Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology

by Howard Zinn

  ocean, during her long exile in Europe.106

  In the decade before World War I, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a radical

  trade union, was organizing al workers—skil ed and unskil ed, men and women, native born

  and foreign—into "One Big Union." IWW organizers, going to speak in cities in the far west to miners and lumberjacks and mil workers, were arrested again and again. They refused to

  stop. They engaged in what they cal ed "Free Speech Fights": when one of them was put in

  jail, hundreds of others would come into that town and speak and be arrested until the jails

  could not hold them and they were released. But they refused to be silent.

  This is always the price of liberty—taking the risk of going to jail, of being beaten and

  perhaps being kil ed.

  There is another risk for people speaking and organizing in the workplace: loss of one's job.

  Historical y, the only way workers, subject to the power of a foreman or an employer, could

  have freedom of expression, was to join with other workers and form a union so that they

  could col ectively defend themselves against the power of the employer.

  Freedom of the press depends on the energy and persistence of people in developing their

  own newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets, to say things that wil not appear in the

  mainstream press. Throughout American history, these little publications, pressed for

  money, have managed to form a kind of underground press.

  The Populist Movement of the late nineteenth century spread literature throughout the farm

  country, north and south. The Socialist press of the early twentieth century was read by 2

  mil ion people. Black people, taking a cue from the first abolitionist newspaper printed by a

  black man in 1829, developed their own newspapers, because they knew they could not

  depend on the orthodox press to tel the truth about the race situation in the United States.

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  When in the 1950s journalist I. F. Stone decided he could not count on having an outlet in the regular press, he published his own little four-page newspaper. /. F. Stone's Weekly

  contained information unavailable elsewhere, which Stone, in Washington, D.C., put

  together by reading obscure government documents and the Congressional Record; it soon

  became a famous source of reliable facts. The first rule of journalism, Stone declared, is

  that "governments lie," and so alternate sources of information are desperately needed if we are to have a democracy.

  The movements of the sixties—the black movement, the antiwar movement, the women's

  movement, and the prisoners' rights movement—produced an enormous underground

  press. There were 500 underground high-school newspapers alone.

  Soldiers against the Vietnam War put out their newspapers on military bases around the

  country. By 1970 there were fifty of them: About Face in Los Angeles; Fed Up in Tacoma, Washington; Short Times at Fort Jackson, South Carolina; Last Harass at Fort Gordon, Georgia; Helping Hand at Mountain Home Air Base, Idaho.

  Underground newspapers sprang up during the war in cities al over the country. In early

  1969 J. Edgar Hoover instructed his field offices to target these publications. FBI agents

  raided and ransacked the offices of newspapers in San Diego, Philadelphia, Phoenix,

  Jackson, and other places. Advertisers were persuaded to withdraw. One landlord after

  another agreed to evict newspapers from their offices. The Underground Press Syndicate

  and Liberation News Service became targets of FBI infiltrators.107

  By 1972 these attacks badly crippled the underground press. But slowly it made its way

  back and today around the country community newspapers continue to print material not

  found in the regular media.

  In the past few years, a new form of free speech has become important: "whistle-blowing."

  A whistle-blower is a person who risks his or her job with the government or with a large

  corporation to expose truths that have been kept under wraps.

  For instance, Pentagon employee A. Ernest Fitzgerald embarrassed his employer in 1969 by

  tel ing Congress that a transport plane ordered by the air force would cost $2 bil ion more

  than it expected to pay. Fitzgerald was dismissed from the Pentagon, then reinstated but

  given lesser assignments.

  Dr. Jacqueline Verrett, of the Bureau of Foods of the Food and Drug Administration, granted

  an interview with a television reporter. She was told never to speak to the press again. She

  was warned (in her words), "not to answer my phone but to get someone else to answer it

  and say I wasn't there."

