Tooling up for Mass Repression: The Subversive Activities Control Board
1953-12-12 035-0019-003 Tooling Up for Mass Repression by Laurent B. Frantz LAURENT B. FRANTZ was co-author with Norman Redlich of the widely read article Does Silence Mean Guilt? in The Nation of June 6. EVEN persons acutely conscious of the importance of civil liberties are usually but dimly aware...
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| Institution: | MCR - The Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick |
| Language: | English |
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12 December 1953
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/10796/E53829D7-1441-449D-8140-D746A08AD37F http://hdl.handle.net/10796/CC98CE5F-8698-4CDA-A88B-06148D191755 |
| Summary: | 1953-12-12
035-0019-003
Tooling Up for Mass Repression by Laurent B. Frantz LAURENT B. FRANTZ was co-author with Norman Redlich of the widely read article Does Silence Mean Guilt? in The Nation of June 6. EVEN persons acutely conscious of the importance of civil liberties are usually but dimly aware of the existence of the Subversive Activities Control Board. Most Americans have probably never heard of it. The newspapers have largely ignored it. Yet this tribunal may have a more disastrous impact on traditional American liberties than all the sedition legislation, spy scares, "loyalty" tests and oaths, and investigations of opinion that have preceded it. It is sixteen years since Martin Dies, the premature McCarthyite, made the seminal discovery that Communists support most of the short-range objectives of progressives, liberals, New Dealers, and trade unionists, and that that fact may profitably be confused with support by the latter groups for the long-range objectives of the Communists. American reaction in the intervening years has been chiefly engaged in exploring the political potentialities of this false equation. A governmental board empowered to decide what activities are "subversive" and to control them was the natural outcome. Yet while there has been no dramatic break in the line of development, the Subversive Activities Control Board represents a significant change of pace. As Franklin Roosevelt once noted, "the judicial process requires to be supplemented by the administrative tribunal wherever there is a necessity for deciding issues on a quantity-production basis." We are moving from political trials of individuals to political trials of groups and movements. Repression is tooling up for mass production. The board derives its existence and powers from the McCarran Act, more formally known as the Internal Security Act of 1950. This was an omnibus measure, produced when the Eighty-first Congress, puzzled by the relative merits of several rival schemes for the curtailment of liberty, resolved the matter by combining them all into one. The part of the act which creates the board and defines its functions is a revision of the Mundt-Nixon bill which the House Committee on Un-American Activities proposed to Congress in 1948. The committee offered its original bill as an alternative to proposals that the Communist Party be openly outlawed. A possible element in its calculation was the fact that its only previous legislative effort had been held unconstitutional as a "bill of attainder," which means that it imposed punishment based on a legislative finding of guilt. Representative (now Vice-President) Richard M. Nixon, a member of the committee and co-author of the original bill, testifying later in favor of the measure finally adopted, stated: ". . . we came to the conclusion that naming the Communist Party by name and attempting to build the entire registration provisions around such a definition was an unconstitutional approach, and consequently the committee attempted to find a legislative device for meeting the problem in a constitutional manner." This bit of official history is revealing, but it evidently does not tell the whole story. One does not create and staff a permanent governmental body for the trial of a single case. The Communist Party, after all, can be tried only once and then the board must devote itself to the pursuit of organizations whose objectives are more immediate and have at least some non-Communist support. Thus its long-range function must necessarily be the application of Mr. Dies's principle that anything from civil liberties to rent control is subversive if the Communists are for it. The "legislative device" invented by the House Committee on Un-American Activities begins with a series of Congressional findings on the evil intentions of "the world Communist movement" and "the Communist movement in the United States." The fact that this eloquent denunciation does not refer to the Communist Party by name is supposed to insulate it from constitutional objections to legislative findings of guilt. EQUIPPED WITH these prefabricated opinions on the significance of the matters to be adjudicated, the board sits in judgment on any organization which the Attorney General sees fit to hale before it. If it finds an association to be a "Communist action organization" (a term apparently intended to refer only to the Communist Party) or a "Communist front," it does not formally proscribe it. It merely orders the organization to register. The distinction, however, seems to be largely theoretical. In view of the descriptions embodied in the act and the legal and practical consequences of such a registration, the order is, in effect, that the organization plead guilty to being a public enemy and extend its chin to receive the consequences. "Fronts" must list officers and sources of funds. "Action" organizations must list these, plus members and all who have been members during the preceding twelve months. It seems probable, though the act does not make this wholly clear, that "fronts" must also give what amounts to a list of members by itemizing the source of all dues payments. All lists must be renewed annually. In connection with other parts of the act, these lists may be of sinister significance. Thus, Section 4(a) makes it a felony, subject to ten years' imprisonment and a $10,000 fine, "for any person knowingly to combine, conspire, or agree with any other person to perform any act which would substantially contribute to the establishment within the United States of a totalitarian dictatorship" under foreign control. This is by far the vaguest and most sweeping sedition statute ever enacted in the United States. It could fairly easily be
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