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. [well, almost all. I have found that his views on homosexuality were those common to his time. Would he have been able to change again? Maybe...]
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.
August 13, 1964
SOCIETY REJECTS THE CANCER OF EXTREMISM; A REPORT ON THE DECATUR LYCEUM DEBATE
How can you write of something like the debate last Friday night on extremism? If you were there, you will understand, and if you missed it words cannot picture the mood of the evening or the magnitude of the thing that happened there.
This writer is deeply grateful for that opportunity. We did not choose the occasion, it was forced on us. Having accepted the challenge, we gave it everything we had, and dug for weeks through all available literature on the John Birch Society, including the slimy works of its founder, Robert Welch and his hatchet man, Prof. Revilo Oliver.
The daily paper in Decatur, which gave us very full and fair reporting, counted the crowd at 600 people. There may have been more. People filled every chair in the big pavilion at Nelson Park in Decatur, and sat on picnic tables and stood in the archways.
If the Birchers were outnumbered, they still made themselves heard. The whole assemblage was treated to a lesson in the bad manners of extremists as funny-looking women we had never seen before, and men wearing dark glasses (after sundown!) yelled, screeched, and booed at us while we spoke. Our supporters heard Dr. Scholtz respectfully, answering him by thunderous applause for our efforts.
Dr. Scholtz, our opponent, made a valiant effort to defend the organization with which he has become involved. We think of him as a very fine physician, and as a man too honorable to go all the way with the radicalism of the Birchers. We described him as a brave man searching for the truth – who has lost his way.
It was an unusual crowd. No pair of imported speakers could have duplicated the interest aroused. They knew both of us and what we stood for. Both sides mustered their full strength and in the headlong collision of believers, the impartial daily newspaper call it 3 to 1 for “Democracy” against “Extremism”.
We cannot think of it as a personal victory. It was one of those times when the people become convinced that something is in error, and they join their voices in one great vote of censure. We tried to speak, not as a liberal Democrat, but as an American, against something which offends and endangers American Democracy. The feeling was that of riding a surfboard in from the deeps on a tidal wave of public acclaim. You, the reader, could have stood in our place and read aloud the Declaration of Independence, and you would have been given the same support.
We told our listeners that their church, no matter to what faith they belonged, is an attempt to organize love. The John Birch Society is an attempt to organize hatred and fear.
They have gathered together all the frustrations of living in our complex and dangerous world, all the yearning for “the good old days” all the special furies of lesser groups into one movement. It has been described as “an attempt to repeal the Twentieth Century.”
In order to repeal what our people have voted into existence, they must destroy the Democratic process by which we choose our own leaders. “Mobocracy”, Welch calls it; “a deceptive phrase, a weapon of demagoguery and a perennial fraud”.
The Birchers are against Communism, to be sure; but so was Hitler. Welch has high praise for every Nazi-type dictator in existence, and we cannot find in his writings where he has ever uttered one word of criticism of Adolf Hitler himself. The parallels between Birchism and the early days of the Brownshirts in Germany has often been noted. The Nazis blamed everything on the Jews, while the Birchers seem to find the Negro a ready-made demon. “Mongrels”, “Mangy cannibals”, and “typical survivals of the stone age”, are racist terms which we can document from Birch literature.
Among their utterly ridiculous crusades are these; they call U.S. Savings Bonds “deliberately fraudulent”, and advised “all American mother to discourage their girls from joining” - the Girl Scouts! They are against fluoridation of drinking water (rat poison, they call it) against NATO, the United Nations, foreign aid, nearly all federal programs including the REA, against farm programs, against social security, labor unions, income taxes and corporate dividend taxes.
We have proof they have spread false rumors of invasion of the United States by cannibals from the Congo, under Russian officers. They attack teachers and school board members as “soft on Communism” if they do not get their way there. They write nasty unsigned letters, and call people at 2 a.m. and then just breathe into the telephone.
Most of this is just petty annoyance. The thing which makes the Birchers potentially dangerous is that they have set out to destroy our faith in our democratic institutions and in our leaders. We have documented proof that the Birchers believe the United States Supreme Court to be Communist-controlled. We can give you page references in their literature for dozens of statements that President Dwight Eisenhower was a Communist agent and a traitor to this country. The same goes for Presidents Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy.
We attempted to show that, within out system, the honorable conservative and the responsible liberal need each other; they work together like bones and muscles within the same body. They appear to be tugging and resisting against each other, but through their interaction the body stands, and it moves forward.
The extremist, of either the left or the right, Communist or Fascist, is outside the body politic. He says it is all bad. He wants to tear down everything that is up.
So long as they content themselves with soap-box ravings, none of these people exceed their rights as citizens; but the moment any of them issue a call to arms against our government, they belong in the hands of the law. You must remember that officers seized a truckload of rifles and machine-guns from some of these fanatics called “Minutemen” just north of Clinton not very long ago.
We pointed out that the Communist Party, U.S.A. is a miserable failure; because America feeds its people, and clothes and educates them. Communism reached its high-water mark in Berlin, and admitted failure when it had to build a wall to keep its own people from running away to our side.
We suggested that those who know Birchers attempt to get them involved in the constructive labors of our society; they are people who at least recognize that something is wrong and are hungry for some meaningful participation in the process.
The real trouble with extremism is that it rouses anxieties, but solves no problems. Despite setbacks and failures, our society is little by little hammering out solution to the problems that face us, and we listed examples. The test-ban treaty, the fight to reduce unemployment, the effort to build real racial brotherhood, and urban renewal to cure our city slums.
We suggested that if our hearers wished to avoid involvement with the hysterical propaganda of the rightists, they would steer clear of an “religious revivals” or “anti-Communist schools” sponsored by either Rev. Billy James Hargis or Dr. Fred Schwartz, and any films or printed material originating with George S. Benson and Harding College at Searcy, Arkansas. There is an excellent course in anti-Communism put out by the United States Chamber of Commerce. It is called “Freedom versus Communism: The Economics of Survival.”
If your radio station plays subversive right-wing material such as H.L. Hunt's “Life Lines”, the Dan Smoot Report, the Dean Manion Forum, or the “Reverend” Carl McIntire's Twentieth Century Reformation Hour, ask them to give opposing viewpoints an equal hearing. Both have a right to be heard. If your station does not do so, write to the Federal Communications Commission in Washington, D.C.
Whatever organization you may join, insist that it operate by the democratic rules and the vote of the membership which you learned in school. It is your surest guarantee against losing any group into one-man dictatorial control such as the Birch Society has.
Our final word to those who have followed the Birch Society was, “It's alright to dig for termites, but for God's sake (and we meant it reverently) – don't cut the bottom out of the boat!”