluded, "may be the further lowering of the quality of debate concerning the nation's problems. With the isolation of the substantive criticism of the activists from the American mainstream, the search for solutions may turn up scapegoats, and the means of dealing with the conditions may be increasingly repressive."
The possibility of repressive means has been considerably increased by a particularly ominous act of Congress at the end of last year. It passed a bill giving new life to the Internal Security Act of 1950, part of which the Supreme Court had declared unconstitutional. Surprisingly little public attention was given this development, but both the original act and its new amendments merit close study. The 1950 bill was vetoed by President Harry Truman, who said it represented "a clear and present danger to our institutions" and "would make a mockery of the Bill of Rights and of our claims to stand for freedom in the world." The Senate voted to override Truman's veto. One of the votes to override was that of Lyndon Johnson.
Among other provisions, the original act set up a five-man Subversive Activities Control Board and required Communist-front and Communist-action organizations to register themselves with the Attorney General. In 1965, the Supreme Court decided that the latter section was unconstitutional because it violated the Fifth Amendment guarantee against self-incrimination. The newly amended act permits the Subversive Activities Control Board to conduct its own hearings as to whether organizations are Communist, Communist controlled or Communist infiltrated. If the board declares that a group falls into one of those categories, the names of all members will be publicly listed with the Attorney General. In arguing unsuccessfully against the adoption of this end run around the Supreme Court, Congressman John Culver of Iowa warned: "To grant such frightening power (to establish a public black list of organizations deemed Communist or 'Communist infiltrated') to a bureaucrat, to five men or, indeed, to (any) Government official... is most dangerous and irresponsible, because it may only serve to stifle dissent--it may only serve to kill expression of controversial views in this nation. To the extent that it denies the political vitality and vigor of our own free institutions, then it clearly aids and abets the Communist movement."
When the measure came up in the Senate for final adoption on December 14, only five Senators were in the chamber, and this extraordinary piece of legislation became law by a vote of three to two. It may be significant to remember that in earlier debate, Senator Dirksen told his colleagues that the President had called him to the White House and told him he wanted the bill passed. The sonorous Senator from Illinois then raised the flag to obscure the Constitution: "We are at a time when we have to call a spade a spade in this country. The time for fooling is past. We have 475,000 youngsters and oldsters out in Vietnam. What do you think they think when they read about these things going on in the Senate--people trying to stop the Subversive Activities Control Board from doing its work?"
There are further dangers to dissent in the new legislation. As a group of civil-liberties lawyers, including Melvin Wulf of the American Civil Liberties Union and William Kunstler, have pointed out: "The statute, as amended, is, to put it conservatively, even more 'at war with the First Amendment' than its predecessor. For example, the definition of a 'Communist-front organization' has been further 'liberalized' to provide that an organization may be registered as a 'Communist-front organization' if it 'is substantially directed, dominated or controlled by one or more members of a Communist-action organization ...' (emphasis added). The act previously defined a 'Communist-front organization' as one that 'is substantially directed, dominated or controlled by a Communist-action organization.'"
How can it be proved that one Communist, who may well have hidden the fact that he is a Communist, is "substantially" directing, dominating or controlling your group? One key test, under the new amendments, is whether your organization is involved in "advocacy, espousal and teaching of a creed or of causes for which the Communist movement stands." As Representative Culver emphasized in his losing battle in the House, it would be quite possible for "innocent organizations" to take positions on matters of policy that in particular cases don't deviate from those of the Communist movement. "An organization advocating humanitarian programs designed to meet the unrest of the cities following last summer's riots," Culver noted, "could be classified as a Communist front if the Communist Party should find it expedient to exploit such causes."
As if the amendments to the Internal Security Act were not threatening enough to dissent, "the most serious aspects of this bill," as Congressman William Ryan of New York has warned, "involve not what it alters but what it leaves unchanged. The restrictions on freedom of association inherent in the original act are unchanged." So is the ability of the Government to weaken and eventually destroy organizations through lengthy and expensive legal proceedings. This happened, as William Kunstler recalls, to many organizations under the old act. "This way," he says, "the Government can effectively kill by exhaustion those organizations it doesn't like."
Also still in effect is Title II, Section 100 of the original Internal Security Act. This provides that the President alone, under certain conditions--a declaration of war by Congress, an "insurrection" within the United States or "imminent invasion" of this country or any of its possessions--can declare a national "internal-security emergency." As soon as the President does this, the Attorney General is required by the act to apprehend "any person as to whom there is reasonable ground to believe that such person probably will engage in, or probably will conspire with others to engage in, acts of espionage or sabotage."
According to the December 27, 1953 New York Times, six camps were actually set up for "dangerous" people--at Allenwood, Pennsylvania; Avon Park, Florida; El Reno, Oklahoma; Florence, Arizona; Wickenburg, Arizona; and Tule-lake, California. At that time, Charles R. Allen had described these camps in The Nation and other publications. In the June 1967 Realist, Allen wrote that he had recently reinvestigated the situation: "Briefly, I found that the program is still in full force. That the Johnson Administration is all set to swing into action. That there are at least 1,000,000 Federal Internal Security Emergency Warrants waiting to be used if need be. That the FBI has a thing called 'Operation Dragnet' that it can throw into full gear 'overnight.' That the concentration camps are, in one form or another, still ready on a 'stand-by basis' and that they can hold at least an initial complement of 26,500." He also claims that "the likely candidates for being picked up in 'Operation Dragnet' have expanded considerably since the passage of Title II so as to include the whole black-hippie-dissent scene."
Allen asked Walter Yeagley, head of the Internal Security Division of the Justice Department--charged with carrying out these details of the Internal Security Act--for an interview about the camps. Yeagley wrote Allen that he did not consider the inquiry "a subject for public discussion." Earlier this year, however, Yeagley and other Government officials were interviewed by William Hedgepeth, a senior editor of Look, in the course of an investigation by that magazine about the existence of the camps. Hedgepeth could find no evidence "either of physical preparations or of plans by the Federal Government for mass-level incarceration of Americans via Title II of the McCarran Act." But he was careful to add: "Still, the law lies on the books, the campsites exist... it could happen here." And he quoted Melvin Wulf of the A. C. L. U.: "The mere existence of the camps is really beside the point. If the law went into effect, they'd have no trouble finding some place to put 'em all." An unnamed Federal official agreed with Wulf: "Even without camps, we could transfer and double up in our prisons to hold people. We've got the talent and the staff to sit down and start working out transfers in a hurry."
