The Rights of the People (5 page)

The victims of the time were both famous and obscure. Among the best known were Jane Addams, the founder of Hull House for the poor in Chicago, whose speaking engagements were canceled as she was vilified and threatened for her pacifism; Eugene Debs, the Socialist Party’s presidential candidate and labor leader, who was jailed; and Emma Goldman, the anarchist advocate of “liberty unrestricted by man-made law,” who was arrested and then deported for organizing rallies against the draft.

Among the lesser known was Thomas Aloysius “Red Tom” Hickey, a socialist in Texas who opposed U.S. involvement in the European fighting, calling instead for a “war from within” against capitalism, an economic system he colorfully labeled “a secretive, elusive, Janus-faced foe that besmirches our judiciary, corrupts our congress, debauches our legislatures,
muzzles our press, mammonizes our teachers and preachers, and even seeks to degrade the electorate.” As he left a post office on the afternoon of May 17, 1917, after mailing copy for his newspaper,
The Rebel
, Hickey was seized by a Texas Ranger and three gun-wielding deputies. By the time he was bailed out of an Abilene jail by his wife, over fifty small businessmen and tenant farmers had been locked up for “seditious conspiracy,” writes his biographer, Peter H. Buckingham. Their crime? Their organization had narrowly approved peaceful resistance to the planned draft, a protest the government exaggerated as “an armed uprising.” The criminal cases went nowhere. A jury found all but three of the businessmen and farmers not guilty, and those convicted were later pardoned.

Hickey was never prosecuted, but authorities had other ways to silence him, and strong motives for doing so. He had run afoul of the postmaster general, Albert Sidney Burleson, by reporting in
The Rebel
the eviction of thirty tenant farmers from land owned by Burleson and his brother-in-law. The farmers had been replaced with convict labor—a thinly disguised form of slavery in those years.

On the eve of the Espionage Act’s passage—but six days before it became law—the U.S. Post Office employed the prospective statute to ban
The Rebel
from the mails “for publishing treasonable matter,” Buckingham reports. Hickey protested that the government could not invoke a law not yet in force, but to no avail. He was hounded the rest of his life; his barn was burned down by a mob, and his county’s local newspaper recommended that those who schemed against America be awarded “a nice little plot of their own, about seven feet long, three feet wide and four deep.” Residents of his Texas town of Brandenburg changed its German name to Old Glory, as it is still called today, a monument to xenophobia.
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World War I’s conclusion segued smoothly into the Red Scare of 1919–20, an ideological war with Lenin’s Russia: American union organizers were branded Bolsheviks, leftist foreigners were deported, and state laws were generated to prosecute people for displaying the red flag of worker internationalism. At least 1,400 flag-flyers were arrested, and 300 received sentences of up to twenty years.
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Some 6,000 people, mostly immigrants, were swept up as alleged anarchists in the 1919 Palmer Raids after a series of bombings was punctuated by an explosion on the porch of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s home. The usual suspects were rounded up.

Looking back at this history, you have to marvel at the sense of fragility endured by those at the pinnacle of power. In practically every war,
it seems, those wielding the authority of the state were gripped with a galvanizing fear, not just of the enemy abroad but of an imagined virus of resistance and subversion at home. Or they cynically mobilized the fear. Hitler’s deputy Hermann Goering thought such manipulation possible in every political system. Ordinary people never want war, he told an American psychologist questioning him in 1946, after his capture. “Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece?” Goering asked. “It is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a parliament or a communist dictatorship.” Even where the citizens have a voice? the psychologist asked. “Voice or no voice,” Goering argued, “the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”
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Wartime anxieties in the United States tend to focus first on noncitizens, then spill easily into the ranks of Americans who are outspoken, who have foreign names, or whose race or class makes them readily identifiable as “others.” As if the country were not stable enough to withstand strident dissent or even the silent presence of people ethnically akin to the enemy, those who seem different become convenient targets. That has happened during every detour from constitutional principles.

“Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct,” wrote Alexander Hamilton in
The Federalist Papers
. “Even the ardent love of liberty will, after a time, give way to its dictates.” Even “nations the most attached to liberty” will resort to institutions that destroy their rights. “To be more safe, they at length become willing to run the risk of being less free.”
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And so for the fourth time, during World War II, individual rights succumbed to national fear. There were scattered prosecutions on both the right and the left of the spectrum, using the Espionage Act of 1917 and a new measure, the Smith Act of 1940,
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whose prohibition against advocating the overthrow of the government “by force or violence” was stretched to cover mere membership in communist or fascist organizations. (It is still on the books.) President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a civil liberties supporter in the abstract, repeatedly pressed his reluctant attorneys general to arrest his isolationist critics.

