RED SCARE REPRESSION -- A
COURAGEOUS MINE-MILL AD IN
THE WESTERN NEWSPAPERS -- AND
SOME VERY CONTEMPORARY IDAHO
THINGS
As the Red Scare mounted in the U.S. of the latter 1940s, reactionaries and their Congressional allies moved to enact blatantly repressive legislation. An early example was the viciously anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. Witch-hunting Federal and state anti-radical "hearings" mushroomed. The Attorney General's "Subversive List" -- summarily and arbitrarily outlawing hundreds of organizations -- was quickly initiated. Criminal prosecution for simple beliefs multiplied rapidly.
In 1950, the Internal Security Act -- named the McCarran Act after Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada [who was also known as the "Senator from Spain" for his undying admiration of the Fascist Franco] -- was enacted with much flag-waving and drum-beating. Among its many provisions was the infamous Subversive Activities Control Board -- and another provision provided for the concentration camp incarceration of radicals or suspected radicals during any one of several President-decreed states of "national emergency." Old concentration camps -- i.e., those used to hold Japanese-Americans during World War II -- were reactivated; new camps were built. Full rosters of camp personnel were hired.
The FBI quickly began to feather out its existent radical lists -- and to develop a variety of new ones. Many, many thousands of Americans were placed on these lists.
All of these -- and other poisonous fruits of this hideous epoch -- constituted blatant and massive violations of the U.S. Bill of Rights at every point.
Under U.S. pressure, the Canadian government moved in a similar witch-hunting direction.
In early October, 1952, the U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee which worked very closely with J. Edgar Hoover et al. -- and which included Pat McCarran and racist U.S. Senator Jim Eastland of Mississippi and others of that ilk -- came to Salt Lake City to conduct "hearings" designed to attack Mine-Mill and its leadership.
The Union courageously put, among other places, this advertisement in the Salt Lake City Tribune of October 6, 1952.
The Internal Security Act was finally repealed in 1971.
But, bluntly, there isn't any reason today (2000) to believe that the FBI itself, which has pursued political repression as a primary priority since its origins early in the 20th Century, has in any way stopped its pursuit of radical dissidents -- especially those of the Left.
And there is much to indicate that the FBI, and some other agencies, however covertly, are doing just that.
Think about this: We've lived in Pocatello, Idaho for three years. A few examples of our very strange experiences here:
As soon as we moved into our new home, we found ourselves the recipients of unusual and on-going official (and otherwise) scrutiny: obvious surveillance. This is continuing.
A man was suddenly across the street one day -- taking photos of our house. He left very quickly when I emerged.
An ostensible cable t-v repairman appeared in our back yard one afternoon. Minutes thereafter, our cable went out. The cable company -- this was stated by two company officials to us -- knew absolutely nothing of the man and had no workmen scheduled anywhere in the vicinity of this neighborhood.
A very odd person -- a woman or a man dressed "cleverly" as a woman -- appeared at our doorstep at 2 a.m. The person, who we invited in, was extremely curious about the insides of our home and gave us a story about being kicked out of an unspecified nearby house, and thus needing a cab. [This is a 'way up high, relatively isolated, on-the-edge setting and none of this fit.] The next day, I thoroughly investigated "her" story -- and nothing checked out anywhere.
Our garbage has been dumped and searched with obvious intricacy.
A Protestant clergyman suggested that, with my extensive background in race relations, I join a Pocatello citizens' police advisory committee of which he was a member. Having chaired for years the Mayor's Committee on Police Policy at Grand Forks, N.D. [ scroll down Index, or click, for the section entitled, But Some Very Good Words -- UND, Mississippi, Grand Forks N.D.], I was quite agreeable. I immediately sent him some relevant material on my background and work. And then there was silence. I never heard from him again. A year and a half later, while giving a talk, I mentioned this to a person active in the local NAACP -- and did so in the context of our very strange Pocatello experiences. "We'll certainly get you on that committee," she said. And, not surprisingly, I never heard another word on that from anyone.
I am, after all, a retired full Professor with a vast amount of teaching and related activity under my belt -- to say nothing of rich and extraordinary field experiences in Native rights, labor, civil rights, and race relations. Efforts to develop any interest of any kind in me at Idaho State University (here at Pocatello) -- by myself or by others --have consistently failed to strike even a single note of resonance. One faculty member, learning of my background via one of my children, became very interested in my giving talks at ISU and possibly teaching a class. He came congenially to our home twice. Suddenly he became visibly afraid, practiced overt avoidance many times, and I never heard from him again.
There is more.
Much more indeed.
