by Howard Zinn
appeared, Lynd was dismissed from his job with the labor firm.
162
Chuck Atchison, a forty-year-old quality-control inspector for a construction company that built a nuclear energy plant in Texas, spoke out publicly in 1982 about numerous violations
of safety regulations at the plant. He was fired. He lost his house, couldn't find a job in his
field, and at one point walked the highway picking up beer cans to sel for scrap aluminum.
The Bil of Rights could give him no protection.42
With no constitutional protection, employees sometimes look to the National Labor Relations
Board (NLRB) to protect their rights. But this has proved a very flimsy defense against the
power of employers. In the mid-1980s, a truck driver in Michigan was fired from his job
because he insisted on inspecting his rig after it was involved in an accident where its
brakes malfunctioned. He appealed to the NLRB, which is supposed to protect members of
labor unions against "unfair labor practices." But the NLRB said the truck driver, because he was not a union member, could be legal y dismissed from his job.43
Private col eges and universities do not fal within the scope of the First Amendment, and so
their employees are without constitutional protection for their freedom of speech. Arlyn
Boudreau, a nurse for twenty years, had worked for seven years with the Boston University
Health Clinic when she and several other workers there began to protest the health and
working conditions at the clinic. She and another worker were cal ed in by the clinic director
and told that they could either resign and get severance pay, or be fired without pay. They
refused and were fired.
The official reason given for firing Mrs. Boudreau was "insubordination." Webster's
Dictionary defines subordinate as "placed in a lower class or rank; inferior in order, nature, importance; submissive to authority." She refused to be submissive to authority, insisted on
speaking her mind, and was without a job.
Standing in front of the clinic on a picket line protesting the situation, she said, "It's the first time I've been on a picket line in my life. I feel like such a radical I can't believe it. My three daughters, aged 17, 19, and 20, they al came out to picket too." It was 1975, and the
nation was getting ready to celebrate the bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence.
Mrs. Boudreau kept her independence, although she didn't keep her job.44
In reality, the difference between working for a private institution, with no constitutional
protection, and working for a public institution, where the First Amendment is supposed to
operate, is insignificant. In either case, the power of the employer in the immediate
situation is the critical factor, and what legal redress there is must be exercised at the
expense of thousands of dol ars and years of time, and stil remain uncertain in its outcome.
The writer Jonathan Kozol taught in a public school in a black district of Boston. Presumably,
his freedom of speech was covered by the Fourteenth Amendment ("nor shal any state
deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law") because the
Supreme Court in 1925 interpreted this clause to cover freedom of speech. But one day in
the 1960s Kozol recited something to his class by the black poet Langston Hughes cal ed
"Bal ad of the Landlord." The poem begins:
Landlord, landlord,
My roof has sprung a leak.
Don't you 'member I told you about it
Way last week?
The poem goes on to describe the man complaining about the steps, broken down too,
whereupon the landlord threatens to cut off his heat, to evict him, to throw his furniture out
in the street. The man threatens to hit the landlord. Then come the last stanzas.
163
Police! Police!
Come and get this man!
He's trying to ruin the government
and overturn the land!
Copper's whistle!
Patrol bel !
Arrest.
Precinct station.
Iron cel .
Headlines in press:
MAN THREATENS LANDLORD
TENANT HELD NO BAIL
JUDGE GIVES NEGRO 90 DAYS IN COUNTY JAIL
Jonathan Kozol was removed from his teaching job by the school committee, which said in
its report: "It has been established as a fact that Mr. Kozol taught the poem 'Bal ad of the
Landlord' to his class and later distributed mimeographed copies of it to his pupils for home
memorization."45
It is a special irony that in schools and col eges—supposed to be special places for the free
dissemination of ideas—it can be dangerous to express yourself. The power of the high-
school principal or the school board or the university president or the board of trustees is far
more important than the words of the First Amendment.
At Boston University, under the dictatorial power of its president John Silber in the 1970s
and 1980s, faculty who spoke their minds were in danger of losing their jobs or their pay
raises.46 Students who expressed themselves freely feared losing scholarships or being
suspended. Administrators who differed with Silber might not hold their jobs long. Members
of the board of trustees who wanted to stay on the board learned not to disagree with the
president's policies.
Student newspapers were required to submit to censorship. Students and faculty who
picketed peaceful y in front of university buildings were photographed by the campus police.
A news director of the university radio station was asked to resign because he refused to
censor a broadcast of a speech that criticized President Silber. The Civil Liberties Union of
Massachusetts reported that it had never received such a volume of complaints about any
institution as about Boston University.