  Nevertheless, Fitzgerald and Verrett continued to speak their minds.108 So did others. A

  safety engineer with the Ford Motor Corporation exposed the fact that Ford, to save money,

  had chosen a gas tank that was prone to rupture under stress. Peter Faulkner, an engineer,

  exposed faults in a nuclear device made by General Electric. He was cal ed in to discover

  why he had such "deep-seated hostility." Then he was fired. But he published a book about his experience.109

  It takes courage to divulge information embarrassing to the government, especial y when

  there are laws that can be used to imprison you for doing that. Daniel El sberg faced 130

  years under the Espionage Act for photocopying the 7,000 pages of the Pentagon Papers

  and sending them to the newspapers, to expose the truth about the war in Vietnam. But he

  went ahead.

  182

  It is impossible to judge the impact of those papers on the public, but it is reasonable to assume that the several mil ion people who read the Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe learned things about the war they had not known before. This, along with al

  the other disclosures about the war going on at the time, helped turn public opinion against

  the war. But El sberg, and codefendant Tony Russo, had to risk prison to make the First

  Amendment come alive.

  During the Vietnam War, with the government lying and with the press slow in getting past

  official propaganda, a whole network of techniques was developed to spread information

  about the war. There were teach-ins on col ege campuses, alternative newspapers, ral ies,

  picket lines, demonstrations, petitions, ads in newspapers, and graffiti on wal s.

  In Southeast Asia an alternative news organization was created— Dispatch News Service—

  which sent out news items revealing what the government was keeping secret, like the

  story of the My Lai massacre.

  The thousands of acts of civil disobedience during the war were acts of communication,

  smal works of art, appealing to the deepest feelings of people. Art plays a critical role in

  any social movement, because it intensifies the movement's messages. It tries to make up

  for the lack of money and resources by passion and wit. It communicates through music,

  drama, speech, demonstrative action, drawings, posters, songs, surprise, sacrifice, and risk.

  During the Vietnam War, a very successful commercial artist (Seymour Chwast) turned his

  talents to the antiwar movement, and produced a poster with a simple design and eight

  large words printed on it: WAR IS GOOD FOR BUSINESS. INVEST YOUR SON.

  It was chil ing and powerful. It was just part of the work of hundreds of thousands of people

  al over the country, speaking to mil ions of people in many different ways, bringing life to

  the First Amendment and an end to a war.

  1 Much of my data o
n the Alien and Sedition Acts and the colorful accusations surrounding

  them come from John C. Mil er, Crisis in Freedom (Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1952).

  2 See Leonard Levy, Freedom of Speech and Press in Early American History (Harper & Row, 1963).

  3 James Morton Smith, "Political Suppression of Seditious Criticism: A Connecticut Case

  Study," The Historian.

  4 Mil er, Crisis in Freedom, 74.

  5 Ibid., 104.

  6 For an analysis of the early interpretations of the First Amendment, see Levy, Freedom of

  Speech and Press.

  7 Levy, Freedom of Speech and Press, 243-244.

  8 Wil iam Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, vol. 4 (Beacon Press, 1962),

  161.

  9 New York Times v. U.S. 403 U.S. 713 (1971).

  183

  10 We should note that when Thomas Jefferson became president in 1801, although the

  Sedition Act had expired, prosecutions of critics of government for seditious libel continued.

  Jefferson had written to Madison back in 1788 that he accepted the common law

  interpretation of freedom of speech as meaning no prior restraint, and that people should be

  held accountable for "false facts." For Jefferson's attitude to civil liberties, read Leonard Levy, Jefferson and Civil Liberties (Quadrangle, 1973), although Levy offended many lovers

  of Jefferson by his critique.

  11 Victor Marchetti and John Marks, The C.I.A. and the Cult of Intel igence (Knopf, 974).

  12 Snepp pointed out that former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former CIA head

  Wil iam Colby, and other former CIA men of high rank were not prosecuted for failing to let

  the CIA see their manuscripts in advance. Frank Snepp, Decent Interval (Vintage, 1978).

