Manufacturing Hysteria
Page 39
In It Can Happen Here, Joe Conason summed up the Bush government’s cavalier attitude toward constitutional guarantees when he wrote that “the mind-set of the administration … [is] reflected in all of the illegal or dubious surveillance programs that the … regime has instigated. They are all important because they demonstrate the unilateral will of the president to use any means at his disposal, whether approved by Congress and the courts or not, and his utter determination to create a surveillance society that no longer vests any meaning in traditional ideas of freedom and privacy.”22 This attitude was unfortunately supported by a large majority in Congress, as well as by a large segment of the American public.
• • •
While the election of President Barack Obama may have stemmed the all-out assault on civil liberties that had been mounted during Bush’s two terms in office, it would be a mistake to conclude that the threat is past. The Alien Enemies Act and the USA PATRIOT Act are still on the books; nativism, Islamophobia, and homophobia are vigorously on the march; and minorities and dissidents remain vulnerable.
In the summer of 2009, it came to light that in the cities of Olympia and Tacoma, Washington, the Army had infiltrated and was spying on both the antiwar group Port Militarization Resistance and a local chapter of SDS.
In Arizona, a controversial statute enacted in 2010 requires immigrants to carry their papers at all times and empowers police to stop and check the immigration status of anybody suspected of being in the country illegally. Polls taken shortly after the passage of the law indicated that a majority of Americans supported it.
In New York City, police have compiled a database of nearly 2.8 million people who were stopped on the street between 2005 and 2009, and although close to 90 percent were utterly innocent of any offense, their names remain in the computer.23 “Information contained in the stop, question and frisk database remains there indefinitely, for use in future investigations,” NYC’s police commissioner, Ray Kelly, informed the city council in 2009. “Therefore, there are no existing Police Department guidelines that mandate the removal of information once it has been entered in the database.”24 Fifty-two percent of the people stopped were African-Americans, 30 percent were Latinos, and 10 percent were whites, and the rest were members of other racial or ethnic groups.
In 1975, while chairing the Senate committee investigating abuses conducted by intelligence agencies in this country, Frank Church spoke of the “very extensive capability of intercepting messages” and warned that this capacity “at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything, telephone conversations, telegrams. It doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide.”25
More than three and a half decades on, technology has advanced the government’s surveillance power a quantum leap beyond what it was when Church issued his alert. But while the surveillance apparatus that has played such a key role in the scapegoating of one or another minority group since World War I is more pervasive and invasive than ever, it is not necessarily more efficient. As a July 2010 investigative series in The Washington Post reported, the staggering number of organizations—1,271 government agencies and 1,931 private companies—working on intelligence programs in the United States creates significant “redundancy and waste,” as “many security and intelligence agencies do the same work.” Moreover, the Post found, the sheer volume of intelligence reports—fifty thousand published every year—guarantees that many are “routinely ignored.”26
As of this writing, there have been two thwarted suicide bombings on U.S.-bound airplanes, an unsuccessful car bombing of Times Square, and assorted other attempted terrorist attacks on U.S. targets. Clearly, rigorous security measures are required, but as we “reposition the line between law enforcement and individual rights,” as Stephen J. Schulhofer has written in The Enemy Within, we will be well-advised to keep in mind that such an adjustment does not imply the need to “suspend the mechanism of accountability and control that traditionally frame governmental power. If anything, there may be more need as government investigative power expands.”27
Democracy requires vigilance. It is fragile and can be undermined. In his introduction to Louis Post’s Deportations Delirium of Nineteen-Twenty, the lawyer and civil rights activist Moorfield Storey warned of the danger of taking democracy for granted. “We read with pride the Declaration of Independence,” cautioned Storey,
and we boast of our wonderful Constitution with the security it affords to the meanest citizen. We pride ourselves on our freedom of speech, our protection against unwarrantable searches and seizures, the bulwark against oppression afforded by our right to due process of law, and we comfortably assume that in practice the provisions of the Constitution are respected … As an abstract proposition it does not seem possible to us that the officers of the United States should under pretense of enforcing the laws trample on the Constitution, and we drift on complacently assured of our safety, in the confident belief that all is going well under the best of all possible governments.28
One of the most insidious degradations of democracy is the scapegoating of minorities—be they ethnic, racial, religious, political, or sexual—because to deny the civil liberties of any specific group, even in the name of national security, is to take the first step toward curtailing the civil liberties of all. It is a testament to the resiliency of the American political system that despite the recurring persecutions of minorities since World War I—and the ensuing manufactured hysteria, clandestine violations of the Constitution, illegal surveillance of civilians, and concomitant threats to civil liberties—we have thus far managed to right the ship of state each time such a challenge to democracy has presented itself.
