“Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one” - A.J. Liebling
My father Bob Wilson took this to heart, and bought one and started his own newspaper, the Prairie Post of Maroa, Illinois in 1958, and ran it until he died in 1972. It never had a circulation of more than 2500 or so, but every week, he would fire off editorials at everyone and everything from local events to the actions of the nations of the world.
He may have been a Quaker peace activist in a Republican district, but his love and support of the farming communities garnered him enough respect that he eventually ran for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1962, though he lost. (He might have tried again, had he not died of an accident while only 49.) Many of his views ring true today. And he might have been willing to change the ones that fell behind the times. Although raised in the casual racism of the 1920s and 1930s, at the age of 15 he took stock of what he was being taught and discarded much of it as being wrong, and lived his life with respect for all.
I decided to transcribe his old editorials (I may make a book for some of my relatives) and every once in a while I will repost one here, as a view of how the world has changed wildly, or remained stubbornly the same.
June 2, 1960
THE TURKISH COUP
Premier Menderes of Turkey is out. Like Rhee of South Korea, he tumbled in ten days from the chief of a monolithic police state, to a harried refugee from his own people.
One lesson is inescapable, no matter how rigid the police measures, it means nothing to own the guns, if you do no control the hearts of the men who must be relied on to fire them.
What disturbs us is that Adnan Menderes was the close friend and ally of the West. The Turkey in which he was closing universities and padlocking newspapers, was being described here at home as “a bastion of the Free World.”
“Free” like South Korea, “free” like Franco's Spain, “free” like Formosa? On Formosa, you know, an election lately took place in which Chang-Kai-Shek was re-elected President of “Free China.”
Did our newspapers report that in this so-called election, ONLY ONE CANDIDATE was permitted on the ballot? Or that unmarked ballots were thrown out? Or that the 85% of the population who are native Formosans were allotted just 2% of the vote?
What sort of “Freedom”, what kind of “Democracy” are we feeding throughout the world with American money and American arms?
Our slavish press services, which have representatives in Istanbul, had nothing to say about injustice or repression there until the brute facts of civil war forced themselves onto the front pages.
Rulers everywhere, cynics though most of them be, recognize the basic decency in the hearts of the plain people, whom they rule. This is why they must pretend that every war is a “defensive” war, and every enemy an inhuman monster.
We are being relentlessly conditioned for the day when we will be asked to kill Russians in order to “save civilization”, just as we lately “saved civilization” from the Germans and the Japanese – now our Allies!
The truth is that back in 1939, the nations of the West forfeited forever the claim that they fight wars for moral reasons. In that year, they permitted the Communists to eat Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, and then stood by while four million fearless Finns defended their land to the last drop of blood against 170 million Russians.
Now we are forced to wonder, in how many other portions of the globe our puppets and “Friends” are ruling by hunger and terror, under cover of the news blackout by our wire services?
We know there is slavery of the soul and of the body within the Communist empire; but how shall we win if we do not offer something better?
June 23, 1960
IDEAS OR BOMBS?
Disaster is heaped upon disaster.
Not within living memory has any major nation received a humiliation equal to that visited upon us by the Communist world conspiracy.
Without question, there is a connection between the cancelled visit to Russia, and the student riots which prevented the visit to Japan.
We must ask ourselves, however, how we have gotten ourselves into a position where a handful of agitators can inflame hundreds of thousands against us.
The errors in our foreign policy have long been apparent to anyone who really wanted to understand. In 1952, the Editor of this newspaper visited Europe. We came back deeply troubled. We spoke to half a hundred local groups in northeastern Missouri, where we were farming at the time. We told all of them that our United States foreign policy would make us, within a few years time, THE MOST HATED NATION ON THE FACE OF THE EARTH.
It sounded ridiculous then; DOES IT NOW?
On July 24th, 1958, in an editorial entitled “A Harvest of Terror”, we wrote... “A RECKONING IS DUE SOON, AND THE WINNER WILL BE, NOT THE NATION WITH THE BIGGEST ATOM BOMBS, BUT THE NATION WITH THE MOST FRIENDS...”
Perhaps it sounded like foolishness then; DOES IT NOW?
In the same editorial we wrote... IF WE CHANGE NOW, THERE MAY YET BE TIME. OTHERWISE, THERE IS A TERRIBLE HARVEST TO BE GATHERED.
When will our leaders learn? How long will they go about rattling swords as John Foster Dulles did, and “buying” the governments of small nations with enormous grants of money and arms, in order that we might use their nations as battlegrounds in the coming war with the Soviets?
Japan is a defeated enemy. Our troops have remained on her soil for sixteen years. What better method to arouse the hatred of the populace than to urge on them a treaty which will keep us there for another decade?
Over and over, our moral and spiritual leaders have warned us; Justice William O. Douglas, Adlai Stevenson, Hubert Humphrey, Chester Bowles, and many others have gone abroad and seen the truth. They see American military might encircling the globe, the clanking legions of a new Rome marching through streets where the poor hunger for bread, for books, for a sense of meaning to their lives.
What else do they see? They see Communist agents quietly at work, sowing dreams, sowing ideas, and beating us on every hand!
The futile cry of Mr. Dulles and his sword-rattlers was to “contain” Communism. Is it finally evident that we can no more “contain” Communism than we can “contain” a deadly disease germ, carried on the wind?
YOU CANNOT FIGHT AN IDEA WITH ATOM BOMBS. You can only fight an idea with a better idea.
We give ignorant people machine guns and steel helmets, but no vision of a better world. Then they, too, are stricken by the disease carried on the wind, and they will turn those guns against us!
Once America was young, and full of dreams. The world looked to us breathless with hope, to see if the common people could really rule a great nation with liberty and equality for all... this dream is still our ultimate weapon.
Let us export, not H-bombs, but freedom; not hatred, but brotherhood; not money, but a working knowledge of our free political institutions; not guns, but food and tools!
Do this, and we can win!