Outrage in Chicago
Howe, Irving
The following letter, in condensed version, was sent to the New York Times by the editor of Dissent: TO THE EDITOR: It is hard to speak of the Chicago trial with anything but bitterness....
...Until this trial, the New Left was far advanced in political self-destruction...
...It is foolish to suppose that repression can silence the political supporters of the Chicago defendants...
...Suppose we admit their intention was to stage a political spectacle rather than a legal defense...
...Those supporters may be wrong, but they are serious and prepared to suffer for their ideas...
...Do the people running this country, men like Agnew and Mitchell, really suppose that dissident youth can be answered through police sticks and jail sentences...
...The man on the bench and the man in the dock are not in the same position...
...They gained a day or two, the defendants lost years...
...a trial in which the presiding judge behaved in a style we have come to expect from the Soviet "courts," even going so far as to prohibit testimony from former Attorney General Ramsey Clark...
...Politically, the trial will lead to further polarization, with the Agnew-inspired Right encouraged to press for fiercer prosecution of dissidents and the New Left driven into moods of desperation...
...The following letter, in condensed version, was sent to the New York Times by the editor of Dissent: TO THE EDITOR: It is hard to speak of the Chicago trial with anything but bitterness...
...I say the Times is deluding itself...
...But let me say something else on this score...
...Looking at the shambles that has been created in Chicago, and considering the consequences likely to follow, I can only repeat with anger and despair the words young people keep directing to men in authority: when will they ever learn...
...And for anyone who cares about the future of the American young, it was a political disaster...
...It will be said that the defendants behaved badly...
...What occurred there was not merely a juridical burlesque, but a moral disgrace...
...a conviction on the lesser of the two charges by a jury "compromising its differences...
...Consider the sequence of events: an indictment on charges of "conspiracy," which by its very nature is juridically imprecise and factually dubious, and of crossing a state line with intent to incite a riot, which by its very nature is utterly vague and perhaps unconstitutional...
...a maximum sentence by a judge inflamed, inhumane, and perhaps deranged...
...Does that in the slightest free the court from its proclaimed obligations to impartiality, dignity, and mercy...
...now it will gain new sympathy on the campus...
...Suppose we grant that...
...The defendants were outraged at what they regarded as an act of political persecution—how can any decent man not share that outrage...
...There will be an enormous increase among the young in the already-strong feeling that democracy is a sham, that there is no recourse except violent measures, that claims for liberal values and tolerance are mere deception...
...The former has power to hurt, the latter can do little but accept hurt...
...Is that a "quiet justification of the jury system...
...Reports from the jurors indicate the verdict was made through a deal among themselves to hasten their return home...
...As a man of the Democratic Left, who has sometimes found himself in agreement with some of the defendants and more often in disagreement, I must assure our Attorney General that he is mistaken...
...Their conduct may have been tactically unwise, but if the man sitting on the bench had behaved with fairness and restraint, they too might have modulatedtheir conduct, and in any case February 20, 1970 we would not today feel that the whole thing was a rotten farce...
...The New York Times takes editorial consolation from the "quiet justification of the jury system...
...a sentence for contempt that is without precedent in its savage vindictiveness...
Vol. 17 • March 1970 • No. 2