A remarkable student named Yosef Abramowitz, a Zionist who was also active against
apartheid in South Africa and who was a member of a group asking that Boston University
divest itself of its stock in corporations connected with South Africa, learned firsthand about
free speech at the university. One day he hung a banner from his dormitory window, with
one word scrawled large on it: "Divest." When he returned to his room at the end of the
day, the banner was missing. This happened several times more and he kept putting it
back. Then he got a letter from the University Housing Office, tel ing him he would be
evicted from his room if he continued to hang the sign from his window.
Yosef asked the Civil Liberties Union for help, and they secured a lawyer for him. Although
private universities are not covered by the First Amendment, a new civil rights law passed in
Massachusetts in 1980 seemed to cover civil liberties at private institutions also.
164
In court, Boston University pretended that it was not at al interested in Abramowitz's message. Al it cared about was the aesthetic effect of a banner hanging from his window.
Abramowitz's lawyer brought a number of students to the stand who testified that they had
the most ugly things hanging from their windows for months (an inflated yel ow chicken, for
one) and no one had said a word to them. The university's case began to look ludicrous. The
judge found that Boston University had violated Yosef Abramowitz's freedom of speech and
ordered it to stop harassing him about his banner.
What happened after that show
s how the holders of power in any situation are very little
perturbed by the law. Abramowitz proceeded to hang three Divest signs from his windows.
The university then announced that the court decision only applied to him, and that any
other student who hung a banner outside his or her window would face disciplinary action.
There is another institution where the restriction of free speech is especial y ironic: the
courtroom. The United States has long prided itself on "due process of law," which includes the right to have a lawyer and the right to a fair trial. But in the courtroom itself, the judge
controls what can be said in the trial, by excluding any witnesses he chooses to exclude, or
any testimony he considers irrelevant.
We thus have a peculiar situation in a country where people vote freely in elections, where a
Bil of Rights exists, and something we cal democracy operates in the society. In the
everyday institutions of that democracy—in the schools, in the workplaces, on the military
bases, in the courtrooms—freedom of speech is restricted by the power of the people who
dominate those institutions.
Secret Police in a Democracy
In our country, so proud of its democratic institutions, a national secret police has operated
for a long time, in a clandestine world where the Constitution can be ignored. I am referring
to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intel igence Agency. It was a CIA
official Ray Cline who, when there was talk of the ClA's activities violating the First
Amendment, told Congress, "It's only an amendment."47
We might comfort ourselves with the thought that the FBI and the CIA are not as fearsome
as the KGB of the Soviet Union or the death squads that have operated in right-wing
dictatorships supported by the United States—El Salvador, for instance. The scale of terror is not comparable. A radical critic of American foreign policy is not likely to be picked up in
the middle of the night, immediately imprisoned, or taken out and shot. (Although it is
sobering to recal that the FBI conspired with Chicago police in 1969 to murder the black
leader Fred Hampton in his bed.)
But should citizens who cherish democracy use the standards of totalitarian states to
measure their freedom? We want something better than to be able to say we're not as bad
as those countries.
The actual apprehension of dissidents is on a much smal er scale in our country compared to
theirs. But the mere existence of organizations secretly col ecting information on citizens
must have a chil ing effect on the free speech of everyone. The FBI, according to a Senate
report of 1976, has files on 500,000 Americans.
However, the FBI goes far beyond the col ection of information. We learned this from a
mysterious raid in 1971 on FBI offices in the town of Media, Pennsylvania (its perpetrators
have not yet been found). The FBI files were ransacked and then leaked to a smal radical
magazine that published them. Many of the documents were headed with the word
COINTELPRO, and only later was it discovered what that stood for:
165
Counter Intel igence Program. The Senate committee investigating the FBI in the mid-seventies wrote in its report:
COINTELPRO is the FBI acronym for a series of covert action programs
directed against domestic groups. In these programs, the Bureau went
beyond the col ection of intel igence to secret action designed to "disrupt" and
"neutralize" [the FBI's words] target groups and individuals. The techniques …
ranged from the trivial (mailing reprints of Readers Digest articles to col ege
administrators) to the degrading (sending anonymous poison-pen letters
intended to break up marriages) and the dangerous (encouraging gang
warfare and falsely labeling members of a violent group as police
informers.)48
The program began in 1956, according to the Senate committee, ending in 1971 because of
the threat of public exposure. (The raid on the Media office took place on March 8, 1971;
the FBI decided to terminate COINTELPRO April 27, 1971.) The Senate report said,
In the intervening 15 years the Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante
operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment
rights of speech and association, on the theory that preventing the growth of
dangerous groups and the propagation of dangerous ideas would protect the
national security and deter violence.