That's the point. The law exists, and plenty of space can be found to intern all those picked up under that law. In 1962, in an interview on New York radio station WBAI-FM, former FBI agent Jack Levine revealed how quickly the roundups could take place. "The FBI," he said, "estimates that within a matter of hours every potential saboteur in the United States will be safely interned. They'll be able to do this by the close surveillance they maintain on these people; and they (the FBI) envisage that with the cooperation of the local police throughout the country, they'll be able to apprehend these persons in no time at all."
Nor is such a forced march to concentration camps without precedent in American history. It happened during World War Two to 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry--70,000 of them American citizens by birth--who were herded into "relocation" camps for as long as four years. The most comprehensive account of that time of hysteria is Allan R. Bosworth's 1967 book. America's Concentration Camps. In his introduction to the book, Roger Baldwin of the American Civil Liberties Union, by no means an alarmist, warns: "The laws and the machinery are ready for another day, another war, another emergency, another minority... In order not to be caught again improvising measures for security in wartime or a national emergency declared by the President, Congress has thoughtfully provided that next time camps will be ready for the immediate internment of all persons, aliens and citizens alike, whom the FBI and other intelligence agencies suspect of sympathy with whatever enemy then confronts us."
In retrospect, it's instructive and hardly reassuring to consider the names of some of those who supported the mass imprisonment of the Japanese. When President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order No. 9066, which put the machinery in motion, Earl Warren, then attorney general of California, said that the order was most wise. The act was also upheld by the United States Supreme Court in 1944, with Justice Hugo Black as its spokesman. In one of the three dissenting opinions, the late Justice Robert H. Jackson observed: "A military order, however unconstitutional, is not apt to last longer than the military emergency.... But once a judicial opinion rationalizes such an order to show that it conforms to the Constitution... the Court for all time has validated the principle of racial discrimination in criminal procedure of transplanting American citizens. The principle then lies about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need."
The weapon is still loaded. William Peterson, professor of sociology at the University of California, ended an article, "Success Story, Japanese-American Style," in the January 9, 1966 New York Times Magazine: "The Chinese in California, I am told, read the newspapers these days with a particular apprehension. They wonder whether it could happen here--again." And not only the Chinese are apprehensive.
Just as there is a precedent in American history for "relocation" camps, so there is a chilling diversity of precedents for the suppression of dissent. From 1798 to 1800, the Alien and Sedition Acts were in force, providing jail terms of up to five years and fines of up to $5000 for anyone who spoke or wrote about Congress, the President or the Federal Government "with intent to defame them or bring them... into contempt or disrepute." Ostensibly designed to protect the country from subversion by the French, with whom America's relationships had deteriorated, the Alien and Sedition Acts were really intended by the Federalists in power to cripple the opposition Republican Party of Thomas Jefferson.
In the first four months during which the laws were on the books, 21 newspaper printers, all of whom put out Republican journals, were arrested. One prominent Boston editor died as the result of mistreatment in jail. Among many others arrested was a Congressman, Matthew Lyon of Vermont, who had written in a letter that President John Adams had an "unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation and selfish avarice." For that opinion, the Congressman was sentenced to four months in a tiny, unheated cell in a Vermont jail and fined $1000.
In revulsion against the Federalists' sweeping and arbitrary use of the acts, the electorate defeated them in 1800 and the new President, Thomas Jefferson, pardoned all who had been convicted under the laws. But throughout the 19th Century, there were strong forces against dissent both within and outside the courts. In 1835, for instance, a mob advanced on the Boston office of the Liberator, an abolitionist newspaper edited by William Lloyd Garrison, and dragged him through the streets at the end of a rope. And for many years, abolitionists couldn't meet in the city of New York without having to cope with organized disturbances.
But Garrison and the other abolitionists not only persisted in dissent but also resisted laws they considered an affront to their consciences. On July 4, 1854, Garrison, in the course of a speech in Framingham, Massachusetts, held up a copy of the Fugitive Slave Law, which required the turning over of runaway slaves to their masters. He burned the copy of the law publicly--a precedent of its kind for today's burning of draft cards. Other acts of resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law provoked riots, direct confrontations with law-enforcement officials on the streets and the snatching away of runaway slaves from Southern masters who had gone North to claim them.
There was also resistance to the Mexican War, and Henry David Thoreau was jailed in 1846 for refusing to pay taxes to support that War. (A United States stamp in honor of Thoreau, ironically, was issued last year.) In another striking parallel with current public statements of dissent, Theodore Parker, an abolitionist clergyman, said during the same period: "What shall we do... in regard to this present War? We can refuse to take any part in it; we can encourage others to do the same; we can aid men, if need be, who suffer because they refuse. Men will call us traitors; what then? That hurt nobody in '76. We are a rebellious nation; our whole history is treason; our blood was attainted before we were born; our creeds are infidelity to mother church; our Constitution treason to our fatherland. What of that? Though all the governors in the world bid us commit treason against man, and set the example, let us never submit. Let God only be a master to control our conscience."
In the last half of the 19th Century, there were intermittent attempts, by law and by mob violence, to repress the nascent labor movement, all manner of radicals and women insisting on their right to vote. But the nadir of civil liberties in post-slavery America was reached during World War One and in the years immediately after. National hysteria in World War One did not even exclude clergymen. Theodore Roosevelt declared that "the clergyman who does not put the flag above the church had better close his church and keep it closed." In their book Opponents of War: 1917-18, H. C. Peterson and Gilbert Fite wrote that "in some cases, ministerial opponents of war were handled roughly, or even jailed. Reverend Samuel Sibert of Carmel, Illinois, was jailed in December 1917, because he said in a sermon that he opposed war. In Audubon, Iowa, two men, one of them a minister, were seized by a crowd who put ropes around their necks and dragged them toward the public square. After one of them signed a check for a $1000 Liberty Bond, he was released. The minister was released because of the intervention of his wife. The Sacramento Bee, December 27, 1917, headlined the report, 'near Lynchings give pro-Germans needed lesson.'"
