It Took More Than Stamler By Ken Lawrence
If an historian of today's young generation had written "Halting McCarthyism: The Stamler Case in History," or if a liberal magazine had published it, I would have yawned and turned the page. But with Paul Buhle as the author and Monthly Review (October 1999) as the venue, the article demands a response. Both the writer and the editors ought to know better.
I do not quarrel with Buhle's factual summary of the legal challenge to the House Un-American Activities Committee. I extol Dr. Jeremiah Stamler, Rose Stamler, Yolanda Hall, the visionary members of their legal team, and their distinguished supporters, including Richard Criley and the Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights. They mounted a bold, courageous, and imaginative legal challenge to HUAC, as Buhle wrote.
But to paraphrase Buhle, had leftists in Chicago waited for lawyers and courts to take the lead, the legal victories never would have come, which is the elementary lesson that Bill Kunstler and Arthur Kinoy learned well, and always imparted to their younger colleagues. [Bill's surname was misspelled in Buhle's article.]
By the time HUAC had announced its intention to convene at Chicago in 1965 for purposes of witch-hunting the left and redbaiting the popular mass movements, militant radical Chicagoans had been on the march for the previous five years, with numerous victories to our credit and momentum on our side.
Although important civil-rights protests had been waged in Chicago during the 1950s, particularly in battling for open housing and against urban renewal programs designed to wall off the African American ghetto and to destroy the city's handful of interracial enclaves, they did not achieve a mass constituency of activists until weekly picket lines at Woolworth's in 1960 energized the movement, in solidarity with Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee sit-ins at Greensboro and Nashville. That activity gave birth to the Chicago Youth Committee for Civil Rights, and to Chicago's own SNCC chapter.
At the same time, the national headquarters of Student Peace Union, the most radical wing of the broadly insurgent movement against U.S. nuclear weapons and military interventions abroad, teemed with activism. Originally housed in a tiny South Side commercial building, SPU soon relocated to a dilapidated three-story mansion near the University of Chicago as the movement blossomed.
In 1962 the Congress of Racial Equality held a series of jail-no-bail sit-ins at the University of Chicago, forcing the city's second largest owner/manager of real estate to desegregate its property. (UofC's realty holdings were eclipsed by those of the Catholic archdiocese, but we doubted we had the mass base to defeat God's own segregationists in 1962, even with the aid of James Farmer's oratory.) For most Chicago CORE members, those were our first arrests.
SPU held Chicago's first protest against the U.S. war in Vietnam when Madame Nhu came to Chicago in 1963. Our demonstration that greeted her at the airport was sufficiently spirited that her bodyguards got physical with us, but they backed off when flashbulbs began to pop. Annual Easter peace marches from Fort Sheridan to Chicago drew larger crowds each succeeding year, as the slogans on the banners and the songs we sang became ever more radical.
In 1963 and 1964, SNCC led militant protests and a city-wide boycott against the Chicago Public Schools' plan to use portable classrooms and neighborhood gerrymandering to keep the system racially segregated, which did not end until the Willis wagons, as we dubbed the portable buildings in honor of Chicago's superintendent of schools, Benjamin C. Willis, were withdrawn.
Also during 1964, several of our Chicago SNCC members volunteered for Freedom Summer duty in Mississippi, while the rest of us provided logistical support. One of our beloved comrades, Wayne Yancey, was murdered at Holly Springs. Unlike the killers of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman, who have been prosecuted and convicted of major crimes, Wayne's have never been apprehended (or even seriously pursued by the authorities).
A great deal more could be written about insurgent radical movements in Chicago during the early 1960s. This summary does not do them justice, it merely recounts highlights of my personal recollections, as a rank-and-file socialist of no special distinction. The city was alive with activism in those days, and no single person could have kept a hand in all of it.
To no one's surprise, when HUAC announced its intention to hold hearings at the old federal courthouse on Chicago's North Shore, SNCC mobilized in opposition. On the eve of the hearings, an anti-HUAC rally keynoted by James Forman filled a large auditorium. Jim drew a standing ovation when he called for action: "I want you all to put your bodies on the line, to stop this Committee!"
To assure the largest possible participation, we organized the Chicago Committee to Stop HUAC, with a three-pronged strategy: First, a mass picket line chanting anti-HUAC slogans would surround the courthouse. Second, a contingent of 14- to 18-year-old women (students at Hyde Park High School, mostly SNCC members) would disrupt the hearing inside the courtroom with songs and chants. Third, as the disruption escalated inside, a contingent of pickets would storm the police barricades and enter the building to reinforce the women's protest.
Our plan was not warmly endorsed by Richard Criley of the Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights. He and his organization wanted publicity to focus exclusively on Dr. Stamler's legal case, supported by orderly picketing. But after Jim Forman's speech, SNCC's alternative carried the day.
Our flyers read, "Five years ago, thousands of demonstrators in San Francisco forced HUAC to run for cover. They're in Chicago. It's our job now."
