The Price of Dissent: Testimonies to Political Repressions in America. (Reviews).

Bud and Ruth Schultz. The Price of Dissent: Testimonies to Political Repressions in America. Berkeley: U of California P, 2001. 468 pp. $65.00 cloth/$24.95 paper.

The authors' earlier book, It Did Happen Here: Recollections of Political Repression in America (U of California P, 1989), and The Price of Dissent combine two histories: one, a compendium of political police depredations against opponents of the government's policies--illegalities, dirty tricks, felonies, break-ins, beatings, burglaries, and smear campaigns during the twentieth century--and, two, the heroic resistance of labor, civil rights, antiwar, and other dissidents. Both books foreground the harm done by anticommunism and more broadly the persistence of rightwing hostility to the democratic promises of our Bill of Rights.

The authors recount a dark historical narrative of political repression as "the nether side of the American tradition of constitutional liberties" now institutionalized in "every branch and every level of government." Robert Goldstein's Political Repression in Modern America provides the definition of political repression: "government action which grossly discriminates against persons or organizations viewed as presenting a fundamental challenge to existing power relationships or key government policies." Combining historical overviews with some seventy individual memoirs or interviews, the authors' method is powerfully comprehensive and dramatic.

It Did Happen Here opens with five case studies of protest suppressed by government actions. The second section, "The Method to the Madness," surveys the suppression of "heretical" beliefs and activities by the legislative, executive, and judicial branches. The third section, "The Face of a Police State," exposes the extremes of police-state illegalities and brutalities. And the final section tells the stories of the costs to people who sought vindication.

While It Did Happen Here collects first-hand accounts of activists from highly diverse social movements, The Price of Dissent focuses on three: labor, African American, and antiwar activists. In seeking to redress grievances and to change the structures of the nation, these dissenters from corporate and government control endured the full force of government repression, both its frontal assaults and its divisive tactics. The authors reveal how, by resisting attacks against themselves, each dissident "contributed to the great U.S. heritage of free expression."

The three sections of The Price of Dissent examine the red-baiting attacks on labor during the Cold War era, the assault on the modem Civil Rights and Black Power movements, and the offensive against opponents to the Vietnam War. The authors' persuasive combination of general commentary and specific memoir works wonderfully well to expose the authoritarian history of our police and their leaders.

In Part I, "Subverting the Organization of Labor," which like the other sections proceeds chronologically, the campaign against the Industrial Workers of the World leads off, followed by the repression of African American sharecroppers, the pre-WWII red scare against teamsters, the postwar Cold War orthodoxy and loyalty tests to put down auto workers and teachers, the purge of international unions, the muzzling of rank-and-file labor leaders in Pittsburgh, and the onslaught against the meatpackers' strike in Minnesota.

Part Three, "Silencing Opponents of War," surveys the suppression of those opposed to the Vietnam War. In this section we hear the stories of eight victims. For example, in their effort (along with HUAC and the CIA) to stigmatize the anti-nuclear group as "subversive," the FBI alone amassed forty-nine volumes of records on Dagmar Wilson and Women Strike for Peace. Jackie Goldberg gives an account of the maneuvers and eventual brutality of the University of California and the police to silence Berkeley's Free Speech Movement. And Abbie Hoffman's story of the Yippies exposes particularly the fierce bigotry and contempt for law by the police and courts at times of crisis. These personal narratives, along with the historical contexts and scholarly references provided by Ruth and Bud Schultz, constitute an abhorrent record of a government become criminal in its rabid obsession to silence peaceful, legal opponents of the government's Soviet-phobic foreign policies.

I will focus on Part Two, "Suppressing the Black Freedom Struggle." Cold War constraints on African American demands for freedom are recounted, followed by the Southern black freedom movement under siege, a white liberal's struggles, Lowndes County, Alabama, the murderous terror against the Black Panther Party, and undermining of African American elected officials. These extraordinary citizens who "by dissenting when it was unpopular or dangerous" preserved "the precious right of free expression for the next century's dissenters" include Paul Robeson, Walter Bergman, John Lewis, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, Anne Braden, Johnny Jackson, Kwame Toure (Stokely Carmichael), Ron Satchel, Akua Njeri (Deborah Johnson), Flint Taylor, and Mervyn Dymally.

I have space to elaborate on one testimony, that of Johnny Jackson. Although relatively unknown today, he exemplifies the courage and leadership that effected profound changes in the South.

Jackson carries with him to this day the dream of a loving community concerned for humanity as taught by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. He grew up in Lowndes County, Alabama, where he joined the movement for justice brought by SNCC. Before 1965 Lowndes County blacks and sympathetic whites were afraid "to do anything" for improved conditions of life, even to talk about it. But the county was turned upside down after the SNCC workers came (Bob Mants, Stokely Carmichael, Scott B. Smith, Courtland Cox, Rap Brown, and others). Jackson's brave father supported the SNCC youth with a house. The whole Jackson family joined in the march from Selma to Montgomery. The time and place were dangerous. The Klan killed several Civil Rights workers nearby (Jimmie Lee Jackson, Viola Liuzzo, Jonathan Daniels, Samuel Younge, Jr.) and burned churches; Father Jackson, a daughter, and Johnny lost their jobs; Johnny was shot at by Klan members; his father had a mysterious car accident and was severely burned; but they continued undeterred. Johnny led a boycott at his high school for a cafeteria and heated buses. And then they worked to help people register to vote and raised money for people who were fired or evicted for trying to exercise rights guaranteed by the Voting Rights Act. Brother Cliff entered an all-white school. From 1965 to 1976 Jackson helped found a third party in Lowndes County with a black panther emblem; he was arrested over and over; he refused induction to fight in Vietnam (joining Cleve Sellers, Muhammad Ali, and others); he went to college. He and other blacks ran for public office, but "absentee" ballots defeated them. But then a friend won office as tax assessor, and then the first black became sheriff of Lowndes County. And Jackson became mayor of his town (but only after a court challenge). "We gained a little at a time, just enough to give us strength to keep fighting for more."

In 1978, Jackson requested his FBI papers and found what other SNCC workers had found. The FBI had collected 364 pages based upon ten years of surveillance and harassment because he had wanted justice and demanded rights guaranteed by the Constitution. "But the most important thing is that we Blacks joined hands together as a people to make things work for everybody. And that was all done through SNCC."

A final section of the book recounts the successful struggle by Chicago citizens to expose the secret, entrenched, illegal Chicago Red Squad (with accounts by Rick Gutman and others).

The epigraphs to all four sections of the book emphasize the U.S. Constitution's establishment of fundamental rights as the normative context for evaluating recurrent U.S. fascism. The heroism of the dissenters whose testimonials empower this book arose from their struggles to exercise the rights of free speech, peaceable assembly, freedom of the press, due process, and equal justice despite a political police whose often unconstrained power derived from their contempt for these constitutional rights.