In 1917, Congress passed the Espionage Act, still on the books, which made it a crime, punishable by a $10,000 fine and 20 years in jail, for anyone to "convey false reports or false statements with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the military or naval forces of the United States or to promote the success of its enemies... or attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny or refusal of duty in the military or naval forces of the United States, or... willfully obstruct recruiting or enlistment service."
The next year, to make doubly sure the lid was on dissent, the Sedition Act came into being. It prohibited anyone, on pain of a $10,000 fine and 20 years' imprisonment, to "utter, print, write or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous or abusive language about the form of government of the United States, or the Constitution of the United States, or the uniform of the Army or Navy of the United States, or any language intended to... encourage resistance to the United States or to promote the cause of its enemies."
Security in time of war is one thing, but the 1918 act invited a return to the arbitrary repression of 1798. In the course of World War One, more than 2000 people--including pacifists and Socialists--were prosecuted, many for simply speaking against the War. With the War over, there were further abuses of the Bill of Rights. In Red Scare, Professor Robert K. Murray describes the start of this next stage under Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. On August 1, 1919, Palmer established within the Justice Department's Bureau of Investigation "the so-called General Intelligence, or antiradical, Division. As its head, he appointed young J. Edgar Hoover, charging him with the responsibility of gathering and coordinating all information concerning domestic radical activities. Under the general guidance of bureau chief William Flynn and through the unstinting zeal of Hoover, this unit rapidly became the nerve center of the entire Justice Department and by January 1920, made its war on radicalism the department's primary occupation. In fact, there are some indications that both Flynn and Hoover purposely played on the Attorney General's fears and exploited the whole issue of radicalism in order to enhance the Bureau of Investigation's power and prestige... and started it on the road to becoming the famous FBI of the present day."
In that connection, it's worth remembering the durable J. Edgar Hoover's persistent attempts to link black militancy, antiwar activities and campus protest movements with communism. In his annual report to the Attorney General last January, Hoover asserted that Communist Party leaders are "pleased with the disturbances on campuses and the disruption of city life by war protesters and riots in the ghettos." Pleased they may be; but their direction of any of these activities has never been proved, in hard fact, by the director of the FBI nor anyone else. Nonetheless, this past May, Hoover went on to charge recklessly that the New Left, typified by Students for a Democratic Society, constitutes "a new type of subversive, and their danger is great." As The Harvard Crimson said in an editorial the same month, "Hoover commands more cooperation from Congressional committees than does any other man, with the possible exception of General Hershey. And as head of a 16,000-man, $200,000,000 organization, Hoover has the kind of semi-autonomy that makes his political stands particularly dangerous."
They were dangerous at the very start of his career, for his zealous early efforts to ferret out radicals and alleged radicals helped result in a series of raids under Palmer that reached a climax on January 2, 1920, when more than 4000 suspected radicals were swept up in a dragnet encompassing 33 major cities in 23 states. "Often such arrests," Robert Murray writes in Red Scare, "were made without the formality of warrants as bureau agents entered bowling alleys, pool halls, cafés, clubrooms and even homes and seized everyone in sight. Families were separated; prisoners were held incommunicado and deprived of their right to legal counsel. According to the plan, those suspected radicals who were American citizens were not detained by Federal agents but were turned over to state officials for prosecution under state syndicalist laws. All aliens, of course, were incarcerated by the Federal authorities and reserved for deportation hearings."
What was the reaction of the citizenry? "The mass of Americans," Murray notes, "cheered the hunters from the side lines, while Attorney General Palmer once again was hailed as the savior of the nation." As for the individual states, during 1919 and 1920, at least 1400 persons were arrested under state syndicalist and sedition laws; 300 were sent to prison. "Although such laws varied slightly from state to state," Murray adds, "the effect was generally the same. Opinions were labeled objectionable and punished for their own sake, without any consideration of the probability of criminal acts; severe penalties were imposed for the advocacy of small offenses; and a practical censorship of speech and press was established ex post facto."
Even free elections were subverted in the name of antisubversion. Victor Berger, a Socialist, was twice elected to Congress from the Wisconsin fifth district (in 1918 and in a special election the following year) and was twice refused his seat by his colleagues. Only one Congressman voted for Berger the first time, only six in 1919. In January 1920, the New York State Assembly, by a vote of 140 to 6, denied seats to five freely elected Socialists.
By the end of 1920, the Red Scare had abated. The next wave of repression began with the formation of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1938 and reached its feverish height during the 1950-1954 suzerainty of Senator Joseph McCarthy. As Walter Goodman has documented in his definitive recent book, The Committee: The Extraordinary Career of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, thousands of reputations were ruined in public hearings before HUAC. In a sampling of life under HUAC, the American Civil Liberties Union tells of "a successful Miami businessman-builder who relied on his Fifth Amendment privilege before HUAC, lost his business and finally had to leave Florida; he was forced to earn a living doing odd jobs and carpentry.
"A girl with a job as a pot washer was fired because her husband and father invoked the Fifth Amendment before the Committee. Her husband, a draftsman, lost his job, too. In a similar case, in another city, a girl who worked for a county government division lost her job because her father declined to testify before the HUAC, though she herself was not involved in the hearings.
"A fire-department captain, who denied he was a member of the Communist Party at the time of his testimony but refused to discuss his past political activity, was dismissed from his post when he lacked one month and ten days of 25 years' service and retirement benefits."
