American Notebook A Significant Victory
Harrington, M.
After a decade of injustice, the Attorney General of the United States casually removed the Independent Socialist League from his List of Subversive Organizations a month or so ago. In...
...Thus a blow was struck at one of the basic instruments of the witchhunt...
...Until that happens, if it ever does, the focus of the civil liberties battle will be on the formal, legal questions involved...
...They are, as is obvious to everyone including the Attorney General, incapable of ever defending themselves, for they no longer exist...
...One of the features of this madness is that defunct organizations are on the List...
...The former members of the now defunct group are subject, for the rest of their lives, to all of the pressures and suspicions which listing involves...
...Rather it was to provide an utterly convincing demonstration of its reactionary character...
...It should be given money to continue its splendid work...
...but that was as true ten years ago as it was ten weeks ago...
...For this, for its perseverance in long and arduous years of struggle (examinations upon examinations upon examinations), the ISL deserves the gratitude, not only of socialists, but of every democrat and civil libertarian...
...And Joseph Rauh, whose series of legal victories is making him one of the most effective champions of civil liberties in the United States, deserves praise, of course, but, better yet, another chance to bring the whole constitutional question out into the open...
...during the time of patriotic pro-Russian feeling even United States Senators associated with Soviet-American friendship committees...
...It is a factor in the life of anyone who has ever belonged to a group designated by the Attorney General...
...The List, first made public by Tom Clark under the Truman Administration, has literally pervaded American life...
...Both have been done, and sometimes the executive who decreed that this subversive lapse on the part of a writer rendered him unfit to work was himself a former member...
...They can hold prior membership against a man—or they can excuse it...
...Proof, of course, the Attorney General did not have...
...But these ghostly condemnations have real effect...
...With the magnificent aid of the Workers Defense League, and Joseph Rauh, the WDL attorney in the case, it was able to challenge the Attorney General...
...In Hollywood, for example, one of the World War II "Win the War" groups was placed on the List...
...There is the old, and somewhat abstract, argument that if the Government takes this or that step, then it will be driven logically to an extreme...
...It is not unlikely that he reluctantly decided to let one group go in the hope of keeping the List itself intact...
...The hearings themselves, such as they were, were strung out over a period of years...
...His case against the ISL was shredded by Rauh's brilliance...
...One theory that comes to mind immediately is that the Attorney General feared a clear-cut court test of the List...
...For once having adopted a principle of anonymous and irrefutable accusation which was taken as proof of guilt, once having introduced this conception into a society which was moving toward the right, the Attorney General had created a malig nant growth...
...Why then, did the Attorney General hand down his decision...
...Since there is no longer any organization, those who wish to can pick and choose...
...The listed organizations were given no opportunity to hear the charges, much less to refute them in any kind of proceeding...
...In the course of this struggle, Max Shachtman, National Chairman of the ISL, won a victory in a significant passport case which upheld the "natural right" to travel...
...So long as the List remains, the atmosphere, at least, of witch-hunt remains...
...After a decade of injustice, the Attorney General of the United States casually removed the Independent Socialist League from his List of Subversive Organizations a month or so ago...
...he would appear in court, not as the denouncer of a Communist organization which had been listed arbitrarily, but as the persecutor of a small, antiCommunist and democratic socialist organization...
...here, it did...
...The WDL (112 E. 19th St., New York) should not simply receive congratulations...
...In this sense, no decision of the Attorney General, or of any American court, can possibly eradicate the grave harm that has been done in violation of due process...
...And yet, one cannot help skeptical speculation about the motives of the Justice Department (and how ironic the name sounds in this context) in this case...
...and he would face a challenge, not simply to the listing of the ISL, but to the constitutionality of the List itself...
...It has been used to deprive people of jobs in defense industries, to keep them off radio and television, to subject them to harassment by the FBI, to punish them with various kinds of damaging discharges from the army after two years of satisfactory service, and on and on...
...And this does not merely apply to the defunct organizations which have been listed...
...Usually it doesn't work...
...Now the hysteria has passed and these "extremes" have become institutions...
...Virtually every writer in the movie industry belonged to it...
...The outcome of the ISL fight was not to destroy the institution...
...And throughout, there was the continuing and unrelenting pressure of the Government itself...
...admitted he was ready to lie for the "cause...
...This, of course, is not to minimize the signficance of the ISL victory...
...In announcing the decision, no reference was made to the merits of the case, and a few lame excuses were offered—the Attorney General, whose office had established the List, appointed the prosecutor and the trial judge, and who had acted as a court of appeal, suddenly discovered that his own "strict standards" of proof had not been met...
...The ISL—the only or ganization on the List to make the attempt—won a series of hearings, or examinations, only after years of effort...
...It became the chief weapon of every McCarthyite and anti-libertarian in the country, the rigorously insane statute of a Kafka-like world...
...390...
...in fact, the Atterney General had difficulty finding experts to testify against the ISL: one admitted he had never heard of the ISL, another (James Burnham...
...For some, listing is clearly permanent...
...Now, with the formal delisting a further victory has been won...
...Here was a small organization discouragingly pitted against the immense power of the Government's agencies...
...But even with Rauh's generous contribution and the WDL's aid, there was still a considerable financial burden...
...It spread and spread with rigorous consistency, from Government to industry, from industry to the public as a whole...
...Actually, the only thing which can really change this situation would be a massive public revulsion against the principle of the List itself, and a general refusal on the part of the American people to pay any attention to it...
Vol. 5 • September 1958 • No. 4