  13 H. C. Peterson and Gilbert C. Fite, Opponents of War, 1917-1918 (University of

  Washington Press, 1957), 17.

  14 Schenck v. U.S., 249 U.S. 47 (1919). In a later case, Abrams v. U.S. (1919), Holmes and Justice Louis Brandeis dissented from the majority decision to uphold Abrams's conviction.

  Holmes wrote in his opinion: "I think we should be eternal y vigilant against attempts to

  check the expression of opinions that we loathe." Why Schenk's leaflets were a "clear and present danger," and Abrams's leaflets were not, remains a mystery.

  15 See the biography of Debs by Ray Ginger, The Bending Cross (Rutgers University Press,

  1949), 358.

  16 Debs v. U.S., 249 U.S. 211 (1919).

  17 Peterson & Fite, 34.

  18 For an account of this case, see H. C. Peterson and Gilbert C. Fite, Opponents of War

  1917-1918 (University of Washington Press, 1957), 92-93.

  19 The case was Dunne v. U.S., 138 and 137 (8th Circuit, 1943). See an account of the trial by a leader of the Socialist Workers party, James P. Cannon, Socialism on Trial (Pathfinder Press, 1970).

  20 Ibid.

  21 Dennis v. U.S., 341 U.S. 494 (1951). In later decisions, the Court seemed less ready to convict radicals for merely teaching and advocating doctrines of violent revolution. And ten

  years later, in Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969) the Court ruled that a state can

  prosecute only for action that advocates immediate unlawful acts and when the advocacy is

  likely to have an immediate effect. But, as Staughton Lynd pointed out in his article

  "Brandenburg v. Ohio: A Speech Test for Al Seasons?" there was no assurance, knowing the erratic behavior of the Supreme Court, especial y in times of international tension, that

  it would hold to this test of "imminent action." University of Chicago Law Review (Fal 1975).

  22 See The Docket (May 1986), published by the Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts.

  23 New York Times, Sept. 20, 1089.

  24 Parker v. Levy, 417 U.S. 733.

  25 John V. H. Dippel, "Getting Nowhere Through Channels," New Republic, May 22, 1971.

  26 Brown v. Glines, 444 U.S. 348 (1980).

  184

  27 Huntington's essay, "The Democratic Distemper" appears in a volume by Nathan GIazer

  and Irving Kristol, The American Commonwealth, 1976 (Basic Books, 1976).

  28 Barren v. Baltimore, 7 Pet. 243 (1833).

  29 Daws v. Massachusetts 167 U.S. 43 (1895). In Massachusetts it was Oliver Wendel

  Holmes, sitting on the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, who wrote the decision

  against the man Davis, who wanted to speak on the Boston Common without having to get

  permission from the mayor.

  30 Gitlow v. New York, 268 U.S. 652 (1925).

  31 Terminiel o v. Chicago, 337 U.S. 1 (1949).

  32 Fewer v. New York, 310 U.S. 315 (1951).

  33 Edwards v. South Carolina, 372 U.S. 229 (1963).

  34 Adderley v. Florida 385 U.S. 39 (1966).

  35 Marsh v. Alabama 326 U.S. 501 (1946).

  36 Amalgamated Food Employees Local 500 v. Logon Val ey Plaza, Inc. 391 U.S. 308 (1968).

  37 Lloyd Corporation v. Tanner 407 U.S. 551 (1972).

  38 Tinker v. Des Moines Independent School District 393 U.S. 503 (1969).

  39 Procunier v. Martinez 416 U.S. 396 (1974).

  40 See David Ewing, Freedom inside the Organization (Dutton, 1977).

  41 The Nation, June 15, 1974.

  42 New York Times, Nov. 9, 1986.

  43 Boston Globe, Oct. 6, 1986.

  44 Howard Zinn, "Four Women of Courage," Boston Globe, Apr. 24, 1975.

  45 Jonathan Kozol, Death at an Early Age (Bantam, 1970). The text of the Langston Hughes

  poem is on page 235.