In an essay in The Radical Right, Herbert H. Hyman estimates that by the mid-Fifties, as a result of HUAC, other Congressional investigating committees, their state counterparts and the administrators of Federal security programs, "the total number of individuals whose loyalty or security had been subject to official scrutiny by some organ of American Government clearly extended into the many millions. The number of American families who had been affected by inquiry about one of their family members, and the additional number of families who had encountered such an inquiry through a field investigation of one of their acquaintances, friends or relatives must have been so large as to make quite a dent in the consciousness of the American people."
But what kind of dent? In January 1954, the king klaxon of loyalty testers, Joseph McCarthy, was shown by a Gallup Poll to be held in generally "favorable opinion" by 50 percent of the American people, who felt he was serving his country in useful ways. In opposition was 29 percent, and the rest had "no opinion." With regard to his Congressional colleagues, Richard Rovere wrote in Senator Joe McCarthy, "The truth is that everyone in the Senate, or just about everyone, was scared stiff of him.... Paul Douglas of Illinois, the possessor of the most cultivated mind in the Senate and a man whose courage and integrity would compare favorably with any other American's, went through the last Truman years and the first Eisenhower years without ever addressing himself to the problem of McCarthy. Senator John Kennedy of Massachusetts, the author of Profiles in Courage, a book on political figures who had battled strong and sometimes prevailing winds of opinion and doctrine, did likewise."
McCarthy was finally discredited, largely by his behavior during the televised Army-McCarthy hearings in the late spring of 1954. He clearly revealed himself to a fascinated and then appalled national audience as a bombastic bully, contemptuous of legal procedures. After his decline and eventual condemnation by the Senate, there were a few years of respite from repression of dissent. It appeared that McCarthyism, like the Red Scare before it, had been interred for a good long time. But with the coming of the New Left, increasing student unrest, the Vietnam war and the rise of black activism, we are again at a point in our national history at which the Bill of Rights is in clear and present danger.
In addition to the repressive bills passed in recent months and those being considered by Congress, and along with the intensive hunt for "subversives" by Congressional committees, there is now also the use of the draft as a weapon against dissent. Intimations of what was to come appeared in the fall of last year, as the large-scale October peace demonstrations at the Pentagon were drawing near. On October 19, Congressman Burke of Florida grimly addressed the House: "Mr. Speaker, I would like to suggest two measures that may help curb these disgraces. I would hope, first of all, that the proper authorities would exercise some initiative and immediately round up these hippies, have orders processed for them and turn them over to some rugged military basic-training center for some good training. If they qualify... they can then fulfill their two-year obligation to their country.... These may be drastic actions, Mr. Speaker, but these are drastic times. If these long-haired protesters want to remain citizens of America like several million others, they must start facing the responsibility this citizenship requires." And shut up.
After the Pentagon demonstrations, Congressman Roman Pucinski of Illinois revealed on the floor of the House: "I have asked the Selective Service people to look at every one of these people who have been arrested and find out what their Selective Service status is and how many of these people are enjoying the privilege of not serving in the Service because they are going on to higher education. They have a right to come here and protest against their Government, but they do not have a right to stay out of military service." And if they exercise the first right, let them pay for it.
On October 26, rhetoric was turned into action, when Selective Service Director General Lewis B. Hershey sent a letter to all local draft boards "recommending" that they quickly induct anyone, regardless of what kind of deferment he has, who has interfered with the draft or with military recruiting. A Hershey "recommendation" is interpreted as an instruction, not a suggestion, by local boards. And "interfering" can mean demonstrating at induction centers, symbolic turning in of draft cards and other acts of protest.
Eight House members attacked the Hershey recommendation as "a flagrant denial of due process clearly designed to repress dissent against the war in Vietnam." Hershey was unimpressed. He said he had "talked with somebody" at the White House before issuing the letter; and the next month, he added, "Until the President tells me to change my course, I'll sail it. And he hasn't stopped me." Hershey has also opposed allowing draft registrants to have counsel with them when they appear before local draft boards. An appeal against that order has been turned down--without comment--by the Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, local boards, following Hershey's instructions, have continued to strip dissenters of their deferments. Included have been not only young men but also a 37-year-old member of the Temple University faculty, married and with two children, who had turned in his draft card during a Washington peace demonstration. Other professors and instructors have been reclassified for the same kind of act, as have a Protestant chaplain and a Catholic priest at Cornell, another Catholic priest in Rochester and a number of divinity students.
In the state of Oklahoma, it appears that the use of the draft against dissent has been extended to make a young man vulnerable for just being a member of a particular organization opposed to the war. John M. Ratliff, a University of Oklahoma student, has been reclassified 1-A by Tulsa Draft Board No. 76, specifically because of his membership in Students for a Democratic Society. The local board wrote Ratliff that it "did not feel that your activity as a member of S. D. S. is to the best interest of the U. S. Government...."
Moreover, according to the December 14, 1967, Village Voice, "a phone call to the Tulsa Draft Board No. 76 confirmed that all the state's draft boards had been 'ordered by General Hershey to review the status of all S. D. S. students.'" As the Voice noted, "The incident raises several questions. How did Draft Board No. 76 get the S. D. S. membership list? Does this mean that mere membership in an organization, never cited by the Government as subversive, will result in the automatic loss of student deferments?"
The use of governmental force by a draft board to war on dissent is, however, at least an act that can be fought within the democratic process. The board makes its move; then it can be attacked in court. At present, suits against General Hershey's manipulation of the draft to intimidate dissent are being carried forward by the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Student Association and other groups. More disturbing is the increasing use by government--Federal and local--of secret-police tactics.
As authoritarian states have demonstrated with cold efficiency, one way to control--and ultimately destroy--dissent is to infiltrate the opposition. In a democratic society, a reasonable case can be made for infiltrating secret, illegal and violent groups--the Mafia, the Ku Klux Klan, the Minutemen, or a revolutionary cadre, right or left, committed to assassination as a political weapon. But serious questions arise when the state moves by stealth to gather information about those who are simply exercising their First Amendment rights. During a Washington press conference of the American Civil Liberties Union last September, for example, it was discovered that among those present were Secret Service agents photographing the participants and clandestinely taping the proceedings. Nor is it reassuring when Newsweek discloses that "in New York, Los Angeles and other cities, local police and Federal agents masquerade as newsmen, especially as newspaper photographers, to collect information unobtrusively at antidraft and peace demonstrations."