It would be imprudent, however, to assume that it will always be so. Each such trial has been more perilous than the previous one, and persisting in such behavior is manifestly reckless. One of these times, we could reach a point of no return.
* The TIPS idea was later picked up by the Department of Homeland Security and put into practice as the School Bus Watch program, with the intent of training 600,000 school bus drivers to report on “suspicious” behavior. At least one former Homeland Security intelligence official, John Rollins, found the prospect alarming. “Today, it’s bus drivers, tomorrow it could be postal officials,” he cautioned, “and the next day, it could be, ‘Why don’t we have this program in place for the people who deliver the newspaper to the door?’ We could quickly get into a society where we’re all spying on each other. It may be well intentioned, but there is a concern of going a bit too far” (Fredericksburg [Va.] Free Lance-Star, Feb. 18, 2006).
*One of the hallmarks of the Bush government was its obsession with secrecy, and the administration asked the Times not to publish both the wiretapping and the banking stories. The paper delayed publication of the first for a year in order to do additional research, and agreed to omit some information that administration officials claimed could be “useful to terrorists.” In the case of the second story, the newspaper decided that it was “a matter of public interest” and went ahead with publication. The administration was not pleased in either case: in the second piece, the White House deputy press secretary, Dana Perino, was quoted as saying, “The President is concerned that once again The New York Times has chosen to expose a classified program that is working to protect our citizens.”
Notes
Abbreviations
AG Attorney General
Church Committee Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (see www.aarclibrary.org/publib/contents/church/contents_church_reports.htm)
CR Congressional Record
CWRIC Papers Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians
DOJ Department of Justice LAT Los Angeles Times
LOC Library of Congress
NARA National Archive and Records Administration
NYT The New York Times
U.S. Stat. United States Statutes at Large
WP The Washington Post
Prologue: Against the Wall
1. For more on the Prager affair, see Weinberg, Labor, Loyalty, & Rebellion; Schwartz, “Lynching of Robert Prager”; Hickey, “Prager Affair”; Luebke, Bonds of Loyalty; and Ott, “Anti-German Hysteria.”
2. St. Louis Labor, April 13, 1918.
3. Creel, “Public Opinion in War Time,” pp. 185–86; Creel, How We Advertised America, p. 5.
4. Frank Cobb, “The Press and Public Opinion,” New Republic, Dec. 31, 1919, p. 144.
5. Evening Sun, Oct. 22, 1918, quoted in Viereck’s: The American Monthly, Nov. 1918, p. 88. Another New York paper published a complete list of the names and addresses of all German and Austro-Hungarian alien enemies living in the city, and later published the list in a book edition (New York Herald, Dec. 3–28, 1917).
6. El Paso Herald, Dec. 24, 1917; El Paso Morning Times, Dec. 24, 1917.
7. National Civil Liberties Bureau, War-Time Prosecutions and Mob Violence, p. 6.
8. Ibid.
9. Chicago Tribune, March 2, 1918.
10. Denver Post, March 4, 1918.
11. NYT, March 4, 1918.
12. National Civil Liberties Bureau, War-Time Prosecutions and Mob Violence, p. 7. Others sources spell the name Schopke.
