of information on the way Times editors and publishers played bal with the U.S.
government.
74 The details of the press blackout on the Bay of Pigs preparations are told by Victor
Bernstein and Jesse Gordon, "The Press and the Bay of Pigs," Columbia University Forum (Fal 1967).
75 Arthur Schlesinger recounts this in his book A Thousand Days (Houghton Mifflin, 1965),
261.
76 Editor and Publisher, Feb. 2, 1963. Quoted by Bernstein and Gordon, "The Press and the Bay of Pigs."
77 See New York Times, Dec. 25, 1977. Also, the article by Wil iam Preston, Jr. and El en
Ray, "Disinformation and Cuba: A Case History," Cuba Update (Center for Cuban Studies, New York, June 1983)
78 Mark Hertsgaard, On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency (Farrar, Straus
& Giroux, 1989), 191. Also Noam Chomsky, Necessary Il usions (South End Press, 1989),
371.
79 Boston Globe, Oct. 24, 1981.
80 In These Times, Feb. 3-9, 1988.
81 Boston Globe, Jan. 5, 1988.
82 Boston Globe, Feb. 26, 1977.
83 New York Times, Mar. 7, 1980.
84 USA Today, May 24, 1988.
85 New York Times, May 18, 1067.
86 Quoted by North American Council on Latin America, The Media Go to War: From Vietnam
to Central America, N.A.C.L.A., July-Aug. 1983.
87 Mark Hertsgaard, "How Reagan Manipulated a Passive Press," Boston Globe, Nov. 2, 1988. See also Hertsgaard, On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency.
88 Patrick S. Washburn, A Question of Sedition (Oxford University Press, 1986).
89 Noam Chomsky, "Al the News That Fits," Utne Reader (Feb.-Mar. 1986). The Utne Reader is an extraordinary source of information that cannot be obtained in the mainstream press.
It gives digests of articles that appear in smal publications throughout the country and it
regularly prints descriptive lists of important publications that are ignored by the regular
media.
90 Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent (Pantheon, 1988).
91 New York Times, Jan. 5, 1087.
187
92 See David S. McLel an, Dean Acheson (Dodd Mead, 1976).
93 Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress (prepared for the Senate Committee
on Foreign Relations), The United States Government and the Vietnam War: Executive and
Legislative Relationships, Part I, 1945-1961 (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1984).
(Hereafter cited as Congressional Research Service.) This volume is reviewed by James
Crown, Presidential Studies Quarterly (Fal 1984).
94 Congressional Research Service, quoted by Crown.
95 Senate Select Committee on Intel igence, Covert Action in Chile, 1963-1973 (Government
Printing Office, 1975).
96 Walter Lippmann, Essays in the Public Philosophy (Little, Brown, 1065).
97 Secrets sometimes make a difference during war. But even in World War II, where both
war and secrecy looked at their best, there was much exaggeration about the importance of
secrecy. The famous secret operations Ultra and Sigint and Enigma were much overrated in their importance. See the review of F. H. Hinsley and others, British Intel igence in the
Second World War (Cambridge University Press, 1982) by Zara Steiner, New York Review of Books, Oct. 21, 1982.
98 Alger Hiss, Recol ections of a Life (Henry Holt, 1988).
99 New York Times, Oct. 4, 1988.
100 See Chamorro's letter to the New York Times, Dec. 30, 1085. Also the New York Tines, Mar. 18, 1985. Also an article on Chamorro in the New Republic, Aug. 5, 1085.
101 Boston Globe, Oct. 28, 1986. Also the New York Times, Feb. 7, 1987.
102 New York Times, Oct. 12, 1986.
103 This point is made in Theodore Draper, "Revelations of the North Trial," New York Review of Books, Aug. 17, 1989.
104 New York Times, Dec. 24, 1986.
105 Leonard Levy, Emergence of a Free Press (Oxford University Press, 1985), looked at the
press in the postrevolutionary period, studying thirty-three newspapers in eight colonies
from 1704 through 1820. He wrote, "That so many courageous and irresponsible editors
risked imprisonment amazes me."
106 Alice Wexler, Emma Goldman in Exile (Beacon, 1989).
107 Brian Glick, "Neutralizing the Underground Press," Oct. 1984 (an unpublished paper in my files).
108 New York Times, Apr. 29, 1975.
109 Alan F. Westin, Whistle Blowing! Loyalty and Dissent in the Corporation (McGraw-Hil ,
1980).