Again, the excuse of national security. James Madison, back in 1798, had warned about this
in a letter to Thomas Jefferson: "Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at
home is to be charged to provisions against danger real or pretended from abroad."49
In a totalitarian state, we assume that the head of state is aware of the operations of his
secret police. In a country like the United States, however, the higher officials may claim
that they don't know what is going on. Former Attorney General Katzenbach said he didn't
know, but couldn't have stopped it anyway. Official y, the attorney general is higher in rank
than the director of the FBI, but the FBI has a power that attorneys general, and even
presidents, have been afraid to touch.
It should not be thought that the president or the attorney-general strongly disapproved of
these activities, il egal as many of them were. J. Edgar Hoover's successor Director Clarence
Kel ey told the Senate committee "the FBI employees … did what they felt was expected of
them by the President, the Attorney General, the Congress, and the people of the United
States." How the FBI knew what "the people" wanted is not clear. But the bureau did have a fairly good idea of what the president wanted and what would get support in Congress.
There is a long record, at least from 1953 to 1973, of il egal opening of citizens' mail by the
FBI. There is also a long record of il egal break-ins, "black bag jobs," sometimes cal ed
"surreptitious entry." The report of the Senate committee concluded:
We cannot dismiss what we have found as isolated acts which were limited in
time and confined to a few wil ful men. The failures to obey the law and, in
the words of the oath of office [of the president], to "preserve, protect and
defend" the Constitution have occurred repeatedly throughout administrations
of both political parties going back four decades.50
In 1973 staff assistant in the White House Tom Huston drew up a plan, approved by Nixon,
that included wiretapping, mail coverage, and "surreptitious entry." He said, "Use of this technique is clearly il egal. It amounts to burglary. It is also highly risky and could result in
great embarrassment if exposed. However, it is also the most fruitful tool and can produce
the kind of intel igence which cannot be obtained in any other fashion."51
166
One wonders about the files on those 500,000 people (or is it 1 mil ion or 2 mil ion—how can we tel , because the FBI operates in secret). We know from the records of the loyalty
investigations of the 1950s that the FBI filed reports on government employees who had
been seen entertaining black people, or who had been seen at a concert where Paul
Robeson sang, and so on.
One employee was told, "We have a confidential informant who says he visited your house
and listened in your apartment to a recorded opera entitled The Cradle Wil Rock, and that the opera fo
l owed along the lines of a downtrodden laboring man and the evils of the
capitalist system."52
The FBI also maintained files on a number of famous American writers. (This was disclosed
when journalist Herbert Mitgang managed to get documents under the Freedom of
Information Act.) There was a file on Ernest Hemingway, whom the FBI labeled a drunk and
a Communist. The novelists John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath) and Pearl Buck (The
Good. Earth) were in the FBI records as people who promoted the civil rights of blacks. John dos Passes (U.S.A. ), Wil iam Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury), and Tennessee Wil iams (A Streetcar Named Desire) were al on the list. About Sinclair Lewis, on whom there was a
dossier of 150 pages, the FBI said his novel Kingsblood Royal was "propaganda for the
white man's acceptance of the Negro as a social equal."53
There were more serious FBI files than these—the ones kept on members of radical groups,
whose names were put on a "Security Index," which at one time listed 15,000. The people
on this list were to be picked up and detained without trial in case of a "national
emergency." In 1950 Congress passed an Emergency Detention Act, which provided for a
set of detention centers (perhaps more accurately, concentration camps) for those people
on the Security Index. And although the Act was repealed in 1971, the FBI continued its
index.54
When the former head of the FBI's Racial Intel igence Section was asked if during the fifteen
years of COINTELPRO anyone in the FBI questioned the legality of what was being done, he
replied, "No, we never gave it a thought."55
As part of the COINTELPRO the FBI in 1970 tried to discredit Jean Seberg, an actress
(famous for her part in the French film Breathless) who was a sympathizer of the Black
Panther party. The FBI suggested she be "neutralized." Seberg was in her seventh month of pregnancy when she read in a newspaper that she had become pregnant by a member of
the Black Panther party. It was a false story planted by the FBI. The shock of the story led
to premature labor, and the child was born dead. She tried to commit suicide, according to
her husband, every year on the anniversary of her baby's death, and in 1979 she did kil
herself.56
It is hard to tel how many people lost their lives as a result of COINTELPRO, but documents