For virtually the entire period we've lived in Pocatello, our mail -- USPS -- has taken inordinate periods of time to reach us. Many things come to us by Priority Mail which should normally take only two to three days -- but which, in our case, has almost always been very late and has sometimes taken up to eight or nine days! Many of these items have had holes poked in them and at least one packet -- Overnight USPS -- mailed by me early this Spring at a local Post Office where I am known and sent by me to a history professor at a well known higher ed institution -- was subjected to substantial tampering and some damage.
On January 13, 1999, I sent a long, detailed complaint to the Postal Inspection Service at Seattle and attached dozens of envelopes and package wrappings. I never received any response from the Inspection Service -- eventually getting only what proved to be an in-the-dark and non-helpful phone call from the local postmaster. Our situation improved briefly and then once against worsened. I wrote again to the Postal Inspection Service at Seattle on January 26 2000. Receiving no response, I once again wrote -- March 13 2000:
"On January 26 2000, I wrote you . . .with respect to bizarre mail delays that we have been experiencing here. A year earlier, I had also written to Postal Inspection Service, Seattle, on the same matter. Now, as then, I've received no response of any sort from the Inspection Service. Improvements in our mail service as a result of these communications are, at best, unpredictable and speculative -- and the basic questions as to who, why, and what's being done remain completely unanswered from our perspective.
The crudity of the whole thing does raise the possibility of some sort of local and/or state law enforcement approach -- functioning "under color of law" [to use a phrase we used a great deal when I was a civil rights organizer in Mississippi and other parts of the Deep South from ] -- but very possibly without any bona fide legal basis. The absence of any response from the Postal Inspection Service certainly lends toward this explanation.
In any event, I concluded my letter of January 26 2000 to you with the statement, "With respect to my original letter of January 13 1999 [ copy enclosed -- along with a contemporary civil rights clipping involving interviews with me by the regional newspaper], what action has Postal Inspection Service taken and what can we expect from it in this current continuation of the situation?"
I reiterate that, and hope to hear from Postal Inspection Service quite soon indeed."
This has secured no response whatsoever -- simply silence. While our mail service seems to be more "normal," I sure as hell wouldn't count on it. [NOTE August 10 2000: Our mail situation has become even more weird and this is continuing.] Tampering with the mail, as I have always understood it, absent any ostensibly "legal" basis, constitutes a felony crime. The possibility of a direct Federal connection in this situation looms increasingly large.
We have had almost continually weird telephone experiences. [NOTE August 10 2000: Our telephone situation has become even stranger and this is continuing.]
A telephone bill -- U.S. West -- in February 2000 indicated a string of calls billed to our phone from a person and phone number completely unknown and unrelated to us. These were made over a period of several days. In addition, an AT&T bill received concurrently, indicated something comparable. Together the calls totalled almost $90.00. A telephone company person, when we called all of this in, used the term "tap" as a possibility. Telephone people subsequently checked and said no tap was found [at the time of the subsequent checks.]
It's worth pointing out that, in the 1980s, I secured 3,000 or so pages from my FBI files -- some of these as then recent as 1979 -- and, in addition, there are several hundred other pages FBI refuses to give me on grounds of "national security," etc.
Other very strange things have been happening to us.
My experiences as a primary target of witch-hunters go back into at least the mid-1950s. This is my best, reflective analysis of the current state of Federally-based repressive methodology at this point in the Nation's history -- and I give it this July 11 2000:
It seems very likely indeed that the FBI and related Federal law enforcement agencies are presently using, in formal and semi-formal frameworks, selected and ostensibly "trained" local and state lawmen in their covert activities against the activist Left. Among other things, this approach would quietly broaden the contact/support base of these particular Federal agencies but, much much more to the point, would -- cunningly -- officially maintain revelatory distance between themselves and their "grassroots" anti social-justice and anti Native-rights and anti civil-libertarian and anti environmentalist (and frequently downright illegal) projects. And, certainly, this would greatly minimize potentially embarassing FOIA and other disclosures.
I remember the words of an old friend of mine, courageous Professor Jim Silver, History, University of Missississippi (Oxford) -- author of Mississippi: The Closed Society (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1964) -- right after the violent and tragic upheaval organized and led by Mississippi authorities in their unsuccessful effort to prevent the admission of the first Black student, Mr. James Meredith. Jim Silver, one of the very few faculty at Ole Miss to befriend Meredith, was subjected -- as he had been off and on for years -- to all sorts of harassment. A reporter from the North asked him, "Why do you stay here?"
"Hell, I like it here," Jim told him.
As always, we keep right on fighting.
"Speak Up, America!" is as relevant a cry today as it was a half century ago.