In addition, some of the infiltrators turn out to be agents provocateurs, hardly a legitimate role for law-enforcement personnel in a free society. Last December in Chicago, the Chicago Peace Council exposed three policemen who had been posing as exceptionally active members of that antiwar group. Karl Meyer, chairman of the council, noted that the three infiltrators "invariably took the most militant positions, trying to provoke the movement from its nonviolent course to the wildest kind of ventures." Jay Miller of the Chicago A. C. L. U. called the use of these agents provocateurs, trying to get groups to perform illegal acts, a "real police-state practice that is bound to have an effect on dissent."
There were also infiltrators, many dressed as hippies, among the demonstrators at the Pentagon on October 21, 1967. Among them were agents of the FBI, the Secret Service, the Washington police and Army intelligence. In November, Colonel George Creel, assistant chief of the Army's public information office, told a George Washington University public-relations class, "There were more men infiltrated by us into the crowd at this demonstration than at any event I can remember." Were any of them provocateurs? No one who knows is saying.
In New York City in recent months, plainclothesmen dressed as hippies have been active in peace demonstrations and some have later been identified by legitimate participants as having tried to urge the demonstrators on to more and more provocative action.
Secret-police infiltration has also moved onto campuses. The extent to which spying and political surveillance have been spreading in the colleges was detailed by Frank Donner in Spies on Campus (Playboy, March 1968). In a recent instance, during the student rebellion at Columbia last spring, a shaggy-haired New Leftist, usually wearing a safari jacket and cowboy boots, turned out to be a policeman attached to the Bureau of Special Services (New York City's "Red Squad"). Having infiltrated the campus protest movement for two months, this same disguised cop was the man who finally arrested S. D. S. leader Mark Rudd on charges of riot, inciting to riot, criminal trespass and criminal solicitation.
Yet another method of stifling dissent is open, brutal police contempt for such First Amendment rights as "the right of the people peaceably to assemble" without being clobbered. If enough heads are busted and enough blood flows, the exercise of that right becomes so perilous that potential dissenters decide to stay home. Last June, when 15,000 antiwar demonstrators gathered outside the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles, where President Johnson was attending a dinner, the police descended on the peaceable largely white, middle-class assemblage as if they were invading a black ghetto in revolt. "Some police clubbed wildly," the American Civil Liberties Union reported, "others held the demonstrators so their colleagues could club them; others surrounded the crowd, compressing it, preventing the dispersal they had ordered and clubbing those who came within swinging range. Caught in the crush were children, pregnant women, old people, people on crutches and in wheelchairs. A partially paralyzed boy was hit on the head, knocked to the ground, clubbed and kicked, when he told an officer to stop hitting his mother. One officer knocked a baby from her mother's arms; another beat up a man who tried to pick up the child." Within a week after the police had rioted, the chairman of the Board of Police Commissioners announced that the board had "reviewed all the circumstances of the occasion" and found "the police had taken proper action."
The Committee of the Professions, a peace group in New York, has released detailed reports of brutality against demonstrators at the Pentagon last October. In statements signed by professors and other professionals, there are descriptions such as this: "For most of Saturday night, unprovoked arrests were accompanied by great violence. People were pulled away with no warning, clubbed and kicked in the sight of their friends." Similar accounts have come in recent months from participants in antiwar demonstrations in Chicago, Oakland, Cincinnati, Iowa City, Cleveland, San Francisco, San Jose and other cities. In New York, The New York Times in November reported the following attack on 500 young demonstrators: "A sudden charge by about 20 patrolmen into the front ranks of the marchers, many of whom were young women. Billy clubs swung and blood spattered the sidewalk. The flying wedge of policemen sent the crowd reeling back in disorder. Some youths were flung against the iron fence of [a] high school and ordered to stand spread-eagled, with arms and legs stretched wide apart, while plainclothesmen searched them. One youth was dragged by the hair across the street and thrown into a police van."
In one of several complaints to New York Mayor John Lindsay, the New York Civil Liberties Union got to the core of what appears to be a pattern of harsher police practices against demonstrators throughout the country by referring to "the atmosphere of intimidation which now hangs heavy over all future antiwar demonstrations."
The pattern continues. Last January, the Berkeley Barb reported from San Francisco about a demonstration on the appearance in that city of Secretary of State Dean Rusk: "Police repeatedly sprayed Mace at close range into the faces of persons held helpless by other cops. Police continually pursued, clubbed and Maced demonstrators blocks from the Fairmont Hotel--where... Rusk was saying, 'This country is committed to free speech and free assembly. We would lose a great deal if these were compromised.'"
The same paper carried this account of police savagery: "The fury of them! The way they were beating people! There were two or three of them on foot behind us and two on motorcycles. One kid was falling behind and one of the cops drove him between two cars and ran his Harley over him. He drove right over him! I turned away. Tom [her companion] said he went over him again. I turned back and the cop was off his cycle and started beating him.... I saw a girl beaten all bloody around the face and head. Everywhere you looked, people were screaming and running. Anybody who couldn't run fast enough was beaten and arrested."
In May, at Columbia University, police were called to clear the campus in the early morning. Students had staged sit-ins to protest Columbia's expansion into neighboring Harlem without having consulted or shown real concern for the community. They were also demanding more internal democracy on campus and the severance of Columbia's ties with the Institute of Defense Analyses, a consortium of 12 universities engaged in secret war research and in devising means of "pacifying" our domestic ghettos. The viciousness of the police at Columbia was such as to cause Dr. June Finer, a medical volunteer on campus that night, to declare: "I've been involved in demonstrations before. In the South in '64 and '65, I saw policemen I thought were unnecessarily vicious. But this was almost unbelievable, to see so many instances at once of overwhelming brutality." Another doctor, a member of the Medical Committee on Human Rights, said: "The plainclothesmen and detectives were like wild animals. They were beating up people who had offered no resistance at all and, in most cases, were bystanders."
