Inside America:

The Culture of Sedition

 Anthony Harrigan 

      The writer of this monograph is the author, co-author or editor of twenty books. He has lectured at Yale University, Vanderbilt University, the University of Colorado and the National War College. His articles have been published in Contemporary Review (Oxford), National Review, The Australian Army Review, Chronicles, Touchstone, Wehkunde (Munich), Humanitas and many other scholarly journals.

      Since September 11, 2001, the attention of the U.S. public and government has been focused on the war against terrorism and the danger posed by the threat of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of foreign enemies of the United States and Western civilization. But as Americans look to the future, they would do well to concentrate on enemies within—the seditionists who by conduct and language incite rebellion against the lawful government of the United States. Enemies have been present in our midst for generations, for a period long before the Bolshevik revolution. They didn’t disappear with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

      The threat of sedition surfaced very early in the history of the American republic and became acute in the 1880s and 1890s as the result of large-scale immigration from Russia which produced an influx of anarchists and other revolutionaries who sought to destroy our society and constitutional system. Though the U.S. government sought to deal with this threat in the decades before and after World War I, it had only limited success and did not persist with the deportations. Thus the revolutionary seditious element in the U.S. population was not eradicated. This alienated, unassimilated element remained a force in American society, politics and culture. Its hostility to the United States increased as the Soviet Union grew in power and influence and Soviet espionage efforts found fertile ground among the old Marxists and the “red diaper babies” they produced. Indeed, if one examines the lists of people in the 1960s who supported Ho Chi Minh and his war from within the United States, one realizes that many are the grandchildren and great grandchildren of the Russian revolutionaries so foolishly allowed to settle in the United States. The atomic spies of the 1940s grew up in a culture of Communists who despised the land where they had been offered refuge. Today, the hard core Left survives to condemn the U.S. defensive measures at home and abroad. They have been joined by militant Islamic groups that have been allowed to settle in the United States and create bases—all out of a very mistaken and dangerous excess of toleration.

      The rhetoric of the hard core is almost beyond belief. The distinguished journalist John Chamberlain wrote a generation ago that the Rev. Basé Boname, a defrocked priest, who was expelled from Guatemala for alleged revolutionary activity, referred to the United States as “the rapist of the world.”

      Appalling as are the anti-American forces of today, it is a fact that hostility to the United States has existed since the earliest days of the republic. The administration of President John Adams was faced with furious, unprincipled opposition by sympathizers with the blood-drenched French Revolution who were bitterly against the American Revolution that grew out of the English tradition. Adams was the target of an outrageous campaign of calumny. This was at the time that the Directory, the government of revolutionary France, authorized an undeclared war against American shipping, seizing 300 American commercial vessels.

      Jefferson’s Republican Party wanted the U.S. government to make common cause with France against England. Given the situation, Congress enacted the Alien and Sedition Acts to counter the subversive campaign. The Alien Act empowered the U.S. government to deport large numbers of foreigners resident in the United States. Of grave concern to the Adams administration were 20,000 Frenchmen in the country, many of them hostile to American institutions and bent on undermining American values and traditions derived from England. President Adams, however, didn’t utilize the Alien Act, though the Sedition Act was employed to curb the campaign of calumny against the government.

      The Alien and Sedition Acts have been attacked by many modern liberal historians. Witness the treatment of these acts in the Columbia Encyclopedia (sixth edition). They are described as a partisan effort aimed at Jefferson’s party; but the threat prompting this legislation—the presence of revolutionary foreign elements—was real.

      Happily, after the collapse of revolutionary forces in France, the United States was not endangered from this quarter. Immigration continued from the British Isles. For some decades there wasn’t any seditionist threat. To be sure, the abolitionist movement spawned threats of violence, revealed most dramatically in John Brown’s capture of the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, which required a military response. But the divisions that emerged in this period involved political conflict over interpretation of the Constitution and the balance of power between the states and the federal government. The final result was a sectional division, not an ideological one. When the War Between the States finally broke out, the great cause and conflict was the character and future of the Union. It should be noted here, however, that the Union government responded to the perceived threat not only with armed forces but with restrictions on what had been deemed constitutional rights.