More than two dozen leaders of the Socialist Workers Party in Minneapolis were indicted for opposing entry into World War II and organizing
work stoppages in the defense industry; about the same number of fascist leaders were prosecuted in the Great Sedition Trial, which ended without convictions but effectively curbed speech on the extreme right.
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German-born Americans who expressed sympathy for Germany were stripped of their U.S. citizenship in 146 cases.
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State laws outlawed the uniforms of the pro-Nazi German-American Bund and the employment of communists, resulting in the dismissal of about thirty New York City schoolteachers alleged to be communists. In fifteen states, Communist Party candidates were barred from the ballot.
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After Pearl Harbor was attacked, on December 7, 1941, Roosevelt invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to designate 900,000 Japanese, Italians, and Germans as enemy aliens required to register, to stay within five miles of their homes, and to observe a nighttime curfew.
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They could be searched without warrants and were prohibited from owning guns, cameras, and shortwave radios. Some 120,000 ethnic Japanese, about 80,000 of them American citizens, were expelled from their homes and locked up in ten camps from California to Arkansas, out of suspicion that they
might
aid Japan. They were implicated by their race and national origin alone, not by anything they had actually done. Not a single such charge was ever brought, yet the Supreme Court upheld their internment.
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After the Allied victory, the Cold War against Soviet-led communism sowed fear into fertile ground. For the fifth time in its history, the United States swerved dramatically away from its protection of individual rights. It was a time of flourishing imagination, seeing in respectable political and economic criticism the specter of internal subversion. Leftists, whether communist or not, were promoting workers’ rights, condemning capitalism’s exploitations, and urging an agenda of public policies that triggered high-level anxiety in the political class. To those in power, being a communist was neither a benign intellectual exercise nor a legitimate political position. It was more than an embrace of Marxism’s theory that the stages of history would progress inevitably from feudalism to capitalism to socialism to communism. It was “un-American,” and its proponents were seen as advocates of the Soviet Union’s designs on American security and independence. As David Cole has noted, the suspicions and tactics of the first Red Scare after World War I were now applied against American citizens. “The link between internal enemy—the Communist Party of the
United States—and external foreign threat—the Soviet Union—helped to collapse the distinction between foreign national and citizen.”
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The House Un-American Activities Committee, which compiled dossiers on one million suspected communists, ruined many loyal Americans’ professional lives by summoning them to testify under oath, then berating them with the question “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” An affirmative answer would doom their careers, whether in Hollywood or at universities, and might expose them to prosecution; taking the Fifth Amendment’s shield against self-incrimination, however, put them on blacklists that excluded them from jobs. One hundred of three hundred people who were named as communists and “fellow travelers” in 1950 were fired. Some 3,000 were interrogated publicly from 1945 to 1960. Senator Joseph McCarthy waged a crass and cunning campaign of character assassination against supposed communists in government and the army. And President Harry Truman’s loyalty program permitted the FBI to collect unchallenged rumors and innuendo about millions; an estimated 6,300 employees of private firms, and 11,000 of federal, state, and local governments, were dismissed for allegations of disloyalty that they were never allowed to see or rebut.
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Beginning in this era of the Cold War, and stretching through the Vietnam War into the 1970s, government actions descended underground. In the previous four periods, which began around 1798, 1861, 1917, and 1941, the violations of constitutional rights had been committed mostly in the open, for the public to see and the victims to challenge. During the postwar anxiety over communist infiltration, however, federal agencies evaded the law covertly, and their targets spread exponentially beyond suspected communists to political, labor, civil rights, and antiwar organizations that dared to push against the status quo.

We know the details thanks mainly to Senator Frank Church of Idaho, who chaired a relentless investigation in 1976, collecting testimony and documents that exposed the remarkable breadth of the government’s surveillance, disinformation, and dirty tricks against legitimate and constitutionally protected political activity.
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Not only the FBI—through its infamous Counterintelligence Program called COINTELPRO—but also the CIA, the National Security Agency (NSA), the Internal Revenue Service, and army intelligence were secretly mobilized against dissident groups and individuals. The FBI routinely requested tax files on activists, and the IRS, through its Ideological Organizations Audit Project, selected for audits and investigations about
8,000 people and 3,000 groups “of predominantly dissident or extremist nature,” as the assistant commissioner for compliance told the FBI director in a 1969 memo. The targets included such grave national security threats as the American Library Association, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the National Urban League.

From 1947 to 1975, the NSA intercepted “millions” of private telegrams going into and out of the United States, just as it has done with e-mails and phone calls since 9/11. Nearly 250,000 first-class letters were secretly opened and photographed by the CIA from 1953 to 1973, and the FBI did the same with at least 130,000 from 1940 to 1966.

In addition, using secret informants, warrantless wiretaps, hidden microphones, and clandestine break-ins of homes and offices, various agencies “swept in vast amounts of information about the personal lives, views, and associations of American citizens,” the Church committee found. The CIA compiled an index of 1.5 million names; the FBI had 500,000 intelligence files in headquarters alone, with uncounted numbers in field offices; and the army put 100,000 people in its records from the mid-1960s to 1971. The army monitored protests by welfare mothers in Milwaukee, infiltrated church youth groups in Colorado, dispatched operatives to a meeting of priests on birth control, and even sent agents to a Halloween party for children in Washington, D.C., following a report that a “dissident” might be there.

All this was done for more than curiosity’s sake. The FBI had a list of 26,000 suspicious Americans to be rounded up in case of a “national emergency,” the Church committee discovered. Dossiers were assembled on student activists in case they someday applied for government jobs. “Groups and individuals have been harassed and disrupted because of their political views and their lifestyles,” the report concluded. “Unsavory and vicious tactics have been employed—including anonymous attempts to break up marriages, disrupt meetings, ostracize persons from their professions, and provoke target groups into rivalries that might result in deaths.”

The FBI sent unsigned letters to wives of Black Panthers and others alleging infidelity, a ploy that worked to destroy at least one marriage, the bureau’s files showed. It sent letters to employers trying to get activists fired for their political views. It falsely identified certain members of antiwar organizations as FBI informants so that they would be expelled or isolated, a technique that succeeded in ostracizing at least one draft-resistance counselor.

The dirty tricks got very dirty indeed. Stokely Carmichael, the fiery advocate of black power, flew to Africa the day after the FBI shocked his mother by calling her with an invented report that the Black Panthers were out to kill him. Agents also tried to incite a preemptive strike against the group by telling the head of a Chicago gang that the Panthers had “a hit out for you.”