Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays

by Adam Hochschild

  • • •

  In the end, the files continued to be used by various government agencies for well over a decade, and were largely divided between the Army and a secret library maintained by friends of Van Deman’s in a California National Guard armory. About half of the general’s documents have disappeared; the remainder eventually came to rest in the National Archives, where you can examine ninety-seven boxes of them, containing more than forty-two linear feet of paper. But before the files landed there, the general’s allies stripped out a great deal of material, including the identities of the various undercover agents and of the donors who financed the private intelligence network. Nonetheless, the files contain much of interest, including a few hints of the support Van Deman provided to a cunning and unscrupulous politician who would reach the most powerful position in the land.

  In 1946, a popular, liberal, five-term congressman from Southern California, Jerry Voorhis, was running for reelection against a political unknown—a 33-year-old former Navy logistics officer named Richard Milhous Nixon. Voorhis had explicitly rejected the backing of any group that didn’t disavow communism. But Nixon, onstage in a debate in South Pasadena, thunderously brandished at him a piece of paper that supposedly contained an endorsement by a communist-infiltrated organization. Nixon followed this up with a well-financed advertising campaign darkly hinting at more of the same. He pulled off a stunning upset on election day and quickly gained a seat on the House Un-American Activities Committee.

  When Nixon went on to run for a U.S. Senate in California in 1950, against Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, it was again on a wave of flamboyant red-baiting. Workers from Nixon’s phone banks called hundreds of thousands of registered voters, asked if they knew that Douglas was a communist and then hung up. White voters received postcards from a nonexistent Communist League of Negro Women saying, “Vote for Helen for Senator.”

  Under warm sunny skies at a Douglas campaign rally of five thousand people in Long Beach’s Bixby Park, with Eleanor Roosevelt speaking, Douglas supporters noticed people passing out leaflets on pink paper that accused their candidate of sinister communist ties. Nixon claimed that his opponent—who, he noted, was married to the Jewish actor Melvyn Douglas—was “pink right down to her underwear.” The “pink sheets” helped defeat Douglas, and two years later Senator Nixon was elected vice president.

  What remains in Van Deman’s well-expurgated files shows few traces of his aiding candidates for elective office—something which would have been illegal for a man whose clerical help was provided by the U.S. Army. Nonetheless, several clues in the 97 boxes suggest that the general played a role in Nixon’s rise to power. The ambitious young politician had been no stranger to Van Deman. He had ties to the general’s protégé, Combs, and had been a featured speaker at a conference of state legislature red-hunters from around the country that Combs and Van Deman had helped organize in 1948. Van Deman’s files hold hints of the help he provided Nixon. One is a photograph of a Nixon campaign event where a demonstrator opposing the candidate is identified by one of Van Deman’s trademark code numbers. Another is an agent’s report with a revealingly hostile reference to Nixon’s adversary: “A few more Helen Gahagan Douglas’s and the left-wing congressmen will be prying open the most secret records of the federal security agencies.” Finally, Van Deman’s spies had long been collecting damaging information on Douglas’s actor husband: Agent B-11 listed him, for example, as a supporter of efforts to send bandages and clothing to victims of the Spanish Civil War, and another report identified him as supporting striking lettuce pickers.

  California Democrats later charged that some of the scurrilous material in the Nixon campaign’s “pink sheets” against Douglas had come from Van Deman. When these accusations were renewed after Nixon became president, unnamed White House officials queried by the New York Times did not deny the charge. They said only that it was no longer “pertinent.” But for Van Deman to help Nixon at this ruthless stage of his ascent toward the nation’s highest office was highly pertinent. Ironically, the blueprint for the Watergate scandal that finally forced the 37th president to resign could have been taken from Van Deman’s own life’s work: a black-bag job, a secret search for information about political enemies, a mania for surveillance.

  Today, all of us leave behind so many electronic traces that spying is both easier and more complex than it was Van Deman’s agents stole papers out of car trunks. But there is still a dark thread that stretches back across generations. The general, happily, never reached the White House. But someone who recently did was helped by the release of information pilfered from the opposing political party and then built a presidency on a way of thinking very similar to Van Deman’s, from hostility to immigrants to conspiracy theories to treating wild rumors as fact. Donald Trump has probably never heard of Ralph Van Deman, but one person knew them both: Richard Nixon, a man who, according to Trump, “always wanted me to run for office.” Nixon and Van Deman might both now be smiling.

  2018

  FIVE

  Prison Madness

  SOME TIME AGO, I WAS TAKING PART in a book festival in Finland. When there was a free day coming up, the publisher who had invited me asked if there were any local sights I would care to see. Medieval churches, perhaps? I said I’d like to visit some prisons. Finland locks people up at well under 10 percent the rate we do in the United States, a gap far more dramatic than any differences between the people of the two countries can explain. I was curious to learn more. Happily, my publisher’s neighbor was a criminologist, and they arranged a tour for me the next day.

