Unfreedom of the Press
Page 10
As time went on, “the military and the government began punishing editorial opposition to the war itself. Authorities banned pro-peace newspapers from the U.S. mails, shut down newspaper offices, and confiscated printing materials. They intimidated, and sometimes imprisoned, reporters, editors, and publishers who sympathized with the South or objected to armed struggle to restore the Union. For the first year of the war, Lincoln left no trail of documents attesting to any personal conviction that dissenting newspapers ought to be muzzled. But neither did he say anything to control or contradict such efforts when they were undertaken . . . by his cabinet officers or military commanders. Lincoln did not initiate press suppression, and remained ambivalent about its execution, but seldom intervened to prevent it.”19
Saint Michael’s College professor David T. Z. Mindich adds that “[i]n 1862, after . . . Lincoln appointed him secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton penned a letter to the president requesting sweeping powers, which would include total control of the telegraph lines. By rerouting those lines through his office, Stanton would keep tabs on vast amounts of communication, journalistic, governmental and personal. On the back of Stanton’s letter Lincoln scribbled his approval: ‘The Secretary of War has my authority to exercise his discretion in the matter within mentioned.’ . . . Having the telegraph lines running through Stanton’s office made his department the nexus of war information; Lincoln visited regularly to get the latest on the war. Stanton collected news from generals, telegraph operators, and reporters. He had a journalist’s love of breaking the story and an autocrat’s obsession with information control. He used his power over the telegraphs to influence what journalists did or didn’t publish. In 1862, the House Judiciary Committee took up the question of ‘telegraphic censorship’ and called for restraint on the part of the administration’s censors.”20
On May 18, 1864, the Associated Press distributed what turned out to be a forged copy of a presidential proclamation. Its inauthenticity was unknown to the publishers and editors of the pro-Democrat, antiwar New York World and New York Journal of Commerce newspapers, who fell for the ruse and printed it. The document “urged a national day of ‘fasting, humiliation and prayers,’ hinted darkly about ‘the general state of the country,’ and called for a breathtaking 400,000 new volunteers. With Ulysses S. Grant enduring a bloodbath of casualties in a struggle to subdue Robert E. Lee in Virginia, the proclamation seemed a cry of desperation—an admission that to prevail, the Union required both divine intervention and a huge infusion of fresh troops. It was major news.”21
An outraged Lincoln took direct action, believing these papers were damaging the Union effort, and issued an executive order stating:
Whereas there has been wickedly and traitorously printed and published this morning in the New York World and New York Journal of Commerce, newspapers printed and published in the city of New York, a false and spurious proclamation purporting to be signed by the President and to be countersigned by the Secretary of State, which publication is of a treasonable nature, designed to give aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States and to the rebels now at war against the Government and their aiders and abettors, you are therefore hereby commanded forthwith to arrest and imprison in any fort or military prison in your command the editors, proprietors, and publishers of the aforesaid newspapers, and all such persons as, after public notice has been given of the falsehood of said publication, print and publish the same with intent to give aid and comfort to the enemy; and you will hold the persons so arrested in close custody until they can be brought to trial before a military commission for their offense. You will also take possession by military force of the printing establishments of the New York World and Journal of Commerce, and hold the same until further orders, and prohibit any further publication therefrom.22
Major General John Adams Dix was ordered to execute the presidential directive, which he did reluctantly. The two papers were shut down and the two editors detained at army headquarters. Dix soon uncovered the perpetrator of the hoax, a onetime New York Times correspondent, Joseph Howard Jr., On May 21, 1864, both editors were permitted to reopen their newspapers. However, Lincoln’s angry reaction to the two newspapers apparently was less about a hoax and more about the fact that the night before the publication of the forged presidential proclamation, “the president had been working on an authentic proclamation that indeed called for more troops—300,000 more . . .—by either enlistment or conscription.” The published forgery “unleashed panic within the White House and cabinet . . . that someone may have leaked a genuine proclamation” and potentially harmed the war effort.23
During the course of another war, this time World War I, President Woodrow Wilson, who had been a leading progressive intellectual for decades, supported a series of congressional amendments that Congress added to the Espionage Act, which collectively became known as the Sedition Act of May 16, 1918. The act stated, in part:
[W]hoever, when the United States is at war, shall willfully utter, print, write or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States or the Constitution of the United States, or the military or naval forces of the United States, or the flag of the United States, or the uniform of the Army or Navy of the United States into contempt, scorn, contumely, or disrepute, . . . shall be punished by a fine of not more than $10,000 or the imprisonment for not more than twenty years, or both: Provided, That any employee or official of the United States Government who commits any disloyal act or utters any unpatriotic or disloyal language, or who, in an abusive and violent manner criticizes the Army or Navy or the flag of the United States shall be at once dismissed from the service. . . .24
