THE LAST WORD
Carbon, Ron
THE LAST WORD Bonanza Ron Carbon Last March, shortly after the Government of the United States went to court to muzzle The Progressive, a syndicated columnist who shall remain nameless here...
...for any other services rendered in his forty-year association wih the magazine...
...It was all, he implied, a get-rich-quick scheme The Progressive had cooked up...
...But an unprecedented First Amendment case is a most extraordinary circumstance, and the distinguished law firm of LaFollette, Sinykin, Anderson, and Munson was in no position to tie up most of its time and talent on a pro bono basis...
...Please be one of that small number...
...THE LAST WORD Bonanza Ron Carbon Last March, shortly after the Government of the United States went to court to muzzle The Progressive, a syndicated columnist who shall remain nameless here suggested that our magazine had "goaded and provoked" the Department of Energy into trampling on the First Amendment so that we could reap a "bonanza of publicity...
...But it costs money, too — lots of money...
...It is true that we have received a few subscription orders that might not have come in were it not for the First Amendment case...
...Even at substantially reduced rates, the legal fees have been formidable...
...Well, circulation has grown — by about 700 subscribers...
...So what good is your $10 or $25 contribution...
...What else can I tell you...
...In April 1979, by contrast, our travel expenses for the month came to $4,909...
...Defending the First Amendment has already cost us more than $200,000 — and the end is not yet in sight...
...Right now it is experiencing desperate times...
...In April 1978, our travel costs amounted to...zero...
...So it's simple arithmetic: If you and every one of your fellow subscribers were to send just $20, we could afford to defend the whole Bill of Rights...
...The Progressive is $125,000 in debt right now, and the figure will surely grow larger before it begins to diminish...
...The problem is that for six months we had neither the time nor the money to pursue our usual subscription promotion program, which under ordinary circumstances would have produced 3,000 or 4,000 new subscribers...
...If that were all it costs to defend the First Amendment, we'd have no problem...
...But I'd rather tell you, instead, about the evening a few weeks ago when several of us had dinner together, a block from the magazine's office, and how the waitress, when she brought our check, asked us to contribute her tip to The Progressive's Legal Defense Fund...
...But the ACLU has financial problems of its own, and out-of-pocket costs — for travel, telephone, printing, and the like — must be reimbursed...
...What does the plus side of the ledger show...
...And Teri Terry tells me that both the Department of Energy and the FBI have ordered subscriptions...
...Confronted with the need to collect scientific affidavits in support of our position as quickly as possible, I left Madison at 7:30 one Monday morning and flew to Milwaukee, then to San Francisco, drove first to Berkeley, then to Stanford, back to San Francisco, flew down to Los Angeles, drove out to Riverside and back to Los Angeles, flew on to Denver, to Minneapolis, and finally home to Madison — arriving at 9:15 Tuesday evening...
...Like most political publications, The Progressive is no stranger to financial adversity...
...I joined the staff of The Progressive six years ago, and in those six years the magazine incurred a total of about $1,000 in legal costs — an average of $165 a year...
...It was founded in 1909, and in these last seventy years it has experienced two kinds of times — hard times and terribly hard times...
...So let me tell you how rich we got, and are still getting...
...The American Civil Liberties Union, which took on the defense of Editor Erwin Knoll and Managing Editor Sam Day, charges no legal fees, of course...
...But, of course, not everyone will send a check...
...I could tell you how close we have come on several recent occasions to missing the month-end payroll, or how adept I've become at stalling irate creditors...
...That we are living out of suitcases, drinking too much coffee, not seeing enough of our families, smoking too many cigarettes...
...Nobody went anywhere...
...Reporters all over the country picked up on the idea that we were getting rich, and naturally they thought it was a good story...
...We didn't know whether to laugh or cry — and we had no time to do either...
...Others made similarly frantic — and expensive — journeys...
...Well, right now, as you read this last page of the November issue, you are one reader among approximately 40,000 subscribers, all of whom presumably care a great deal about such issues as nuclear secrecy, the danger of the arms race, and the state of the First Amendment...
...we could afford to pay for months or years, if necessary...
...Except in the most extraordinary circumstances, The Progressive's attorney and chairman of the board, Gordon Sinykin, had never sent us a bill for his legal services — or Ron Carbon is the publisher of The Progressive...
...Soon...
...The telephones started ringing right away...
...A small number of people will...
...How did we do it...
...It was easy...
...Perhaps a dozen or two reporters entered subscriptions after covering the case...
Vol. 43 • November 1979 • No. 11