      It is doubtful that many of those Americans who today condemn the Bush administration’s tightened oversight of foreign nationals in the United States are aware that during the Civil War Congress authorized the President to suspend the right of habeas corpus. Newspaper editors in New York City were arrested by federal authorities. This was a war measure designed to safeguard the Union. The point here is that civil liberties have been temporarily curtailed when the nation faced danger and operated on a war footing.

      Anthony Romaro, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, told a Bard College Forum in 2002 that the USA Patriot Act enacted after the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center violated constitutional rights. He accused Attorney General John Ashcroft of undermining free speech, dissent and debate. Fortunately, Mary Jo White, former District Attorney for the Southern District of New York, a Democrat, countered Mr. Romaro, saying:  

We have to survive first for our democracy to survive, and I think the law lets us do that. I guess the phrase that keeps getting quoted is from Justice Jackson: “The Constitution is not a suicide pact.” 

      Professor Ruth Wedgewood of the Yale Law School added that the Constitution

. . . does have the very drastic power that John Ashcroft has not proposed—suspending habeas corpus—Lincoln used this to keep Washington from being isolated in the South. What the Bush folks have instead tried to do is use much more ordinary powers in robust ways to try to adapt to the situation.

      The era of good feeling that prevailed during the early decades of the l9th century was due in large part to the character of immigration during the period. The authors of Patterns in American History (Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1967) pointed out that immigration in “the years 1850-1860” was “predominantly from the British Isles.” Five million immigrants composed the pre-Civil War wave. In the next 30 years ten million came from Northern Europe. Between 1890 and 1914, 15 million came from Southern and Eastern Europe. The immigrants who arrived in the first part of the 19th century had experience of societies with basic values that were identical with or close to the values of the original inhabitants of British North America. They adjusted easily to the constitutional and social system established in the former British colonies.

      The America that existed in this sunny period of our history is the authentic America envisioned by the Founding Fathers. Indeed this is the model era as the American people move into a new century. We need to look back on it as the Romans looked back on the Roman Republic before it became a principate and lost its original values. Referring to this classic period, Dr. John Howard, former president of Rockford College, wrote in 2002 that 

The history of the American people, whether in the homeland, the battlefield, or the naval engagement, was a marvel of courage, self-sacrifice, cooperation and good will. 

It is not fashionable today—indeed it is politically incorrect—to describe these American qualities as being part and parcel of Anglo-Saxon civilization, but that is what they are. To the extent that civilization has been diluted over the past century and a quarter, America has been undone.

      For the English-speaking immigrants for the first 60 or 70 years of the 19th century, the institutions and traditions of the new country were fully understandable. They were part of their heritage. British institutions readily translated into the American forms of government and society.

      This was not the case with newcomers from Eastern and Southern Europe, most particularly from Russia where a free society had never existed and where the common people regarded government as the enemy and where they felt excluded. This attitude unhappily translated into hostility towards America’s government and societal structures. And this hostile attitude was to bear bitter fruit. Americanization didn’t work with many of the immigrants from Tsarist Russia. From the moment of their landing on Ellis Island, many of these newcomers thought of the U.S. government in terms of the government they had known in Russia, and resisted assimilation into the American mainstream, committing themselves to Marxist ideology and rejecting the loyalty to the new country that characterized the majority of immigrants before and after.

      Incidentally, we ought to remember that Karl Marx lived and wrote a quarter century or more before the founding of the Bolshevik state.

      In time, this baggage of hostility towards American institutions and traditions proved very destructive. Many of the Russian immigrants developed a culture of sedition that carried over to their children and later descendants. The Russian immigrants were not an inconsiderable number. The authors of Patterns American History state that

Russian arrivals in the United States rose from 5,000 in 1880 to 81,000 in 1890 and then bounded upward to a peak of 258,000 in 1907.

It is tragic that the immigration and naturalization authorities of that day did not carefully scrutinize the political background and ideological loyalties of this group of immigrants who didn’t truly seek to become loyal Americans. The Dillingham Commission, which in 1907 looked into the character of immigration, didn’t understand the national need to inquire into the ideological background of the latest wave of immigrants. The United States has paid dearly for this lack of awareness and understanding. The country completely failed to recognize the influx of anarchists and similar political elements from Russia.

      The outlook of the 19th and early 20th century from Russia and other East European countries was a world away from that of the post-World War immigrants from those lands. The latter, who had experienced Communist oppression and terror, became the most dedicated American patriots.