Some of the older Communists whom HUAC had subpoenaed supported our plan, and their assistance was crucial. Only a limited number of spectators were allowed in the hearing room, and once in, they could not come and go freely. But subpoenaed witnesses could enter and leave as they pleased, using their summonses as passes through police lines.
As soon as one of the young women stood up and shouted "Stop this hearing!", one subpoenaed witness came outside and gave the signal for our second group to push over the barricades and rush the doors. By dispersing themselves around the crowded room, the women were able to halt the hearings for quite a while, as pandemonium gripped the audience of spectators while marshals chased the demonstrators. Once caught, they went limp, and were carried off under arrest to a federal lockup or a juvenile detention center, according to their ages.
Unfortunately only one outside picketer got past the barricade before the cops locked the doors to keep the rest of us from entering the building, and he was beaten bloody, out of public view. The rest of us then sat down and blocked the entrance, forcing the police to carry us to their vans. I scarcely need mention that they did not perform these arrests gently; they banged my head on concrete steps before heaving me into the wagon.
Nevertheless, we were spirited and triumphant. Unlike previous protests, where we had tended to keep explicitly socialist politics discreetly among ourselves and our comrades in struggle, this time we proudly sang The Internationale as they drove us to the lockup, and filled most of the time in our cells with revolutionary oratory as we awaited our arraignment.
On May 27, 1965, Chicago's daily papers headlined the previous day's demonstration, with reports on Stamler in sidebar articles or well down in the main stories. Chicago's American bannered, "38 Demonstrators Arrested, One Hurt - PICKETS FIGHT COPS AT RED QUIZ" over a front page photo of cops punching a demonstrator.
The Sun-Times pictured two policeman carrying off a woman above the main story, "HUAC Pickets Battle Cops; Two Injured, 38 Arrested." The Tribune's page one headline read, "39 Arrested at House Red Probe - Protesters Hurl Cops to Ground in Mass Assault"; below it ran four photos of clashes between police and demonstrators.
By contrast, Stamler was portrayed as a moderate. His Republican lawyers were quoted as requesting a closed session to hear testimony about their client, not opposing the Committee hearing as such. Stamler himself refused to answer any reporters' questions, so the only consistent objection to HUAC was ours.
The June 5 page one People's World (West Coast paper of the Communist Party) report, "The Chicago story: New tide of protest hits HUAC," played up Stamler's challenge in the best light possible, but devoted its main coverage to our demonstration:
"CHICAGO—The House Un-American Committee, which has reason to regret having gone to San Francisco in 1960, may have similar cause to question the wisdom of its foray into Chicago in the last week in May of 1965.
"The three days HUAC spent here were as stormy as anything the probers have encountered since that other May five years ago, and the end result could be a U.S. Supreme Court test of the legality of the committee and its methods.
"Certainly HUAC has seldom come out of a city with a poorer press. Three of Chicago's four major dailies were editorially critical of the committee, its purpose and its tactics. They were also critical of some of the tactics of the demonstrators, but when a paper as conservative as The Chicago American questions what such hearings accomplish, HUAC can scarcely lay claim to a good press.
"IMPRESSIVE PROTEST
"The first day there were an estimated 1,000 marchers protesting the hearings, in addition to about 300 standing in line to get into the hearings in the old federal Court of Appeals building on North Lake shore Drive.
"From the Sunday night rally prior to the hearings — at which over 1,000 persons heard a variety of civil rights and civil liberties leaders — until the final day when young demonstrators tried to storm their way into the hearings, there was a notable spirit of opposition to HUAC in Chicago."
Although our contingent of mostly younger radicals discomfited our more cautious and respectable elders (in some instances, parents), the Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights did contribute modestly to our legal defense. In our view, we had continued the tactic of direct confrontation with HUAC that had begun five years earlier at San Francisco, and we had won.
We had chased the Committee out of town and back to Washington. Never again would HUAC leave the safety of Capitol Hill to hunt witches in the hinterland.
For us it was time to move on to other battles, in the style of itinerant activism that characterized the emerging New Left. We certainly would not have had the patience to persist with the legal drudgery that became a central element in dismantling the Committee. (None of us would have believed that capitalism could outlast the decade, let alone that its most reactionary defenders would retain political power.) For carrying on until HUAC was abolished, Dr. Stamler's team surely deserves high praise.
If the past is to guide and inspire today's and tomorrow's activists, the portrayal of events has to be comprehensive enough to show how mass movements of committed people can change the course of history. Standing alone, Paul Buhle's article failed to do that. The legal aspects of political struggle probably are more important than many radical activists of the 1960s would have admitted, but the mass movement is fundamental. Adding selected vignettes of that aspect will, I hope, provide a more complete and more useful chronicle of the 1960s fight to abolish HUAC.
[57-year-old Chicago native Ken Lawrence is a writer who lives today in State College, Pennsylvania. He spent 23 years as a political activist in Mississippi, where he researched and organized against the segregationist State Sovereignty Commission while legal workers conducted a parallel struggle, successfully, in the courts.]