188
Nine
Representative Government: The Black Experience
Amid the enthusiastic celebrations in 1987 surrounding the Bicentennial of the Constitution,
novelist James Michener wrote,
The writing of the Constitution of the United States is an act of such genius
that philosophers stil wonder at its accomplishment and envy its results. Fifty
five typical American citizens … fashioned a nearly perfect instrument of
government… . Their decision to divide the power of the government into
three parts—Legislative, Executive, Judicial—was a master stroke.1
In the abolitionist movement of the early nineteenth century, there was no such
enthusiasm. Wil iam Lloyd Garrison, editor of The Liberator, held up a copy of the
Constitution before several thousand people at a picnic of the New England Anti-Slavery
Society and burned it, cal ing it "a covenant with death and an agreement with hel ," and the crowd shouted "Amen!"
Ex-slave Frederick Douglass, invited to deliver a Fourth of July speech in 1852, told his
white audience,
The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence,
bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that
brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This
Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.
During our 1987 celebrations, former Chief Justice Warren Burger, chairman of the
Bicentennial Commission, delivered the usual superlatives to the Founding Fathers and the
Constitution. But the sole black Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshal spoke this way:
In this bicentennial year, we may not al participate in the festivities with flag-
waving fervor. Some may more quietly commemorate the suffering, struggle,
and sacrifice that has triumphed over much of what was wrong with the
original document, and observe the anniversary with hopes not realized and
promises not fulfil ed.2
Historian Leon Litwack has written:
It had been the genius of the Founding Fathers to sanction, protect, and
reinforce the enslavement of black men and women … . It had been the
genius of the founders to build safeguards for slavery into the Constitution
without even mentioning slavery by name. The legitimization of slavery was
the price of the new federal union, and the Founding Fathers shared … the
assumption that blacks were cultural y and genetical y unsuited for
democracy.3
Today, Americans stil celebrate the Constitution; they learn in school about checks and
balances and what Michener cal ed "the master stroke" of dividing the government into
Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches. We hold elections, vote for president and
representatives in Congress, and think that is democracy. Yet for black people in this
country, none of those institutions—not the Constitution, not the three branches of
government, not voting for r
epresentatives—has been the source of whatever progress has
been made toward racial equality.
189
Before we rush to conclude that representative government has worked for white people in this country, but not for blacks, we should consider it is the special gift of oppressed groups
to reveal universal truths. French writer Fourier said that you could tel the state of progress
in any society by looking at the condition of women, and George Bernard Shaw said you
could measure the condition of society by the treatment of its prisoners.
The history of blacks in the United States exposes dramatical y the American political
system. What that history makes clear is that our traditional, much-praised democratic
institutions—representative government, voting, and constitutional law—have never proved
adequate for solving critical problems of human rights.
Theories of representative government became prominent in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, when monarchies and feudal arrangements were being chal enged by
rising classes of merchants and manufacturers. People were moving into cities and the new
middle classes wanted more power in government.
The new way of thinking was expressed by John Locke. He was an adviser to the Whig
party, which wanted to diminish the power of the king and increase that of Parliament.
Locke wrote about the advantages of representative government. His name is associated
with the idea of the "social contract", under which the community—wanting more order, less trouble, and more safeguards for life, liberty, and property—agrees to choose
representatives who would accomplish these purposes.
Locke said that in ancient times in "the state of nature" people got along quite wel , but this was disrupted by money, commerce, and greed. Monarchy didn't help, because kings acted
as if they were in a state of nature, not responsible to the community. Now, Locke said, you
needed settled law, judges, and a stable society based on the wil of the majority
represented by the legislature.4 The legislature would be the supreme power, Locke
proposed, but it had to abide by the terms of the contract, to promote peace, safety, and
the public good. If the government ever seriously violated the contract, rebel ion might be
justified, Locke said.
Therefore, although written in the 1680s, Locke's statements almost have the idealistic ring
of the Declaration of Independence. But there is something suspect about his theory. It
pretends that there is some nice unified community that agrees to set up this constitutional
government. In reality, there was no such unity, neither in England nor in the American
colonies. There were rich and poor, and the poor are never in a position to sign a contract
on equal terms with the rich. Indeed, they are not usual y consulted when a contract is
drawn up, after which they are told: "We agreed on this." So while it may sound good that property and liberty wil be protected by representative government, in reality it is the
property and liberty of the wealthy and powerful that is most likely to be protected.5
We get a clue to the reality behind Locke's liberal theory when we look at his activities. In
the 1660s, he was given the job of writing a constitution for the Carolinas (not yet North
and South Carolina). His constitution set up a feudal-type system, in which eight barons
would own 40 percent of the land; one of these barons would be governor. Locke's
constitution also contained this clause: "every freeman of Carolina shal have absolute
power and authority over his negro slaves, of what opinion or religion soever." This last part was to take care of the claim that Christianized slaves might be freed.