      A case in point is that of Emma Goldman, the notorious anarchist. Most people today don’t even know her name or the political phenomenon she represented.

      Born in Russia in 1869 Emma Goldman attended school in St. Petersburg where she read Cherychevsky’s book What Is To Be Done? In which her heroine is converted to nihilism. This literary experience was the foundation of her anarchism. As a teenager she was sent to the United States, to the home of a half sister in Rochester, N.Y., where she worked as a seamstress and became more completely radicalized, seeing the country as a land of slums and sweatshops.

      The defining radical experience for her was the Haymarket Riot of 1886. On May 3, 1886, workers attacked the McCormick Reaper Works. On May 4, several thousand workers massed in Haymarket Square to protest policy actions at the McCormick Works. According to Selected Case Studies in American History, Volume 2, “anarchists spoke out” at the rally. Then a dynamite bomb was thrown into a group of policemen. It exploded with devastating force, killing one policeman and wounding many more. A riot ensued and, the Case Study reports, “eight policemen ultimately died of their wounds.”

      As a result, eight anarchists were convicted of murder and of

. . . encouraging others to murder by their speeches being most persuasive in urging violence and bloodshed.

According to one friendly account of Emma Goldman’s life, she identified completely with the convicted anarchists and on the day of their execution decided to become a fulltime revolutionary.

      Emma Goldman was completely involved in the world of anarchism—a supreme example of the culture of sedition. Her entire life from this time on was dedicated to the destruction of the United States, which had given her a safe haven and an opportunity for a good, constructive life. She moved from Chicago to New York City and embarked on her first speaking tour but she also wanted to commit revolutionary deeds of a bloody nature.

      She clearly reveals the mindset of those who want to destroy American institutions. She had no respect for the rule of law and the process of social change by legislative means or civilized advocacy. She attempted to left subversive actions under the cover of “freedom of speech.”

      Americans of today, in considering the Haymarket Riot, should bear in mind the observation of Judge Joseph F. Gary that a speaker who proposes murder in advocating change in the social system cannot cite “freedom of speech” to “shield him from the consequences.” He declared that “liberty is not a license to destroy.” This is a fundamental truth rejected by Emma Goldman and her ilk.

      Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were two of the most notorious anarchists of the late l9th and early 20th centuries, but they were far from the only ones. There was a host of anarchists in the United States in this period.

      Among the well-known anarchists were the following: Lucy Parsons, who helped found the International Working People’s Association, and her husband, Albert Parsons. He was implicated in the Haymarket bombing and was sentenced to death by hanging. He also was one of the founders of the Industrial Workers of the World. Lucy Parsons later worked with the Communist Party.

      Others were Nicola Sacco and Bartolomew Vanzetti. They were arrested and convicted of murdering a factory paymaster and were executed August 23, 1927. A huge propaganda campaign was organized on their behalf, one that went on for years—and they were turned into political heroes of the Old Left and the New Left.

      Another hero of the Left in the United States was “Big Bill” Haywood (William Dudley Haywood) who was born in Utah in 1869 and died in 1929. He was one of the most militant labor leaders in American history and founded the Industrial Workers of the World, the so-called Wobblies. In 1918 Haywood and 165 other IWW leaders were convicted of sedition as they opposed the U.S. war effort. He jumped bail in 1921 and fled to the Soviet Union where he remained until he died.

      These are only a few of the anarchists in America in this period, people who used or promoted violence to destroy the institutions of the United States. Fortunately, they could not find a broad base of support. But anarchism was responsible for terrible incidents, most notably the killing of President William McKinley.

      The assassination of President McKinley took place September 6, 1901 while McKinley was attending the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, N.Y. The assassin was a Polish-born anarchist by the name of Leon Czolgosz. Poland at that time was part of Russia. The deed was done while the President was at a reception held in the Temple of Music.

      The president was widely mourned abroad as well as in the United States. The killing sent a shock wave through the nation and alerted the American people to the threat of anarchist violence.