Describing another police riot, this one at a Chicago Peace Council parade last spring, Joseph L. Sander in The Nation added more bloody detail to the pattern of police intimidation of dissent through violence: "The police hunted in posses through the Loop, beating and arresting many whose buttons identified them as march participants. Many officers removed their badges and name plates for this action. Newsmen and TV crews were frequently ordered to 'get those cameras out of here!' Often, too, a uniformed police officer would step before the camera to prevent its recording the actual descent of a raised club. At one such postdem-onstration encounter at the corner of Randolph and State streets, an officer in a riot helmet, furious because the street was not cleared fast enough, ordered the driver of a halted station wagon to drive right into the crowd. The motorist started forward and knocked down two girls before regaining sanity."
The growing readiness of the police to show naked force is not limited to antiwar demonstrations. Preparing for increased black unrest as well as for more dissent against the war if it continues, police departments, The New York Times has reported, "are purchasing armored cars and stockpiling such equipment as tear-gas grenades, other non-lethal weapons and shotguns.... At least one police department, according to a major helicopter manufacturer who asked not to be identified, wanted to buy an armed helicopter like the ones the Army uses against the Viet Cong in Vietnam." That helicopter could be useful in a new way to those departments that adopt a suggestion recently advanced by the Institute for Defense Analyses--a net that could be moved by hand or could be dropped by helicopter to sweep out a portion of a crowd.
Also in more and more police arsenals are such weapons as Stoner assault guns, which shoot through walls; and armor-plated police commando vehicles that have 18 gun ports and carry a combat crew of 12. Los Angeles is proud of a new 20-ton, tanklike personnel carrier equipped with a machine gun, tear-gas launchers, a smoke-screen device, chemical fire extinguishers and a siren that can disable people merely with its sound.
There is no question that police departments need necessary equipment to handle riots, but the scope of present police overkill in weaponry can only, as Representative John Murphy of New York makes clear, "intensify the fear in the nation's cities. They are not weapons of law enforcement; they are weapons of mass destruction." The President's National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders agrees: "The commission believes there is a grave danger that some communities may resort to the indiscriminate and excessive use of force. The harmful effects of overreaction are incalculable. The commission condemns moves to equip police departments with mass-destruction weapons, such as automatic rifles, machine guns and tanks."
But most police departments continue to ignore these warnings. Caught up in their own rhetoric of "warfare," they see themselves as an army mandated to squash peace demonstrators and dissident blacks. In return, more of those who take to the streets will inevitably escalate their own response. "The thing to remember," James Farmer, former national director of CORE, underlines, "is that the young blacks will not just be throwing bottles and bricks." And increasing numbers of them, he adds, will be returned veterans from Vietnam, skilled in guerrilla-warfare techniques. And others of the young, not black, if pushed to violence, will react in kind.
"We are not at war in our cities," Roy Wilkins of the NAACP kept saying all spring. "The weapons of warfare have no place there." But the police are placing more and more weapons of war in the cities; and throughout history, armaments, when at hand, have eventually been used.
And the weapons are becoming more and more sophisticated. There are not only the commando cars and helicopters but also a wide choice of "nonlethal" pacifiers. The Institute for Defense Analyses, for instance, is fond of a foam generator that can block streets or spray crowds. The beauty of it, the manufacturers claim, is that people immersed in the foam become very disturbed by loss of contact with their environment.
As has been indicated, especially popular among constabularies these days is Mace, a spray that, according to its manufacturer, General Ordnance Equipment Corporation, "envelops assailant with his own small 'cloud' of tear gas from which he cannot escape....The victim suffers temporary loss of vision accompanied by pain that is incapacitating even though only temporary in nature." But the humiliating memory lingers on.
In the past three years, more than 250,000 cans of Mace have been sold to 4000 police departments in the United States. As of April first, each of the 11,500 members of the Chicago police force, for example, is required to carry a spray can of Mace in a holster attached to his pistol belt. It is becoming more and more evident, however, that the effects of Mace may be more than temporary. Dr. Lawrence Rose, a San Francisco ophthalmologist, who has treated victims of the chemical and has conducted his own tests, reports that Mace can cause permanent eye damage, has pronounced deleterious effects on the central nervous system and can inflict second-degree burns on the exposed skin. In late May, the mayor of Paterson, New Jersey, nervously banned the use of Mace by his police because of a report he had received from the United States Surgeon General's office confirming Dr. Rose's finding that the chemical can cause permanent eye damage. But sales still rise, as more and more cops add Mace to their basic weaponry.
A further problem with Mace and other "nonlethal" chemical pacifiers is that their effects can be indiscriminate and quite possibly fatal. Gas or chemical sprays turned on a crowd can incapacitate passers-by as well as participants; and in either group, someone with a weak heart or a severe respiratory condition could die as a result. But a spokesman for Smith & Wesson, a leading manufacturer of chemical crowd controllers, is quoted in The New York Times business section: "We're selling all we can make, and we feel that the equipment we're making is lifesaving equipment." As national values and priorities become increasingly distorted, so does language. And so do people. In the past two years, gun ownership in the United States--civilian, not police--has increased by 25 percent. As the Times notes, "Demographic facts--there are more whites than Negroes and more of them have more money--would indicate that the distribution favors whites." Shotgun sales are up particularly high in Montgomery County, Washington's wealthiest and whitest suburb. A clerk in a gunshop in Allen Park, a white suburb of Detroit, told a Wall Street Journal reporter: "Hate is getting big. The word is that if there's any trouble this summer and you see a black man in your neighborhood, shoot to kill and ask questions later." And after the summer? Does hate stop as the leaves fall?
With police arming as if for Armageddon and with more neighborhood vigilante groups forming, there is reason to listen carefully to the Reverend Andrew Young, a mild-mannered assistant to the late Martin Luther King: "We are almost facing the danger of a right-wing military take-over of our cities. If we have another couple of summers of riots, you will get much more repressive police action--and certainly no change."