13. Quoted in Weinberg, Labor, Loyalty, & Rebellion, pp. 119–20.
14. Collinsville Herald, May 31, 1918.
15. Collinsville Herald, May 28, 1918.
16. Collinsville Herald, April 12, 1918.
17. Collinsville Herald, May 28, 1918.
18. Luebke, Bonds of Loyalty, p. 9.
19. NYT, April 11, 1918.
20. Translation by the author. The original German read: “Liebe Eltern, Ich muss heute den 4-4-18 sterben. Bitte betet fur mich, meine lieben Eltern. Das ist mein letze Brief oder Lebenzeugen von mir. Euer lieber Sohn und Bruder, Robt. Paul” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 6, 1918). Prager’s state of mind can be seen in his various misspellings (fur for für, letze for letzte, Lebenzeugen for Lebenszeugen). In this condition, it is possible he wrote Lebenszeugen (literally, “life witness”) when he actually meant Lebenszeichen, “sign of life.” The author is grateful to Gerhard Bock for his speculations on this matter, and for his assistance with the translation.
21. NYT, April 11, 1918.
22. Dunphy, “Lynching of Robert Prager,” p. 37.
23. Truman, Memoirs, vol. 2, p. 272.
24. Wendell Phillips, Speeches Before the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, p. 13. The quotation is often mistakenly attributed to Thomas Jefferson. The source of Phillips’s remark may have been John Philpot Curran’s July 10, 1790, “Speech on the Right of Election of Lord Mayor of Dublin,” in which he said, “The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance.”
Chapter 1: The Fine Gold of Untainted Americanism
1. Baker, Dodd, and Leach, Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 3, p. 379.
2. Shaw, Messages and Papers of Woodrow Wilson, p. 150.
3. Ibid., pp. 150–51.
4. Creel, “Hopes of the Hyphenated,” p. 350.
5. Cincinnati Volksblatt, Dec. 9, 1915, quoted in Wittke, German-Americans and the World War, p. 43.
6. La Follette, “Neutrality,” p. 1.
7. NYT, Feb. 1, 1915.
8. “The decent Americans who are of German birth or descent ought to and in the majority of cases ultimately will stand for what I represent, just as other citizens do and will stand,” wrote Roosevelt. “But the professional hyphenated German-Americans I shall smite with the sword of the Lord and of Gideon when ever I get the chance” (Roosevelt to William Franklin Knox, Dec. 21, 1915, in Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, vol. 8, p. 998).
9. NYT, May 15, 1915.
10. Literary Digest, Oct. 30, 1915, p. 943.
11. Editorial in New York Evening Sun, quoted in ibid., Aug. 28, 1915, p. 388; “The German Campaign Against American Neutrality,” Outlook, Aug. 25, 1915, p. 934.
12. NYT, May 14, 1916.
13. Torelle, Barton, and Holmes, Political Philosophy of Robert M. La Follette, p. 194.
14. Villard to Wilson, Oct. 30, 1915, Villard Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
15. Address of May 20, 1916, in Link, Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 37, p. 81.
16. June 14, 1916, in Baker, Dodd, and Leach, Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 4, pp. 209–10.
17. Roosevelt, America for Americans, pp. 3–4.
18. On July 22, the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce sponsored a parade that attracted over fifty thousand marchers, but a half hour after the start of the pageant a bomb exploded near the Ferry Building at Steuart and Market streets, killing ten people and injuring forty. Within days, two high-profile Socialist labor leaders, Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, were arrested and charged with murder. The trials that followed were a travesty of justice, complete with perjured testimony, false evidence, and prosecutorial conspiracy. Mooney and Billings were convicted and received death and life sentences, respectively, but in the outcry that followed, Mooney’s sentence was reduced to life. Despite revelations, within the year after their convictions, that both men had been framed, Mooney and Billings spent more than twenty years in San Quentin before being pardoned by California’s governor Culbert Olson in 1939.
19. Democratic National Committee, Democratic Text Book 1916, p. 9.
20. Villard to G. F. Peabody, Sept. 19, 1916, Villard Papers.
21. 39 U.S. Stat. 919.