      Anarchists, however, rejoiced at the bloody deed and the blow it represented to the United States. Anarchists in our own time continue to be thrilled by this atrocity. According to www.altreel.com/conspiracy, in 1991, someone cited as Old Anarchist Slacker stated that killed was

. . . one of the true heroes of American history . . . Leon Czolgosz unknown Polish émigré who happened to be an anarchist of “propaganda by the deed” variety. If there were a hundred like him around today, they could change the world. The only political assassination of a U.S. president. . . . except for Lincoln, I guess, and Kennedy probably, but Leon was the only anarchist in the bunch. There was such a thing as belief put into action in those days.

      The same year that McKinley sought a second term as President, another significant political figure made his first run for the White House. This was Eugene Debs, who sought election as the candidate of the American Socialist Party. This was the first of his five attempts to gain the highest office in the land. His last attempt was in 1920 while he was incarcerated in the Atlanta penitentiary. While he was not an anarchist, he emerged from and was part of the culture of sedition. His career began in 1879 when he began the first of two terms as City Clerk of Terre Haute, Indiana. He was a tireless campaigner and polemicist, using the Locomotive Fireman’s Magazine and Appeal to Reason, published in Girard, Kansas. In 1908, he used the Red Special train for a whistle-stop campaign for President. In 1920 in his last run for the Presidency, Debs used a campaign button that showed him in prison garb outside the penitentiary gates with the caption “For President, Convict No. 9653.”

      At this remote age when candidates strive for a “cool” image, it is hard to comprehend the verbal violence that was Eugene Deb’s political rhetoric. He addressed supporters as comrades and filled his speeches with references to the “master class.” He spoke of affluent Americans as “Junkers in the United States.” Debs eventually paid a price for the violence of his expression. He was arrested on a charge of sedition for his speech in Canton, Ohio on June 16, 1916. He was convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison, though he served only two years and eight months.

      In that speech, Debs declared:

Our hearts are with the Bolsheviks of Russia. These heroic men and women have . . . added fresh luster to the fame of the international movement.

He went at great length to extol Bolshevism. When he ran from prison in the presidential race, he received one million votes, a measure of the size and strength of the seditionist culture in the United States eighty-odd years ago.

      Eugene Debs’ 1916 speech and subsequent arrest for interfering with the draft was only one of the many socialist, anarchist and pro-Soviet provocations that shocked the nation during wartime and during the early phases of the Soviet regime in Russia. It was a regime that immediately turned to a policy of terrorism, the murder of opponents—notably the murder of the Czar and his family, and the establishment of the Communist concentration camp system, which rapidly grew into the vast gulag prison camp system in Siberia. Given this situation, President Woodrow Wilson sent U.S. troops, albeit an insufficient number, to Russia to aid the Czech armed forces that were attempting to overthrow the Bolshevik regime.

      Congress recognized the menace posed to the United States by the international Communist movement and passed sedition laws that were directed against Communists, socialists and anarchists, many of whom had opposed U.S. involvement in the allied fight for democracy.

      More than 4,000 Communists and anarchists were arrested in 33 cities before the raids came to an end. Deportations of subversives were limited, however. On December 21, 1919, some 249 people were deported to the Soviet Union aboard the ship Buford that was nicknamed the Soviet Ark. Anarchist Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were on board. Five hundred and sixty others were deported in 1920, all but 30 of whom were members of the Communist Party.

      Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer directed the raids. Future FBI director J. Edgar Hoover played an important role in the raids as he was in charge of their General Intelligence Division of the Justice Department. Ever since, Palmer and Hoover have been prime targets of liberal-left groups in the United States. They dismissed the necessary anti-sedition measures adopted by the Congress and the Executive as a “Red Scare.” The Communist, anarchist, socialist threat was a real and present danger to our system of law and order.

      With the prosperity of the mid- and late 1920s the socialist fervor represented by the Debs phenomenon died away in terms of overt political action. Underground, however, the sympathizers with Bolshevism continued to exist and even flourish in New York City and other large centers. Publications such as The New Masses had considerable support and the liberal-left intelligentsia in and out of the universities was often Marxist in orientation.

      As the country slipped into depression after 1929, radicalization was renewed as a force on the political and intellectual scene. Many unions fell under Communist control and apologists for the Soviet Union cropped up everywhere.

      The most dangerous development was the massive Soviet espionage effort that Stalin initiated in the United States, utilizing the Communist Party and Communist-allied or influenced elements in the big cities who were prepared to do Stalin’s work.