Numerous opponents of Wilson’s war policies were charged and imprisoned.25 Indeed, Wilson had already instituted extensive measures to curtail press freedom. Christopher B. Daly, professor at Boston University, has written that during the lead-up to America’s entrance into World War I, “the Wilson administration took immediate steps at home to curtail one of the pillars of democracy—press freedom—by implementing a plan to control, manipulate and censor all news coverage, on a scale never seen in U.S. history. Following the lead of the Germans and British, Wilson elevated propaganda and censorship to strategic elements of all-out war. Even before the U.S. entered the war, Wilson had expressed the expectation that his fellow Americans would show what he considered ‘loyalty.’ . . . Wilson started one of the earliest uses of government propaganda. He waged a campaign of intimidation and outright suppression against those ethnic and socialist papers that continued to oppose the war. Taken together, these wartime measures added up to an unprecedented assault on press freedom.”26
Wilson also created an elaborate domestic spy network “to watch German immigrants and American radicals. Federal agents arrested hundreds for making anti-war speeches, and sometimes for informal and private remarks. Eugene Debs, four-time presidential candidate for the Socialist Party, was arrested in June 1918 for suggesting during a speech that young American men were ‘fit for something better than slavery and cannon fodder.’ Sentenced to ten years in prison, he defiantly ran for president in 1920 from his jail cell in Atlanta, and received almost a million votes. During the war, more than 2,000 men and women were arrested for ‘disloyal’ speech, and over 1,200 went to jail.”27
Furthermore, Wilson issued an executive order on April 13, 1917, establishing the Committee on Public Information (CPI), a massive propaganda machine “that would put the government in the business of actively shaping press coverage” about the war. Wilson appointed a former journalist and loyal political supporter, George Creel, to lead the operation. “[T]he CPI was ‘a veritable magnet’ for political progressives of all stripes—intellectuals, muckrakers, even some socialists—all sharing a sense of the threat to democracy posed by German militarism.” The Wilson administration planted official “news” stories with media outlets, published an “official” government newspaper that was w
idely distributed, and secured free advertising in press publications. The CPI had a film division, foreign-language newspaper division, advertising division, and speakers’ division. At the same time, the government severely limited press access to people and operations related to the war effort.28
The CPI was pervasive. “The CPI mobilized 150,000 American word-maestros to pitch America’s involvement in the war as necessary and noble. . . . Commandeering the four minutes projectionists needed to change movie reels, Creel and his people trained 75,000 citizens to deliver seemingly impromptu, carefully coached, perfectly timed four-minute pro-war harangues. . . . Creel would estimate his speakers delivered 755,190 talks . . . [and papered] the country with 1,438 different posters.”29
David T. Beito, professor at the University of Alabama, has written of President Franklin Roosevelt’s “war against the press” during the New Deal and later World War II. For example, “[a]t its inception in 1934, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) reduced the license renewal period for stations from three years to only six months.”30 This would allow Roosevelt maximum authority over the life and death of radio stations. “Meanwhile, Roosevelt tapped Herbert L. Pettey as secretary of the FCC (and its predecessor, the Federal Radio Commission). Pettey had overseen radio for Roosevelt in the 1932 campaign. After his appointment, he worked in tandem with the Democratic National Committee to handle ‘radio matters’ with both the networks and local stations. It did not take long for broadcasters to get the message. NBC . . . announced that it was limiting broadcasts ‘contrary to the policies of the United States government.’ CBS Vice President Henry A. Bellows said that ‘no broadcast would be permitted over the Columbia Broadcasting System that in any way was critical of any policy of the Administration.’ He elaborated ‘that the Columbia system was at the disposal of President Roosevelt and his administration and they would permit no broadcast that did not have his approval.’ Local station owners and network executives alike took it for granted, as Editor and Publisher observed, that each station had ‘to dance to Government tunes because it is under Government license.’ ”31
But Roosevelt’s manipulation and reach went well beyond the nascent broadcast media. Beito explained that “Roosevelt’s intimidation efforts reached their apogee in the hands of the Special Senate Committee on Lobbying. The president indirectly recruited Sen. Hugo L. Black (D-Ala.), a zealous and effective New Deal loyalist, as chair.” The Black Committee undertook a wide-ranging investigation into anti–New Deal critics, including journalists.32
Black was granted “access to tax returns dating back to 1925 of such critics as David Lawrence of the United States News.” He then demanded that his targets turn over their private telegrams and the “telegraph companies let the committee search copies of all incoming and outgoing telegrams for the first nine months of 1935. When Western Union refused on privacy grounds, the FCC, at Black’s urging, ordered it to comply.”33
The extent of the government’s intrusion into private telegram communications was shocking. “Over a nearly three-month period at the end of 1935,” writes Beito, “FCC and Black Committee staffers searched great stacks of telegrams in Western Union’s D.C. office. Operating with virtually no restriction, they read the communications of sundry lobbyists, newspaper publishers, and conservative political activists as well as every member of Congress. Writing to Black, one investigator stated that they had gone through ‘35,000 to 50,000 [telegrams] per day.’ Various newspapers and members of Congress later estimated that staffers had examined some five million telegrams over the course of the investigation. . . . The committee used the information it found as a basis for more than 1,000 new subpoenas. One of these was for all incoming and outgoing telegrams, not just those sent through Washington, D.C., of W. H. Cowles’ anti–New Deal newspaper chain in the Northwest.”34