22. Chafee, “Sedition,” p. 638.
23. Annual Report of the Attorney General of the United States for the Year 1918, p. 56.
24. NYT, March 1, 1917.
25. NYT, March 2, 1917.
26. NYT, March 24, 1917.
27. LAT, April 2, 1917.
28. Jordan, Days of a Man, p. 728.
29. NYT, April 3, 1917.
30. Ibid. Also see “An Address to a Joint Session of Congress,” April 2, 1917, in Link, Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 41, pp. 519–27.
31. Cincinnati Times-Star, March 5, 1917.
32. Roosevelt to Henry Cabot Lodge, Feb. 20, 1917, in Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, vol. 8, p. 1157.
33. See CR 55, 65th Cong., 1st sess., pp. 224–34.
34. Pinchot, History of the Progressive Party, p. 128.
35. CR 55, 65th Cong., 1st sess., p. 209.
36. Ibid., pp. 212–14.
37. NYT, April 6, 1917.
38. CR 55, 65th Cong., 1st sess., p. 337.
39. Ibid., p. 332.
40. Kennedy, Over Here, p. 20.
Chapter 2: A Democracy Gone Mad
1. Other signs read, “A Liberty Bond Is a First Mortgage on Labor,” “War Is Hell, Jingo Capitalists Should Go to War,” “Down with Secret Diplomacy. Capitalism Must Go,” “We Are Not Pacifists, We Believe in War upon Our Enemy—Capitalism,” and “Democratize Germany, What About Frisco and the Danbury Hatters?” The account of the parade is based on articles in Boston Globe, NYT, New York Call, Boston Evening Record, Boston Journal (all July 2, 1917), and Milwaukee Leader (July 9, 1917).
2. See Chicago Tribune and NYT, May 28, 1917.
3. Wilson to Cleveland H. Dodge, April 4, 1917, Woodrow Wilson Papers, Manuscripts Division, LOC.
4. Report of the Attorney General for 1917, pp. 57–59.
5. Ibid., p. 56.
6. Warren to Gregory, March 30, 1917, DOJ file 9-4-94½, NARA.
7. Shaw, Messages and Papers of Woodrow Wilson, p. 150.
8. Report of the Attorney General for 1918, pp. 16–17.
9. Quoted in Mock and Larson, Words That Won the War, p. 23.
10. See Chapter 1, above.
11. AUAM to Wilson, April 17, 1917, ACLU files, vol. 26, reel 3, Mudd Library, Princeton University.
12. Scheiber, Wilson Administration and Civil Liberties, p. 16.
13. O’Brian, “Civil Liberty in War
Time,” pp. 280–81.
14. Daniels, Cabinet Diaries, p. 173.
15. NYT, Sept. 1, 1915.
16. Creel, Rebel at Large, p. 196.
17. For the most complete history of the American Protective League, see Jensen, Price of Vigilance. Also see Hough, Web.
18. A. Bruce Bielaski to Special Agents, March 22, 1917, Daniel Frey Papers, UCLA.
19. Official Bulletin, May 12, 1917.
20. O’Brian, “Civil Liberty in War Time,” p. 279.
21. Roche, Quest for the Dream, p. 43.
22. Hough, Web, p. 163.
23. “Suggestions of Attorney-General Gregory to Executive Committee in Relation to the Department of Justice,” p. 309.
24. Cummings and McFarland, Federal Justice, p. 420.
25. Jensen, Army Surveillance in America, p. 137.
26. Koons to Postmasters, April 25, 1917, reprinted in Official Bulletin, May 10, 1917.
27. Nagler, “Victims of the Home Front,” p. 204.
28. Report of the Attorney General for 1918, p. 15.
29. Literary Digest, June 9, 1917; NYT, June 6, 1917.
30. Young, Fifteen Patriotic Editorials from “The Des Moines Capital,” pp. 1–2, italics added.
31. Hulet M. Wells Papers, Special Collections, University of Washington Libraries.
32. NYT, May 19, 1917.
33. Murphy, World War I and the Origin of Civil Liberties in the United States, p. 211.
34. See ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/exhibits/panam/law/images/tragedyatbuff.html.