      This espionage war, for that was what it was, resulted in the recruitment and placement in the U.S. government of more than 200 Soviet agents. This is all revealed and set forth in detail in the Venona Papers (Regnery & Co.) that consists of the intercepts of Soviet coded communications made by the U.S. Army during World War II.

      A vast literature exists which details the work of Soviet agents in the U.S. government during this period. Witness by Whittaker Chambers is an essential volume in understanding the culture of sedition—indeed the culture of treason—at that time. And Jerold and Leona Scheter’s book Sacred Secrets documents the activities of Robert Oppenheimer and other Soviet assets in transferring America’s atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. Oppenheimer, who enjoyed huge support from liberal-left elements, has been revealed as a contributor to various Communist causes. His brother was a Communist. And his wife was first married to a Communist who was killed in Spain fighting for the Communists.

      They were all part of the vast culture of sedition and treason. The Brother, the story of atomic spy David Greenglass and his sister and brother-in-law, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg (executed for atomic espionage), is very valuable in understanding the pro-Bolshevik environment, which existed in New York City in the early decades of the 20th century.

      Studying the political and intellectual history of the 1930s, one is amazed at the ease with which people with pro-Communist backgrounds found access into government departments during the New Deal. Indeed much more research needs to be done on who facilitated the entry of these people into the federal government. Many of them rose rapidly to positions of great influence. The most prominent of the betrayers of America is Alger Hiss, whose name has become a synonym for disloyalty. Another figure, whose record deserves ongoing study, is Harry Dexter White (Weiss) who became top aide and policy planner to Secretary of the Treasure Henry Morgenthau during the Roosevelt era. In this role, he drafted the so-called Morgenthau plan for West Germany which, on the basis of Stalin’s instructions, would turn the future Federal Republic into a poor pastoral entity stripped of industrial resources.

      At the end of World War II, President Truman came to realize that the Soviet Union did not seek peace but wanted to employ Soviet military power to subordinate the entire European continent to the will of the USSR. Recognition of this did not come easily. The Soviet espionage apparatus remained deeply embedded in the U.S. government and governmental, media and intellectual apologists for Stalin were as active as ever. We now know that Truman had access to the Venona intercepts but did not act on them as he feared the political explosion would devastate the Democrats.

      Nevertheless, the determination of many in Congress to root out the agents of Soviet espionage—congressmen such as Richard M. Nixon—revealed the dimensions of the threat to internal security and forced a tightening up of security procedures.

      The Truman administration, certainly the President, woke to the reality of the cold war and took military action to prevent Greece falling under Communist sway. The President also ordered the establishment of the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean as a powerful deterrent to Soviet military operations.

      These moves were not accomplished without counteraction by pro-Soviet elements in the United States. The case of Henry Wallace and his campaign for President in 1948 was the most important event in this regard. Wallace was a member of a family from Iowa distinguished for its work in agricultural research and writing on farm problems. He supported Roosevelt in 1932 and served as Secretary of Agriculture in FDR’s first two terms. In 1940 he won election as Vice President. His outlook was revealed in a book he wrote about his trip across Russia in 1943. It makes fascinating reading today now that we know the full story of Stalin’s gulag concentration camp empire in Siberia. Wallace wrote a glowing account of this terrible region. At the end of his trip, he sent a lengthy telegram to Stalin, praising his rule of Siberia and its inhabitants. It is comparable to someone in the allied world visiting conquered Poland and writing a glowing account of Auschwitz.

      The American people can thank their lucky stars that the Democratic Party bosses didn’t trust Wallace and in 1940 demanded that he be dumped as the vice presidential candidate and replaced by Senator. Harry Truman.

      Had Wallace succeeded to the presidency in 1945 when Roosevelt died, the President of the United Stales would have been Stalin’s man. Wallace was not out of the government, however, having been named Secretary of Commerce in 1945 and held over by Truman. And on September 12, 1946, he attacked the administration’s increasingly firm policy towards the Soviet Union. In his Madison Square Garden speech in New York City, Wallace said of the Soviets:

We are reckoning with a force which cannot be handled with a “get tough with Russia policy.” . . . The tougher we get, the tougher the Russians will get.

He called for accommodation with the wishes of the Soviet Union.