190
The American revolutionists had probably not read John Locke.6 They didn't have to. They were moved by similar circumstances: the necessity to overthrow monarchical rule, to put
forth a rhetoric that would win popular support, and then to set up a government that would
be more democratic than a monarchy. It would be a representative government (a
revolutionary idea at that time), but one that would represent the interests of the wealthy
classes most of al . And so, the Declaration of Independence, a masterpiece of rhetorical
idealism, was fol owed by the Constitution, a masterpiece of ambiguous practicality.
That combination of rhetoric and ambiguity appeared in the Bil of Rights itself, in the Fifth
Amendment, which says no person shal be deprived of "life, liberty, or property" without due process of law. The white person might be thankful that "liberty" was safe, but the
black slave, knowing he or she was "property," might wel be unimpressed. Indeed, when
the Supreme Court in 1857 had to decide between Dred Scott's liberty and his former
master's property, it decided for property and declared Dred Scott a nonperson, to be
returned to slavery.
Those were not "fifty-five typical American citizens" (James Michener's phrase) who drew up the Constitution. At that convention, there was no representation of black people, who at
that time numbered about one-fifth of the population of the states. There was no
representation of women, who were about half the population, and certainly no
representation of Indians, whose land al of the colonists were occupying.
The Indians, like blacks, were not looked on as human beings by those who were fighting a
revolution in the name of freedom. Six months after the battles of Lexington and Concord,
the Massachusetts legislature proclaimed monetary rewards for dead Indians: "For every
scalp of a male Indian brought in … forty pounds. For every scalp of such female Indian or
The Constitution was blatant in its representation of the interests of the slaveholders. It
included the provision (Article IV, Section 2) that escaped slaves must be delivered back to
their masters. Roger Sherman pointed out to the Convention that the return of runaway
horses was not demanded with such specific concern, but he was ignored.
In eighty-five newspaper articles (The Federalist Papers), arguing for the ratification of the Constitution among New York State voters (blacks, women, Indians, and whites without
property were excluded), James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay were quite
frank. Madison wrote (as we noted in the chapter "Economic Justice") that representative
government was a good way of calming the demand of people "for an equal division of
property, or for any other improper or wicked object." It would accomplish this by creating
too big a nation for a revolt to spread easily and by filtering the anger of rebels through
their more reasonable representatives.
[Endnote 7 position not indicated in book.]
The authors of The Federalist Papers explained, more candidly than any other political
leaders of the nation have done since, what the institution of representative government is real y for. As they put it (it is not clear whether Madison or Hamilton wrote this), speaking
of the usefulness of the Senate:
191
I shal not scruple to add that such an institution may be sometimes
necessary as a defence to the people against their own temporary errors and
delusions… . There are particular moments in public affairs when the people,
stimulated by some irregular passion, or some il icit advantage, may cal for
measures which they themselve
s wil afterwards be the most ready to lament
and condemn. In these critical moments, how salutary wil be the interference
of some temperate and respectable body of citizens in order to check the
misguided career, and to suspend the blow meditated by the people against
themselves, until reason, justice, and truth can regain their authority over the
public mind?8
That passage suggests that whites as wel as blacks, men as wel as women, might look
with suspicion on the claims of modern representative government—that while it indeed is
an improvement over monarchy, and may be used to bring about some reforms, it is chiefly
used by those holding power in society as a democratic facade for a control ed society and a
barrier against demands that threaten their interests.
The experience of black people reveals this most clearly, but there is instruction in it for
every citizen. The Constitution did not do away with slavery; it legalized it. Congress and
the president (including later the antislavery but political y cautious Abraham Lincoln) had
other priorities that came ahead of abolishing slavery. Bil ions of dol ars were invested in
southern slaves, and northern political leaders, wanting to keep what power they had, did
not want to rock the national boat.
It became clear to those who wanted to abolish slavery that they could not depend on the
regular structures of government. So they began to agitate public opinion. This was
dangerous not just in the South, where blacks were enslaved, but in the North, where they
were segregated and denied the right to vote, their children excluded from public schools,
and they were treated as inferiors in every way.9
A free black man in Boston, David Walker, wrote the pamphlet Walker's Appeal, a stirring
cal for resistance, in 1829:
Let our enemies go on with their butcheries… . Never make an attempt to
gain our freedom … until you see your way clear—when that hour arrives and
you move, be not afraid or dismayed… . They have no more right to hold us in
slavery than we have to hold them … . Our sufferings wil come to an end, in
spite of al the Americans this side of eternity … . 'Every dog must have its
day,' the American's is coming to an end.
Georgia offered $1,000 to anyone who would kil David Walker. One summer day in 1830,