  Kerava Prison, the first of two that I saw, was in the countryside half an hour’s drive north of Helsinki. Its governor—by design, the title has a civilian sound—was a warm, vivacious, gray-haired woman named Kirsti Nieminen, a former prosecutor. On this wintry morning, she had about 150 prisoners in her charge, all men. Her office wall was lined with portraits of former governors, the first a heavily bearded one from the 1890s. Next to these was a framed drawing by a convict—Snoopy typing a letter, which she translated for me: “Dear Governor, please give me a leave!”

  The equivalent of an American medium-security prison, Kerava had barbed-wire fences, bars on some windows, and plenty of locked doors. Some inmates worked in greenhouses outside the walls, but only if they were trusties or under guard. Most resemblance to American prisons ended there. In the greenhouses the inmates raised flowers, which were sold to the public, as were the organic vegetables they grew. As we walked around the prison grounds, Nieminen pointed out a stream where prisoners could fish, a soccer field, a basketball court, a grain mill, and something she was particularly proud of, a barn full of rabbits and lambs. “The responsibility to take care of a creature—it’s very therapeutic,” she said. “They are always kind to you. It’s easier to talk to them.”

  For an hour or so, I had coffee with half a dozen prisoners. The heavily tattooed Marko, 36, wore a visor and said he was here for a “violent crime” he did not specify. Jarkko, a burly 26-year-old, was doing three years and ten months for a drug offense; Reima, 36, blond and tough-looking, was in for robbery. Kalla, at 48 the eldest, had committed fraud; Fernando (his father was from Spain) was 26, convicted of armed robbery and selling heroin; Harre, 27, was doing five years for selling Ecstasy. Also sitting with us, and translating, were Nieminen, a young woman from the national prisons service who came here with me, and two of Kerava’s teachers, also both women. No armed guards were in sight, and both officials and convicts wore their own clothes, not uniforms.

  This was still a prison, however, and at 7:30 each evening the inmates are locked into their two-man cells. These are not large but somewhat more spacious than those I’ve seen in American prisons, each with a toilet and sink in a cubicle whose door closes. Prisoners are allowed TVs, stereos, and radios. Down the corridor from the cells are a shower room and sauna—something no Finn could imagine being without.

  Prisoners are assigned jobs,
but most spend much of their day in classes, on subjects including auto repair, computers, welding, and first aid. A library holds several thousand books—more than you would find in many American high schools—and inmates can use the national interlibrary loan system to order others. I sat in on a cooking class and then shared a tasty lunch its students had prepared: Karelian stew, which included beef, pork, potatoes, and cranberries.

  • • •

  All this is obviously another world from the overcrowded prisons of the United States, where gardens are scarce and classes, if they happen at all, are often an afterthought. When the former Missouri state senator Jeff Smith was sentenced to a federal prison in Kentucky, he hoped that as a Ph.D. who had taught at Washington University in St. Louis, he would be put to work teaching. Instead, as he writes in his Mr. Smith Goes to Prison: What My Year Behind Bars Taught Me About America’s Prison Crisis, he was assigned to a warehouse loading dock, where he observed and took part in the pilfering of food by both inmates and guards. A month from the end of his stay he was finally transferred to the education unit—and assigned to sweeping out classrooms. A computer skills class consisted of the chance to sit at a computer for thirty minutes, with no instruction whatsoever; at a nutrition class, a guard “handed out a brochure with information about the caloric content of food at McDonald’s, Bojangles, and Wendy’s and released us after five minutes.”

  Particularly at the college level, an effective prison education program, like the well-known one run by Bard College, can cut the recidivism rate—in the United States, 67.8 percent after three years—down to the single digits. The Bard program offers classes taught by professors from its campus and others and is attended by nearly three hundred inmates in six New York State prisons. A debating team drawn from these students won national attention recently when it beat a team from Harvard. Reducing recidivism through such efforts not only is humane but also saves money: it costs New York State more each year to house and guard a single prisoner than the total tuition, room, and board for an undergraduate on that Harvard debating team. You would think that budget-conscious legislators would act accordingly, but reason has never played much of a part in the American prison system.

  Some of what Smith writes recalls many other American prison memoirs: he describes de facto racial segregation, rapes, etiquette (never sit on someone else’s bunk), and the underground economy. Prices for pornography, cell phones, and other contraband rose sharply, for example, when snow on the ground made footprints visible or when a notoriously vigilant guard was on duty. And contrary to the film The Shawshank Redemption, in which the character played by Morgan Freeman wryly observes, “Everyone in here is innocent,” Smith says that few prisoners make that claim. Instead, they blame their fate on the “snitch” who turned them in. (Curiously, he does somewhat the same thing himself when he writes about the friend who got him in trouble for breaking a campaign-spending law.)

  The most moving part of Smith’s story is his picture of what prison does to families. He points to research showing that before they were imprisoned, “half of all incarcerated fathers lived with their children, a quarter served as primary caregivers, and over half provided primary financial support.” When a man goes to jail, his family shatters:

  While I was waiting to use a phone, it was hard to avoid hearing their anguished phone conversations with ex-girlfriends who controlled access to their children, with rebellious teenagers who—lacking a male authority figure at home—were in some cases following in their fathers’ footsteps, and with dying parents far away.