      Because of his appeasement speech and other activities, Wallace had to resign from the Cabinet. In short order, he became the presidential candidate of the Progressive Party, a newly formed party with a pro-Soviet platform. It condemned the Marshall Plan and called for American disarmament.

      The leaders of the Progressive Party are properly thought of as Stalin’s Americans. It failed to carry a single state but garnered a million votes, which is a measure of the hard left constituency in the United States. The failure of the Wallace campaign didn’t end the seditionists’ drive for power, however.

      The late 1940s and 1950s were highly important in that they revealed the Soviet penetration of the U.S. government at very senior levels. The decisive development was the revelation by Whittaker Chambers, former Communist and high-ranking Time magazine editor, of the espionage activities of Alger Hiss over a long period of years. Hiss had been a top State Department official who was at Franklin Roosevelt’s side when he met with Stalin at the Yalta Conference. We now know that he left Yalta and reported to Moscow Center. Hiss and his supporters in government, academia, and the media charged his accusers with a “witch hunt.” But there was massive evidence that showed Hiss’ guilt and he was convicted in federal court and sent to prison. He was convicted of perjury for denying his espionage.

      For years, his supporters and apologists argued that he was innocent but their claims have all been refuted, first by Allen Weinstein’s monumental book on Hiss, and then by the publication of the Venona papers, the intercepts the U.S. Army Signal Corps made of Moscow Center’s instructions to KGB and GRU spies inside the U.S. government.

      Other congressional investigations and the confessions of other Communist spies made clear to the American people the web of Communist conspiracy in the 1930s and 1940s. No one knows, of course, whether all the spies and Soviet assets were exposed. Students of Soviet subversion know that the Soviets routinely employed multiple operations, with one operative or a cell of operatives not knowing of the parallel networks.

      The web of the seditionists, especially the atomic spies of the 1940s, needs ongoing historical examination. Sam Roberts’ book, The Brother, is a fascinating guide to that world, an important tool in penetrating more than the culture of sedition, the culture of treason. David Greenglass, brother of atomic spy Ethel Rosenberg, said of his brother-in-law that Julius “was a guy that really lived Communism.” Ethel Greenglass Rosenberg was also committed to Communism. The record shows that she signed a nominating petition for a Communist Party candidate in New York City. This came to the attention of the Army Signal Corps, which had hired Julius, and he was twice called before loyalty hearing officers, but he was allowed to keep his job.

      Tragically, the U.S. government didn’t take subversive activities with sufficient seriousness. Julius Rosenberg was only one of the many seditionists who were allowed inside the government apparatus during the 1940s. The country paid dearly for this negligence and unconcern.

      The next crisis for the United States came in the twilight years of the Eisenhower administration when Fidel Castro was allowed to gain power in Cuba. Initially in liberal-left circles, Castro was portrayed as a reformer as Mao had been portrayed after Chiang Kaishek was abandoned. For the New York Times, which played a key role in winning acceptance for Castro and his Revolution, Fidel was “Dr. Castro.” In short order, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee was established to serve as an apologetic organ for the Communist revolution in Cuba. This propaganda campaign on behalf of Communist Cuba was a prelude to the revolutionary outbursts of the New Left on campuses.

      The initial event in 1964 was the Dirty Speech campaign launched at the Berkeley campus of the University of California. This was intended to brutalize public discourse regarding the developing war in Indo-China. Then came the student riot at Columbia University.

      The first journalist who recognized that a wave of revolution was approaching the country was Mrs. Alice Wiedener, the brilliant and far-seeing editor of the little magazine USA—A Journal of Fact and Opinion. She was immensely knowledgeable about Communist subversion and propaganda in Europe and elsewhere. Mrs. Widener was a beacon of enlightenment on the terrorization of colleges and universities. Soon Americans were to be faced with the sight of American college students marching in the streets and chanting in support of a North Vietnamese Communist dictator. How the Left accomplished that deserves lengthy historical and psychological analysis.

      The agit-prop that was the principal feature of the Old Left-New Left war from within wasn’t anything new. Mass demonstrations and marches in the streets were a tactic employed in the anarchist and socialist protests of the l9th century. The country had experienced mass lawlessness in such events as the Haymarket Riot and the Wobbly strikes in the Pacific Northwest. The decade-long protests over the conviction of anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti featured mass gatherings and lawlessness. They continued to be used in attempts to vilify the action of Massachusetts’ courts regarding these murderous anarchists.