Also looking ahead is the Defense Department, which has started a program to facilitate the recruitment of ex-Servicemen by police departments. The Defense Department offers soldiers discharges up to three months in advance of their normal separation times if they sign up as policemen. As Allen Young of Liberation News Service observes, "The plan affirms a general affinity between the police and the military--both refer to outsiders as 'civilians.' " That affinity is constantly being strengthened by the Army's take-over of instruction of local police in what it calls "riot control." At Fort Gordon, Georgia, there are continuous sessions of the Army's Civil Dis-obedience Orientation Course. "Each week since early February," The New York Times reports, "a new class of police officers, Guardsmen and occasional Secret Service or Federal Bureau of Investigation agents has completed the course, directed by the Army's Military Police School." The high point of one class came "when a helicopter swooped over the range, emitting a white cloud of gas that was forced down on the [simulated] mobs by the downdraft of the rotor blades."
As the Army, National Guard and local police become increasingly intertwined, the "civilians" who may become their targets encompass not only ghetto residents but, as was shown at Columbia University last spring, such hitherto privileged groups of the citizenry as college students. And, considering the history of peace demonstrations during the past year, also included are more and more adult middle-class dissenters. The military-police attitude toward these civilians at times leads to scenes that could have taken place in South Africa or Poland. Last October, for instance, Chancellor William H. Sewell of the University of Wisconsin brought in the Madison police riot squad to disperse 200 people sitting outside a room where representatives of Dow Chemical Company, manufacturers of napalm, were holding interviews. "Instead of clearing the building," wrote James Ridgeway of The New Republic, "the police clubbed, stomped and tear-gassed those inside as well as 1500 students standing outside. When students called the university hospital and asked for ambulances to take away the unconscious, the hospital refused. When an intern asked for medical supplies so that he might on his own help the injured, the hospital refused. Neither Chancellor Sewell nor his chief lieutenant, Joseph F. Kaufman, dean of student affairs, appeared at the scene; yet they wasted no time in suspending 13 students; then in the name of safety, they called off the Dow interviews."
But force is by no means the only method being used to ensure conformity on American campuses. Dissenters can be and are being simply severed from academic institutions. Just a few months ago, a Brown University assistant professor of psychology was suspended from teaching duties for the rest of the term because he took part in an anti-CIA-recruiting sit-in; two philosophy professors at Paterson State College in New Jersey were fired for supporting a student petition asking to have political, religious and social organizations on campus; and four faculty members at Adirondack Community College in New York were told their contracts would not be renewed because they supported the right of students to participate in demonstrations and took part in one themselves. What was the demonstration in which the four teachers were involved? A minute of silence at the flagpole on the campus as a protest against the war in Vietnam! There have been more such firings of faculty, and the trend is up.
Also up, as I have shown, is the extent of campus spying and political surveillance. As more and more names of dissenters, off as well as on campus, are fed into FBI files and other Government dossiers, it will be all the easier to keep track of potential "troublemakers" for the rest of their lives--with attendant effects on the careers of those who have been so marked. The Defense Department has 14,000,000 life histories in its security files; the Civil Service 8,000,000. The FBI won't tell how many it has, but it does acknowledge dossiers on 100,000 "Communist sympathizers." And new names are being added at a greatly accelerated rate. The Justice Department has proudly announced its reinforced capacity to track down "extremists" in antiwar cadres and black communities through the pouring of more and more information into the computers of the department's intelligence unit. "Our intake in items of intelligence is immense," Attorney General Ramsey Clark proclaimed last spring. "It ranges in the thousands of items daily," from Federal, state and local sources.
Professor Alan Westin, who wrote The Snooping Machine (Playboy, May 1968) and the book Privacy and Freedom, has demonstrated in great and ominous detail that as methods of surveillance and recordkeeping become increasingly efficient and interlocked, whatever a man has done--or has been suspected of doing--at any time of his life can be frozen into central computers. And there will be no arguing with present or future computers about extenuating circumstances, false information or change of opinion. As Vance Packard has noted dryly, "The notion of the possibility of redemption is likely to be incomprehensible to a computer."
Without many of us realizing it, we are experiencing what Alan Westin terms "the crisis of surveillance technology." How that technology will be used, for what ends and with what safeguards depends, of course, on the degree to which this society really values civil liberties. And that's why the current war on dissent is so crucial. It is a testing ground, and the results may determine the nature of American life for decades to come.
There are certainly reasons for pessimism as to what may happen to the nature of American life. I've detailed many of them in this article. Another, not widely reported, is a disclosure made by Cal McCrystal in the April 23, 1968, New York Post: "It is now a fact of life that any civil servant in the Defense Department who criticizes U. S. policy in Vietnam--or elsewhere, for that matter--stands to lose not only his job but a reasonable chance of getting another one. First of all, he must be examined by a psychiatrist on whose report the patient's supervisor will determine his fitness for duty. If he is fit, it means he no longer disagrees with U. S. policy. If he isn't fit, then he must leave. And on his record permanently is the fact that he received psychiatric treatment, as a result of which he was declared unfit for duty."
If so pervasively powerful an institution as the Defense Department is made so systematically immune from even the merest expression of dissent, a recent diagnosis of our society by Senator Eugene McCarthy becomes all the more disturbing. He spoke, as Dwight Eisenhower did, of the growth of "a huge, powerful and somewhat autonomous military establishment whose influence reaches into almost every aspect of our national life.... The threat it poses is not so much that of a conspiracy as a conditioning, in our lives and institutions."