  One of Smith’s workmates, known as Big E, had been an ace basketball player and was serving seventeen years for possession of crack cocaine. One Saturday in the television room there was none of the usual haggling about which sports game would be watched. Big E’s son, a college freshman, was playing, “and Big E, the best shooter on the compound, had never seen his son play.” He had been in prison since the age of nineteen.

  • • •

  How did we get to the point where a nineteen-year-old who has done nothing violent can be put away for almost as long as he has lived, where prisons break up millions of families, and where we have a larger proportion of our people incarcerated than almost any other country in the world, even Putin’s Russia? And at a time when crime rates have been in a long-term decline? With a twentieth of the world’s population, the United States has a quarter of its prisoners. The number is so high that the American unemployment rate for men would be 2 percent higher (8 percent higher for black men) if they were all suddenly let out. If all Americans behind bars constituted a state, its population would be greater than that of fifteen other states, big enough to be entitled to three seats in the House of Representatives. Our jails are so packed that the website www.jailbedspace.com allows wardens and sheriffs to look for space in other facilities if their own is full.

  The two most conspicuous causes of this tragedy are the unwinnable war on drugs and Republican tough-on-crime politicking, which reached a nadir* with the notorious Willie Horton ad in George H.W. Bush’s successful 1988 presidential campaign, which attacked the Democratic nominee, Michael Dukakis, for backing a weekend furlough program that gave Horton, a convicted murderer, the chance to commit additional violent crimes. But Democrats were deeply involved in building the prison system as well. Starting in the 1940s, looking for ways to stop the lynching of blacks and their abuse by police in the South and fearing a recurrence of the Second World War–era race riots in the North, liberals pushed for more professional training for law enforcement officers.

  However, the southern Democrats who then controlled Congress transformed these efforts into block grants to states. As a result, police departments received more money and more advanced weaponry with which to do business as usual. Liberals also pushed for standardized sentences that would curb the discretionary powers of racist judges. But these mandatory minimums inched upward and became cruelly high, and the definition of crimes, with no mention of race, ended up with vastly greater penalties for possession of crack cocaine (used mostly by blacks) than for possession of powdered cocaine (used mostly by whites). Although data show that Americans of different races use drugs in similar proportions, if you’re black you’re more than five times as likely to end up jailed for doing so than if you’re white.

  The 1960s brought immense social turbulence and a sharp rise in almost all types of crime. New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller sponsored drug laws that put several generations of men, most of them black, away for decades. Quick to moralize against disorder and drawing on the deep American reservoir of racism, politicians at every level promised a ruthless response. This could take effect so easily because the United States chooses a sizable proportion of its judges and almost all of its district attorneys and county sheriffs by popular election, something that would be thought bizarre almost anywhere else in the world. Prosecutors have enormous power as to what to charge someone with—which can determine whether those mandatory sentences apply or not—and whether to charge a person at all. And judges, in turn, often have great discretion in sentencing. Both prosecutors and judges keep a close eye on the voters who elect them. One recent study of Washington State judges found that the sentences they passed out lengthened by an average of 10 percent when reelection day approached.

  By the time Bill Clinton entered the White House in 1993, he and congressional Democrats were determined to show that they were even tougher on crime than Republicans. The following year Congress passed the brutally severe Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act and the Federal Death Penalty Act, which, among other things, added some sixty offenses to the list of capital crimes. With their communities ravaged by crack, most black politicians supported such measures. The number of prosecutors soared during the 1990s, too, and with them the number of prisoners.

  The prison boom has also provided a chance to make money. One private company alone, the Corrections Corporation of America, today runs the country’s fift
h-largest prison system, after those of the federal government and three states. The less money such companies spend on staff training, food, education, medical care, and rehabilitation, the greater their profits. Recidivism produces what every business wants, returning customers, so it’s no wonder these companies push hard for three-strikes laws and similar measures. In 2011, the two biggest private prison firms donated nearly $3 million to political candidates and hired 242 lobbyists around the country.

  The vast majority of prisoners, however, are in public prisons, whose staffs would shrink dramatically if the number of inmates dropped, providing another group with a strong motive for locking people up. Many state prisons are in poor or rural areas, like upstate New York, with few other sources of jobs. Jeff Smith points out that food wholesalers, who know that this market of 2.2 million people is powerless to protest if much of what they have to eat is well past its sell-by date, also have a vested interest in keeping prisons full.

  • • •

  The prison-industrial complex is now as deeply rooted as its military counterpart. With both corporate profits and government salaries at stake, it will be equally difficult to shrink or transform. Everyone from the ACLU to the Koch brothers seems to agree, however, that our prisons are too full, and politicians from both Left and Right have floated cautious proposals for reform. In her superb, comprehensive book Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics, the University of Pennsylvania political scientist Marie Gottschalk shows why few of the proposed solutions, either singly or together, are going to reduce the proportion of Americans in prison to anywhere near what it was fifty years ago.