  46 Helen Epstein, who wrote an article on Silber that appeared April 23, 1989, in the New

  York Times Magazine, reported that faculty members were afraid to give their names in

  speaking to her about Silber.

  47 Boston Globe, Dec. 28, 1977.

  48 This quotation and other material in this section is drawn from the Final Report of the

  Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intel igence Activities,

  Book 3 (1976). (Hereafter cited as Church Committee report.) This was the Senate

  committee sometimes known as the Church Committee, headed by Senator Frank Church.

  Pages 1-78 deal with COINTELPRO.

  49 Madison to Jefferson, May 13, 1798.

  50 Church Committee report. Book 3, 289.

  51 Church Committee report. Book 2.

  52 David Caute, The Great Fear (Simon & Schuster, 1978), 281.

  53 Associated Press dispatch Sept. 30, 1987.

  185

  54 The Emergency Detention Act was part of the 1950 Internal Security Act. Detention plans

  actual y began before World War II. In 1938 J. Edgar Hoover had proposed keeping an

  index of subversives, and Franklin D. Roosevelt approved this. They were first known as

  Custodial Detention Cards, then as a Security Index, and after the Emergency Detention Act

  was repealed in 1971 it was cal ed an Administrative Index. See Robert Goldstein, Political

  Repression in Modem America (Schenkman, 1978).

  55 Church Committee report, Book 2, 140.

  56 Organizing Notes (a newsletter on the activities of the FBI and other national security

  organizations), Sept. 10, 1979.

  57 New York Times, Oct. 19, 1980.

  58 Church Committee report, 223.

  59 Boston Globe, Jan. 27, 1988.

  60 New York Times, Dec. 16, 1980.

  61 Howard Zinn, Albany: A Study in Federal Responsibility (Southern Regional Council, 1062) 62 The Church Committee report deals with the campaign against Martin Luther King on pp.

  81-184.

  63 See David Garrow, The F.B.I, and Martin Luther King (Penguin, 1981).

  64 Ibid.

  65 Quoted by Richard Kluger, The Paper: The Life and D
eath of the New York Herald-Tribune

  (Knopf, 1986).

  66 Much of this material on the monopolizing trend in the media comes from Ben Bagdikian,

  The Media Monopoly (Beacon, 1988).

  67 Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly. Also, "The Lords of the Global Vil age," The Nation, June 12, 1989.

  68 First National Bank v. Bel otti 435 U.S. 765 (1978).

  69 Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC 395 U.S. 367 (1969).

  70 Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc. v. Democratic National Committee (1973). Two

  years later, in a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court struck down a Florida statute that

  gave an attacked political candidate a right to reply in the press. Again, it was the laissez-

  faire doctrine, keeping the power of government away from the newspaper business, but

  al owing the power of a rich newspaper to decide whose views would be published. Miami

  Herald v. Tomil o (1974).

  71 A longtime student of free speech in this country. Franklin S. Haiman of Northwestern

  University, pointing to the control of the mass media, suggested that

  the freedom of speech we practice is a counterfeit enterprise … the debates in which we

  engage are over means rather than ends, form rather than sustance, appearances rather

  than essences, and that they are limited in scope, depth, and meaning by cultural

  brainwashing… . We in the United States have our own ways of insuring that the variety of

  opinions expressed and communicated to large numbers of people is kept within boundaries

  that are tolerable to those who hold the reins of power.

  Franklin Haiman, "How Much of Our Speech is Free?" Civil Liberties Review (Winter 1975).

  186

  72 Strategic Review (Summer 1983). This view by a private person was similar to that

  expressed by Wil iam Westmoreland, who was commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam during

  the war there and who on March 20,1982 (according to a UPI dispatch on that date) told a

  col ege audience in Colorado that the armed forces could not win without public support and

  therefore should control the news media in wartime.

  73 Harrison Salisbury, Without Fear or Favor: The New York Times and Its Times (Times

  Books, 1080), based on his many years as a correspondent for the Times, has a good deal