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.
April 20, 1967
JUSTICE FOR ALL RACES
The disapproval of his readers is not the only thing that can make a coward of an editor. Their strong approval may be even more effective.
When one is flooded with approval and gratitude by the wonderful people of Central Illinois among whom we live and work, as we have been, the temptation is very strong to withdraw into that field of opinion which has earned your plaudits, and to avoid others.
In so doing, an editor stagnates, he forgets his mission as a gadfly, and the light he has shed becomes in time only a shadow beside a greater light.
It is against nature for an editor to be popular. He ought to be kept alert by ducking a brickbat once in a while, and spend his time sharpening his quill for battle instead of rearranging the pillows.
In our recent – and continuing – battle against unfair taxes, we have received the support of many people who are conservatives in the finest sense of that term, dedicated to conserving that which is best and most lasting in the American way of life.
Some of these people may not agree with our views on race. We hold that all men are equally the children of God. We do not approve of pampering any individual because he is a member of a racial minority, but neither do we hold with limiting his opportunities to go ahead under his own power.
Specifically, we want you to know we think the Reverend Martin Luther King is righter than even he may realize when he makes the connection between peace in Vietnam and the Civil Right movement.
A great many people have criticized him for this. Some of them are fair-weather types who are for the liberties of Mankind until the storm clouds gather. Then they take cover.
Did you notice that the more objective newspapers reported the New York peace march on Saturday was peacefully conducted, while others played up small incidents or printed pictures of beatnik types who joined the procession?
Have you ever reflected that it is a “demonstration” if it is for a cause you disapprove of, but only a “parade” if it is for something everybody supports?
King's whole message is wrapped up in the signs which said, “No Vietnamese Ever Called Me A Nigger!”
Negroes are only 10% of the U.S. population, but they are sustaining 18% of the casualties in Vietnam. College deferments, the reserve, etc., take care of many whites but few Negroes.
It is doubly strange for Mr. Johnson to call on Negro troops to “defend freedom” by killing people in Southeast Asia. To begin with, the Negro did not come to America in freedom, as you did, but in slavery. He does not truly have freedom, he is asked to fight for “freedom” when there is no more freedom in South Vietnam than there is in North Vietnam. If anything, there is less, because the North Vietnamese run their own country. There are no Chinese or Russian armies encamped in North Vietnam as there are American armies in South Vietnam. They are running their own show.
How they run it is pretty much their own business. Nobody has named us policeman to the world. As for “fighting Communism” this is largely an invented bugaboo by which Mr. McNamara and the Pentagon attempt to explain this hideous little war. Neither the North Vietnamese nor the Viet Cong consider themselves Communists. They are no better and no worse than most of the people of undeveloped areas throughout the world. All they are really trying to do is to get the foreigners out of their country; first the French and now the Americans. The only people on our side are a handful of generals, clerks and servants who tell us anything we want to hear so long as the money rolls in, and steal us blind when our back is turned.
From the beginning, this has been a civil war, not an invasion from the north. Nearly all the fighting is against South Vietnamese peasants, armed with American weapons and American ammunition. The “infiltration from the North” is the Pentagon's excuse for their inability to control the act and damp it down.
King is right when he points out that Mr. Johnson's “War against poverty” has become instead a war against the poor. No good purpose is being served by our sending American boys to be booby-trapped and ambushed in those stinking jungles, whether they be white Americans or black ones. The hungry and angry masses all over the world suspect that Mr. Johnson's real intentions are to get rid of poverty by bombing the poor, and the barrage of abuse which poor Hubert Humphrey received in Europe was only a sample of what would have been unleashed against LBJ if he had persisted in his attempt to follow Bobby Kennedy in triumphal tour of South America. The security forces of the several countries involved reported to him that they simply could not guarantee his safety, and on his recent visit to Punta del Este he saw no crowds and was at all times surrounded by masses of armed men.
The brief and glorious hopes aroused by Johnson's fair words about ending poverty have given away to bitterness everywhere, at home and abroad, as the money is poured instead into a meaningless war. Since most of the poor are also people of pigmented skins, Vietnam becomes an outrage against the rights and the hopes of all colored peoples.
Bertrand Lord Russell, sometimes called the “greatest logician since Aristotle”, has called for an international tribunal to try Lyndon Johnson for his war crimes. He goes too far, of course, when he compares our President to Adolf Hitler. He ought to realize a nation's sins are rooted in their national character, and it would be impossible for Americans to perpetrate any deeds so vile as Hitler and the Germans undertook, because we are so much more virtuous than the German people.
We are, aren't we?