A particularly revealing example of how this conditioning works was an unsigned letter to The New Republic a few months ago from a draftee. Opposed to the war in Vietnam, he had one quiet confrontation with the Army. He gives no details about it, but he does indicate that it worked out to his advantage. The letter, however, is not in the least buoyant; it's a statement of resignation from dissent: "My experiences in the Service have taught me quite a few things. First of all, the Army does not fit the extreme Left's stereotype of a clique of fascist officers brutally ordering innocent enlisted men to their doom in Vietnam. On the contrary, the enlisted men are the bulwarks of the system. Like most Americans, they are either too ignorant to question it or simply conform and rationalize away any doubts they may have.... If I sound unduly cynical and bitter, it is because I am. I will be a civilian again in a relatively short time and I intend to steer clear of political activism then.... If the Army is a cross section of society, then this society is gravely ill, and incurably so because it doesn't even know it is."
His case is far from unique. The majority of the young remain concerned with keeping their records clean and with not going "too far" in expressing whatever dissent they feel. Those who plan to go into government or into large corporate structures already know what to expect. They would not be in the least surprised at the statement given to The Wall Street Journal by Colonel W. F. Rockwell, chairman of Rockwell-Standard Corporation of Pittsburgh: "We don't try to tell employees what they can or can't do off the job, but we pick them carefully to begin with. Among other things, we don't go looking for people who'll go out looking for trouble." "We assume," said an official of a large Eastern metals processor in the same article, "that people who hold higher jobs here won't do or say anything that might reflect negatively on the company, like speak for some radical political outfit or get tossed in jail over civil rights. If a customer doesn't like our product, OK. But we'd hate to lose out because someone doesn't like one of our men's ideas."
While it is true that many Americans are willing to restrict themselves to the expression of only "correct" ideas, an impressively committed minority continues to insist on exercising its full rights of speech and advocacy. More than 26,000 Americans have signed a Statement of Support for Dr. Benjamin Spock, William Sloane Coffin and the two other supporters of draft resistance whose cases are now in the Federal courts. These signers have pledged to back "those who refuse to serve in Vietnam and those indicted men and all others who refuse to be passive accomplices in war crimes," even though they know that the maximum penalty for aiding and abetting draft refusal is five years in prison, a $10,000 fine or both. And young men in unprecedented numbers are signing statements that they will refuse to serve in the Armed Forces as long as the United States is at war in Vietnam--442 at Harvard, 300 at Yale and 320 law students from 20 law schools.
A newly formed National Federation of Priests' Councils--representing some 35,000 of the estimated 65.000 Roman Catholic priests in the United States--also testifies to the strength of the forces mobilizing against the war on dissent. In May. even though a Catholic priest, the Reverend Philip F. Berrigan, was sentenced to six years in Federal prison for a symbolic act of protest--the pouring of blood on draft-board files in Baltimore--this federation of priests adopted a resolution declaring, "It is consistent with Catholic tradition that men make free and individual determination about the justice of an individual war, and that men have the right to resist the draft according to their consciences."
Even among the military, men who have held vital command posts are breaking with military tradition to speak out against the war--Rear Admiral Arnold E. True, Brigadier General Samuel B. Griffith II, Brigadier General William Wallace Ford, Brigadier General Hugh B. Hester, General Matthew B. Ridg-way, Lieutenant General James M. Gavin and General David M. Shoup, former Marine Corps commandant.
It was the dissenters--students and many adults--who made Eugene McCarthy a national political figure, brought the late Robert Kennedy into the Presidential campaign and finally forced Lyndon Johnson to declare that he would not run for a second term. Clearly, dissent is not going to be so easily muted this time as in the years of Joe McCarthy nor so easily crushed as in the period of the Red Scare. For even when the war ends, the dissenters--in the universities, in the ghettos, and including many in the middle class who want full rights extended to everyone in this country--will continue to speak and act. And though a minority, today's nucleus of dissenters, over and under 30, black and white, are a good deal tougher, however inwardly scared some of them may be. And they're more resilient. Fred Brooks of S. N. C. C., arrested in December for refusal to submit to induction, said that if convicted, he would continue to organize blacks in jail: "You can organize in jail just as well as you can out. They'll be getting out someday."
If today's dissenters retain their courage and their commitment to re-energize American democracy across the board, they may be able to make our cities livable, to awaken Congress to the needs of all the people and to turn education on every level into the creation of citizens for whom freedom is a fundamental value, a basic necessity. I do not, therefore, feel hopeless about the outcome of the war on dissent. But, as I have demonstrated in this article, I do not underestimate the strength of the forces working to stifle dissent, for their greatest support comes from the apathy of the majority. As educator John Holt emphasizes in an essay in Robert Theobald's Social Policies for America in the Seventies: "I... believe that freedom is in serious danger in this country because so many people... do not feel free, never did, don't expect to and, hence, don't know what freedom is or why it should be worth making such a fuss about. For a great many Americans, freedom is little more than a slogan that makes it seem right to despise, hate and even kill any foreigner who supposedly has less of it than they do. When, rather rarely, they meet someone who feels free and acts free and takes his freedom seriously, they are more likely than not to get frightened or angry. 'What are you, some kind of nut?' For, alas, the man who has no real freedom, or thinks he hasn't, doesn't think about how to get it; he thinks about how to take it away from those who do have it."
There is the real danger. For how many Americans is freedom more than a slogan? Abraham Lincoln, a man President Johnson is fond of quoting in other contexts, pointed out: "Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands everywhere. Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism at your own doors. Familiarize yourself with the chains of bondage, and you are preparing your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of others, you have lost the genius of your own independence and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises among you."
That spirit, I believe, has not yet been destroyed in this country. If it is, the majority of us will get the kind of country we deserve. The success or failure of the war on dissent depends on you. More than 100 years ago, Henry David Thoreau wrote: "There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the War, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them; who, esteeming themselves children of Washington and Franklin, sit down with their hands in their pockets and say that they know not what to do, and do nothing.... They hesitate, and they regret, and sometimes they petition; but they do nothing in earnest and with effect. They will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy the evil, that they may no longer have it to regret."
If you now only wait, well disposed, for others to successfully fight for the continued right to dissent, you may discover that you will have waited too long. Today's dissenters are, as William Sloane Coffin has emphasized, the true patriots; for they know that the essence of the American tradition is the right to speak and act as a free man. They also know that if this right is not exercised by enough of the citizenry, it will atrophy.
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