Hugo Black would become Roosevelt’s first appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. Early in his career he had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
In another example, Beito writes that “[d]uring the 1930s, [newspaper publisher] Edward Rumely formed an alliance with other New Deal critics, including newspaper publisher Frank Gannett and the well-known conservationist and civil libertarian Amos Pinchot. On the same day that Franklin Roosevelt announced his court-packing plan in 1937, the trio organized the Committee for Constitutional Government (CCG). Gannett wrote the checks, and Rumely ran day-to-day operations. CCG led perhaps the first successful offensive against the New Deal, pioneering the use of direct mail and helping to defeat the court-packing plan.”35
For this, Rumely was singled out by Roosevelt’s congressional loyalists. “It didn’t take long for Democrats to strike back. In 1938, Senator Sherman Minton of Indiana announced a sweeping investigation of lobbies, targeting forces opposed to ‘the objectives of the administration.’ Minton-committee staff arrived en masse at CCG’s office, where they began copying files. After watching this for several hours, Rumely ordered them out, charging them with an illegal ‘fishing expedition.’ Minton’s undoing, however, was his proposal to make it a felony ‘to publish as a fact anything known to be false.’ The resulting public backlash over a perceived threat to free speech led to the collapse of the investigation. Over the next decade, CCG distributed over 82 million pieces of literature criticizing such policies as expanded government medical insurance, public housing, and labor legislation.”36
Roosevelt was also a huge admirer of George Creel, Woodrow Wilson’s top propagandist. In his book, FDR and the Press, Graham J. White explained: “Unbeknown, apparently, to the Washington press, Roosevelt repeatedly used Creel’s articles to outline his plans and purposes and to test public reaction to them. . . . Often Roosevelt actually dictated whole paragraphs to Creel for opinion-pieces Roosevelt would write and speeches he would deliver.”37
Roosevelt was known to give a tongue-lashing to the media during contentious periods of his presidency, as have other presidents. But he sought to separate media owners, publishers, and columnists from the so-called working press, and in this he had great success. While many who have written on this subject credit Roosevelt’s adeptness at press relations, what they do not admit is the provable fondness for Roosevelt’s progressive domestic agenda by the working press. It is also a principal reason they tolerated Roosevelt’s (and Wilson’s) violations of press freedom and championed many of his New Deal programs.
James E. Pollard, who in 1947 wrote about the relationship between presidents and the press, said of Roosevelt, in part, that his administration “[p]eriodically . . . sounded the alarm about the U.S. press; it was false to its trust, it failed to give the public the whole story, it played down anything favorable to the administration and exaggerated what was bad, it manufactured anti-Roosevelt stuff out of whole cloth, it was owned and controlled by men of predatory wealth. By the same token, writers, editors, and publishers [not so much the working press] were forever reading danger to the freedom of the press in the acts and attitudes of the administration. They saw it in Presidential actions and utterances. They sensed it in New Deal legislation. They scented it in the actions of subordinates or of the New Deal agencies.”38
In fact, some prominent individuals feared that Roosevelt was intent on suppressing media owners and publishers. Pollard explained: “Each saw only the worst in the other. To borrow the Roosevelt expression, both were seeing things under the bed. Yet the columnist Gen. Hugh Johnson, at one time in the confidence of the President, asserted that the administration attacks on the press had ‘appeared over long enough periods of time and with enough consistency to indicate a policy or at least a conviction.’ He feared that they were ‘opening steps in a furtive purpose to suppress or soften criticism of governmental action by legislation, intimidation or whatever it takes.’ ”39
However, as Pollard wrote: “The Roosevelt strength in dealing with the working press lay in the fact that he found common ground with the correspondents. He understood their needs and their problems. He fa
ced them as man to man, usually with no holds barred. He matched wits with them, he fenced with them, he was quite frank with them in most matters. His achievements in these respects far outran those of any of his predecessors. He was a master of the art of applied psychology in the field of broad public relations.”40
Therefore, other than all the press manipulation, threats, and suppression, “the working press of the United States is forever in [Roosevelt’s] debt for meeting it on common ground over so many critical years.”41
The same can be said of President Barack Obama, of course, and his relationship not just with the “working press” but with media owners, publishers, and commentators. Like Roosevelt, Obama acted against the media in a variety of significant ways. A retired Washington Post executive editor, writing on the opinion page, explained that “[t]he Justice Department secretly subpoenaed and seized from telephone companies two months of records for 20 AP phone lines and switchboards used by more than 100 reporters in four of its news bureaus.” “[T]he Obama administration . . . subpoenaed and seized records of telephone calls and e-mails between several New York Times reporters and government officials, between a Fox News reporter and a State Department contract analyst, and between two journalists and a former CIA officer.”42