      On February 15, 2003, Roger Mudd, an old-line liberal propagandist, used the History Channel on television in an effort to whitewash Sacco and Vanzetti, and blacken the image of the law in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

      Before university students were enlisted for the Ho Chi Minh protests, the country had suffered through the Ban the Bomb protests. This was a typical Communist agit-prop operation aimed at preventing development of an American hydrogen bomb, a prime Soviet objective. They were the model for the “No War on Iraq” mass protests in Europe and other regions in February 2003. There always has been a large hate America element in the United States and other countries, including countries once allied with the United States or who were beneficiaries of American military power. Attacks on the United States have been made by every left-leaning political leader from Eugene Debs to Martin Luther King, Jr. to Ramsey Clark. In 1967, in a typical utterance, Martin Luther King, Jr. said: “The greatest purveyor of violence on earth is my own government.” He said this after the world knew that Stalin killed 50 million of his own people and Mao killed 25 million. Surprising? Not when you know that one of King’s top lieutenants was Jack O’Dell.

      O’Dell was director of the New York office of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In an interview with Sam Sills, he admitted in 1963, that President John F. Kennedy took King out on the White House lawn and told him: “I [O’Dell] was the number four Communist in the United States.” He added “I’m just saying that anti-Communism had become institutionalized.”

      We will know much more about the O’Dell relationship to Dr. King when the FBI recordings of his telephone calls—ordered by Bobby Kennedy—are unsealed. Until that time a key part of the historical record won’t be available to the American people.

      Since 9/11, the federal government has had new opportunities to explore the links between foreign-based or linked terrorists. But there hasn’t been any public access to investigations, if they have been made, of domestic left-wing groups such as the anarchists who have organized protests in Seattle, Washington, D.C., and other cities. The American people have a right to know who organized and financed the “No War on Iraq” demonstrations and marches. These acts, as was the case of the protests on behalf of Ho Chi Minh a generation ago, represent a war from within the United States.

      We tend to focus on the latest outburst of sedition, as in the case of the “No War on Iraq” groups. The focus is necessary because these groups represent a real and present danger. But, in the process, organizers have been laboring in the leftist vineyard for decades.

      Ramsey Clark, Attorney General in the Johnson administration, is a case in point. On December 15, 2002, in an elaborate profile, the Washington Post declared that Clark was

The most liberal attorney general since World War Il. . . Clark refused to indict black militants and anti-war leaders for inciting riots when protests turned violent in 1968. Three years later, he visited Hanoi and denounced the U.S. war effort. In 1974 he ran for the U.S. Senate against Senator. Jacob Javits, calling for a 50 percent cut in the defense budget.

      Since then, Clark has made a career of defending some of the most notorious radicals in America, including the Attica prison rioters. He participated in a mock war crimes tribunal that found the United States guilty of “crimes against humanity.” His record is one of unrelieved hostility to the United States.

      In the 1970s, the Post said Clark “became a lefty movement” lawyer. It reported that in the l980s Clark went to Iran, without legal authorization from the U.S. government, and “participated in a tribunal that convicted the United States of colluding in the shah’s crimes.”

      After the Panama Intervention, Clark flew to Panama, denounced the United States and claimed that Americans killed between 2,000 and 4,000 people. For years he has visited Iraq to denounce the United States.

      Today, Clark, according to the Washington Post, is a leader of an anti-war group “founded and dominated by the Workers World Group, a Communist fringe group that embraces North Korea.” Clark’s close associate, Brian Becker, of the International Action Center, was Clark’s fellow traveler on a trip to North Korea. Clark is chairman of the IAC, which is deeply involved in the “No War on Iraq” protests in American cities. Unfortunately, the American people aren’t familiar with Clark’s associations and beliefs and the way they color the anti-war demonstrations organized in February 2003.

      The violence of the leftist political assault on the U.S. government is strongest in Hollywood where leftism has roots that go back to the Stalinist writers and directors of the 1930s and forties. A notable case is that of actor-activist Sean Penn, who on October 16, 2002, inserted an advertisement in the Washington Post captioned “An Open Letter to the President of the United States.”

