Since my recent post on domestic surveillance and J. Edgar Hoover's secret plan for mass detentions of suspected "subversives," I've come across a number of blog posts that make interesting supplements to the sources I originally assembled. I'm posting excerpts from two historically focused pieces here and will follow up soon with another post that relates some historical insights to current discussions of privacy in the 21st century.
I found Jerry Moncaco's excellent Ghosts of Strikes Past: Class Struggle, Strike Breaking & Blacklisting In Hollywood interesting on a lot of levels. I had not known, for example, about Barbara Stanwyck's right-leaning, collusion with the anti-communist witch hunters---especially intriguing to me, since my father always claimed his Trotskyite father, whom I'm named after, had an affair with Stanwyck.
But what I'm interested in right now are examples of bad social and political consequences of government maintaining vague and overbroad powers to monitor and collect data on its citizens. The blacklist and the loyalty boards, HUAC and other similar Congressional and state legislative committees all operated on the foundation of US government surveillance of its citizens.
Jerry's important point about the blacklist is that it
was not primarily used against Communists but against union organizers and militants. Further, the blacklist was not primarily used against writers, actors, and directors, the people we usually read about, but against set-designers, carpenters, painters, lighting-designers, etc. It is convenient for us at this late date to think of Hollywood blacklisting as mainly an activity of the past, and an activity that occurred during a limited period of time during the height of the cold war. This is indeed the case when we talk about stars and other well-known creative talent. The best way to discipline "troublesome" creative talent was to accuse them of being a communist, a homosexual. or a drug addict. Essentially, this was a form of blackmail by the bosses. But carpenters ... were not blackmailed in this way. If they were union militants of any type they were simply blacklisted. After the passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935 this kind of blacklisting of pro-union employees was illegal, but it was still maintained, and especially advocated by extreme right-wing bosses like those who ran Disney. The blacklist of Hollywood union militants began long before the well-known Hollywood anti-Communist blacklist and lasted for a long time after.
Furthermore, the US government and industrial powers actively supported corrupt, mob-infiltrated unions to undermine militant unions that pursued the legitimate interests of workers. If there are problems with corruption in organized labor, the US government has some responsibility to help fix it. A good start would be to pass new labor laws that reverse the attacks on organizing and enforcement that began long before George Bush came to power.
The historical lesson here is something that every unionist should know. In the post-war period government and management all opposed the threat of militant unions. At this time there were more militant unions than corrupt unions. One way that management opposed militant unions was by red-baiting them. In many cases the unionists who were being red-baited were not communist or even "leftists". They were simply good union leaders. This was the case with the CSU [Conference of Studio Unions]. Another strategy that management used in opposing militant unions was to find unions that were friendly with management and to promote the interest of those unions over and above the militant unions. A related strategy, and one of the most important, was for management to call in the mobsters and the unions allied with the mobsters. In every case across the U.S. in the post-World War II years - among electrical workers opposing General Electric and Westinghouse, among dock-workers in the east, among Midwestern Teamsters - management and government promoted unions allied with mobsters in order to defeat unions that actually had the worker's interest as part of their program. The story of Gerald Horne's "Class Struggle in Hollywood" is the story of how this happened in Los Angeles.
At the end of Ghosts of Strikes Past, Jerry links to a blog post by a blogging acquaintance of mine, Rokhl Kafrissen, which I missed when she first published it, Mechanics of the Blacklist, Part 1. Similar to my discussion of how suspected civil rights activists were targeted for reprisals in Mississippi, Rokhl discusses how the information gathered by loyalty boards and HUAC, through FBI surveillance and unreliable informants, was then used by the American Legion and others to target suspected Communists outside the law.
In 1947, Harry Truman (facing a hostile Congress and other political factors) enacted a piece of legislation which would screen all Federal government employees for 'loyalty'. One of the grounds for 'disloyalty' was membership in a subversive organization. Truman directed that the Attorney General, with the FBI, promulgate a list of subversive organizations for use by the Loyalty Review Board in their determinations. The Attorney General's List of Subversive Organizations (AGLOSO) came to have far wider import than just its effect on Federal employees....
Once a part of the public record, the AGLOSO was seized upon by groups who believed that the government was not aggressive enough in its efforts to protect the country from the 'Red Menace'.
There is a vast area of subversive activity still within the law about which neither the FBI nor the Justice Department can do anything. Therefor it remains the civic and patriotic responsibility of individual Americans and their organizations to perform.
(Firing Line magazine, 1949)
Firing Line was a publication of the American Legion. It's sole purpose was to inform readers about Communism, and one aspect of that mission was publishing the names and activities of people whom they believed to be Communists. One of the sources for their information was lists like the AGLOSO. Another source was the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). In addition to the Federal HUAC, 13 state legislatures had their own HUACS. Those, too, were combed for information to be published in Firing Line....
[T]he American Legion, and the hundreds of other members of the army of anti-communist vigilantes, had no use for our Constitutional due process protections.
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