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New International, January–February 1950

 

Editorials

Classified Democracy

 

From The New International, Vol. XVI No. 1, January–February 1950, pp. 4–6.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

 

Without much fanfare, one day the Attorney General, a man presumably well enough versed in constitutional law to find his way to the Supreme Court bench, published a list of organizations which he decided to classify as “subversive.” No need for an accurate and scientific definition of a term with such insidious implications. No legal measures were proposed. The government was simply publishing information for citizens, just as it lists organizations engaged in charity pursuits, associations for the advancement of foreign trade, missionaries abroad. But care was taken to broadcast this information as widely as possible.

“Classified” organizations soon found it just a little more difficult than before to rent halls for public meetings or offices, especially in smaller communities. Recourse to legal action was impossible for there was no one to take to court. Classification seeped first into government bureaus. Members of classified groups or those suspected of being associates of those who were alleged to be members, even those who long, long ago signed an innocent election petition, found themselves under investigation, some discharged. The infamous case of James Kutcher, the legless veteran, fired from his lowly filing clerk job in the Veteran’s Administration for membership in the Socialist Workers Party, is well known. Dismissal axes dropped quickly on members and sympathizers of classified organizations working on government projects classified as “confidential.”

Most infuriatingly, while civil rights are chipped away, no law has been passed, no statutory disabilities imposed, no jailings, no prison terms, no trials. Where local and state ordinances are adopted, the Attorney General’s list, which is incorporated into no law, is included.

Classified organizations can find no way to get off the list, although the Attorney General kindly offers to hear their representatives, not with a view to removing them from the list but simply to allow them the consolation of knowing that they have exhausted every futile possibility. It is impossible to discover how or why any group was classified, or for that matter, why any were omitted; all such information is classified as confidential and the Attorney General will not be tricked into revealing it. Incredible as it seems, thousands of people have been tried without a trial, found guilty of a charge which is not defined, and sentenced to punishment which is announced piecemeal as time goes on and whose limits are nowhere discernible. To grapple with these mysterious workings is to try catching a candle-cast shadow on a black pavement in a murky alley.

And now, democracy by classification filters into the factories. Men are discharged because they are alleged to be associated with “classified” organizations; they cannot be permitted to work in departments or shops turning out materials classified as “confidential.” By swift and easy extension, men are fired regardless of the nature of their work. Wright Aeronautical demanded and won, over the protests of the local union, clauses incorporating these procedures into its contract with the UAW. Most recently, the Stewart Warner Chicago plant summarily discharged shop stewards who refused to sign loyalty oaths prepared by the company.

In the trial of Judith Coplon and Valentin Gubitchev, Judge Ryan must mull over FBI evidence, admittedly obtained by illegal wire-tapping, to decide on the validity of the entire proceedings. But worker victims of classification, accused of no crime and, unlike the FBI, guilty of nothing illegal, are convicted in star-chamber processes. Evidence? Has it been gathered by legal or illegal means, reported by maniacs, turned in by company agents paid by the piece, manufactured by skilled artisans? No one can judge; such information is “classified.”

But even the most authentic evidence, gathered by most moral methods, can prove only that the victims are members of groups which are not illegal but merely politically unorthodox and hence cannot demonstrate the criminality of the worker who is to lose his livelihood. Ordinary courts presumably punish malefactors who can be proved guilty of crimes. The secret-police, FBI, and security regulations punish those who are guilty of nothing, except political opinions. Consequently, the efforts of well-meaning people, who hope to prevent an arbitrary working of the eerie security machinery by demanding fair hearings for the accused, break against the wall of the Attorney General’s list, arbitrary justice epitomized.

Facts deny consolation to those who want to believe that this process is to be employed only against Stalinism. Even if this were the case, its malicious character would be evident. But it is now clear that the gears of classification are cut to drag in socialists, union militants, and ordinary dissenters.

We witness the revival of blacklists and yellow-dog oaths, applied to the country as a whole as well as the union movement. Unlike its employer counterpart in days of crude union-busting, new blacklists are government-inspired and initiated, more refined, more subtle, with a more “philosophical” justification, and far more dangerous precisely because the whole power of the state reinforces them.

The innocent list of information has gone a long way; the methods it represents are firmly fixed. There is no end to what can be “classified” as confidential. Government bureaucrats working behind a curtain, unchecked by legislative bodies, have unlimited latitude for their imagination. What logical or legal obstacle prevents some inventive genius from perfecting this device, until “classification” for “suspicion” catalogues groups and individuals on lists held in secret, never made public, and enforced in unexplained and unpublicized purges. American democracy would never stand for such a thing? It has swallowed a big dose already.

Why are we apparently slipping so smoothly into a “classified democracy,” America’s analogue of “peoples democracy”? It is not hard to understand. The greatest bulwark of civil liberties is the powerful labor movement, whose own rights are in jeopardy. But the prime mover is not an arrogantly reactionary administration, openly anti-labor, but the Democracy of Harry Truman. Labor officials do not speak out because their tongues twist with honeyed words for the Fair Deal administration which they support. The most far-sighted labor leaders see danger ahead, but a misplaced loyalty to Truman forces them to turn their eyes. They are only sowing the wind.

 
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