      Though Penn hasn’t any significant place or role in America, his angry, ugly, and patently absurd statement is indicative of what may be called The People’s Republic of Hollywood. The point of his letter is condemnation of President Bush’s determination to disarm Iraq and remove Saddam from power. In Penn’s eyes, that is an unspeakable offense.

      In violent language reminiscent of Eugene V. Debs more than 80 years earlier, Penn alleged

. . . intolerance of debate, marginalization of your critics, the promoting of fear through unsubstantiated rhetoric . . . and destruction of civil liberties. . . . You lead, it seems through a blood-lined sense of entitlement.

Penn went on and on in this vein.

      Such is the outlook of those who would have the United States back away from dealing with dictators who threaten the United States and its friends. Ugly accusations against the United States and its elected leadership, however, is not the monopoly of left-wing actors in Hollywood.

      An especially outrageous comment, given its source, was that of the Reverend Frank Griswold, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church. In a statement January 30, 2003, Bishop Griswold, known for his liberal-left positions, said in an interview with the Religious News Service,

We are loathed and I think the world has every right to loathe us because they see us as greedy, self-interested, and almost totally unconcerned about poverty, disease, and suffering.

He said the nation also is disliked for its “reprehensible rhetoric.” If he had been in his clerical leadership post when Hitler was rampaging across Europe, would he have accused Churchill and Roosevelt of using reprehensible rhetoric?

      The record shows that no other nation provides as much assistance to the world’s poor as the United States, asking nothing in return and receiving little gratitude. Bishop Griswold truly belongs in the company of Ramsey Clark, Sean Penn, and earlier haters of America.

      The liberal-left war from within, encompassing the contemporary sedition movement, has valuable participants and allies in the ranks of the clergy, especially the clergy of the Episcopal Church, which has been radicalized since the 1950s. They have bought into the radical secular culture of the mid- and late 20th century.

      The role of the media, especially the electronic media—television—also has been highly significant. Since the end of World War II, the big media concentrated in a few giant corporations has departed from the traditional journalistic aim and practice of objective reporting. The once truly free American press, consisting of many hundreds of family owned, independent papers, has been swallowed up by the giants. While many Americans have expressed concern about corporate power, hardly anyone cites concentration and control by the media giants, in good measure because it can’t get any media coverage. The controllers certainly aren’t going to criticize their own arrangements. In the case of print journalism, the liberal-left publishers and editors have determined that no conservative reporters will be hired. If one gives a careful reading to the Washington Post, for instance, one easily discerns the liberal bias of the reporting staff. And even some moderately liberal reporters have expressed shock about the way the news editors of The New York Times bend their coverage to the dictates of the editorial page. Of the large papers in the country, only The Wall Street Journal strives to be free of the politically correct mandates. The networks are determined to get in bed with the liberal-left editorial pages. Hence the Lehrer News Hour on PBS routinely selects Post and New York Times reporters and columnists to serve as analysts and commentators. The same pattern prevails on the NBC Today Show, the most successful morning TV show. It is no wonder that liberal-left views dominate television coverage. For years, ABC has been blatantly pro-Palestinian. When PBS reported on the large pro-Saddam rally in London, February 17th, it featured comments by Ken Livingstone, Lord Mayor of London, as though he were a distinguished impartial commentator. Viewers weren’t told that he is an old-line Stalinst known in Britain as “Red Ken” Livingstone. That’s how the U.S. public is manipulated by the liberal-left media.

      Given this array of forces in the United States, with clergy, media, and academia lining up against the United States and its elected leadership, it is amazing that the liberal-left cabal doesn’t always triumph at the polls and enjoy total rule. Fortunately, the American people often prevail, as evidenced by the election of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. But one can’t be sure that the common sense and sound traditional values of the American people will prevail in the future as they are bombarded by the propaganda of the seditionist forces. They are constantly exposed to the sophistry of those elements that hate America. In their past at critical points in American history, beginning in the administration of President John Adams, laws were enacted to prevent domination by seditionists. And it is likely that new legislative efforts directed to this end will be needed in future. Other efforts of a cultural nature must be made and/or intensified to roll back the liberal-left efforts to control and dominate the American mind. This effort to recover control of our institutions cannot be purely political but must be civilization in character. The struggle is for survival of the American system of government and rule of law.     Ω