Conspiracy theory in "A People's History of the United States"?

Factual Questions
1

On the advice of another Doper whose name I no longer remember, I recently picked up a copy of Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States”. While Zinn is unabashedly critical of almost everything the US has done from Colombus on in, the book is well-researched, well-documented, and seems credible enough. However, I found something while reading today that seemed to stretch the limits of credibility.

In Chapter 14, “War is the Health of the State”, Zinn discusses the Espionage Act of 1917, which made it illegal to speak against the war or publish anti-war articles or texts. A few paragraphs into this discussion (Page 366 in the Perennial Classics paperback 2003 edition), Zinn makes the following statement:

I’ve seen claims of this nature before from conspiracy types, but never from a source as ostensibly reputable as Zinn. Can anyone confirm or deny the gist of this claim - that the US has been in a “state of emergency” for the last half century, and that the government is thus empowered to arrest anti-war activists? If so, when was the last time the Espionage Act was invoked, and could it theoretically be invoked by the Bush administration to arrest people for speaking out against the war on terror?

2

Damn, that’s a good question.

3

If the government had been empowered to massively crack down on activists since 1950, what the hell happened during the 1960s-1970s? Massive governmental amnesia?

I posit that if anything remotely like that law was on the books (or even off the books) during the timeframe specified (1950-present), there wouldn’t have been anything approaching the Peace Movement or Civil Rights Movement in this country, in either size or influence. They would all have been shipped off to bases unknown for the duration.

4

My guess would be that we may be technically in the state of emergency, but the authorities have either forgotten about it or know there’s no point in enforcing it, since it’ll be overturned on constitutional grounds.

5

Are all our memories so short that we don’t remember the state of martial law that was declared over the Y2K chaos? Come on, all the road closing signs were stored behind Wal-Marts all over the country. Remember? Remember?

6

The 1917 Espionage Act may still be on the books, but it is not quite the terror of freedom that its is sometimes portrayed. (The Sedition Act of 1918 that Wilson rammed through because he did not get everything he wanted in the Espionage Act was much more anti-Constitutional.)

What happened under the Espionage Act was that the Wilson Justice Department expanded the meaning of the language in the bill to cover a wide range of clearly protected speech and were helped along by judges and juries caught up in the war hysteria. A great many of the convictions garnered under that act were reversed (usually after 1920 when it was politically safe for the appellate courts to do so without the justices jeopardizing their potential elevation to the Supreme Court).

Geoffrey Stone, writing for the University of Chicago Law Review, has provided an interesting commentary on what the law intended (and on how it was used): Judge Learned Hand and the Espionage Act of 1917: A Mystery Unraveled (Adobe Acrobat required).

Following the reversals of the 1920s, the law (if it has not been repealed–a point I haven’t discovered) is probably not as much of a threat as Zinn would like to believe. (Witness the fact that neither John Mitchell nor John Ashcroft invoked it (yet).)

(Google cached HTML version of Stone’s article)

7

Well, I’ll be…

I find that in this Acrobat file it gives the citations for the Act:

So, let’s just see what 18 USC 2388 says, over at GPO Access. This is public domain and may be quoted in full:

I don’t have the time to review this in full, but I think that the bolded parts indicate that the extension was repealed in the 1950s by Congressional resolution.

Here is the text of National Emergency Proclamation 2914:

However, right behind that is Proclamation No. 2974. It terminates the emergency proclaimed on September 8, 1939, just after hostilities broke out in Europe. It has this intriguing line:

I dunno. Hope that’s enough for you guys to work with. I have to disappear now.

8

Like I said above, it appears to me as if the language was repealed, but I find that in an excerpt from the book in question it goes on to say,

Perhaps the state of emergency was re-invoked somehow?

9

I think a definitive answer to this interesting question is still waiting. Any of our resident wonks want to take a non-denominational crack at it?

10

I just have to wonder if our nation had learned anything from its experience with the unconstitutional Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798.

One thing we might have learned from the experience is that such legislation does not belong in our way of government.

But I wonder if some have taken the lesson from it that to get such legislation to stick they must find subtler, cleverer ways of duping the public.

11

So if I’m reading the two quotes in Sofa King’s post correctly, there’s a law stating Americans cannot criticize any military actions taken by the United States. And this was invoked because the Communists were threatening American rights such as “the right of free speech including the right to criticize their Government”.

Sort of a “we had to burn the village in order to save it” mentality at work.

12

This is approaching GD territory, but if I’m reading the USC as provided by Sofa King correctly, section 2388 makes it a crime to:

[ul][li]knowingly lie in an attempt to interfere with military operations[/li][li]attempt to incite mutiny[/li][li]obstruct recruitment and enlistment in such as way as to injure the U.S.[/ul][/li]I have to agree with tomndeb that it’s “not quite the terror of freedom”.

13

Look at the key words: “at war”. The USA has not been “at war” since 1945. Thus, laws in force while we are “at war” have no bearing. Only the congress has the right to declare “war” in the USA. There has been no declaration of war since 1941. There have been “authorizations for use of force” but no declaration of a state of war.

14

Here’s an editorial which appears to contradict my above extension of Zinn’s quote:

And I’m not sure I can agree with Dogface’s observation because I’ve found some evidence that the Espionage Act has been invoked since WWII against American citizens who leaked documents to non-foreign or allied sources. For example, Daniel Ellsberg was tried under the Espionage Act for releasing the “Pentagon Papers” to the New York Times and the Washington Post, but the case was dismissed because of illegal wiretapping. Samuel Loring Morrison, grandson of the naval historian, was successfully convicted for releasing classified photographs to Jane’s Fighting Ships in a time of definite peace, the mid-1980s.

15

Not to turn this into a GD, but how were the Alien and Sedition Acts unconstitutional?

16

They are considered to have been stricken down as such by the Supreme Court in New York Times v. Sullivan. Or at least, Justice Brennan implied that they should have been stricken:

But not until 1964!

17

Thanks.

18

I have little to add to the posts above, but i would like to make a point about the OP’s wording.

Zinn’s claim is NOT a “conspiracy theory.” It is a conclusion based on political and historical analysis. Like many such conclusions, it is open to debate, but whether you agree with his conclusion or not is beside the point. He makes no claim that the Espionage Act, the Sedition Act, or the National Emergency of 1950 emerged out of a conspiracy or in secret.

I only point this out because too often critiques of government policies or corporate actions or social trends are labelled “conspiracy theories,” and it seems to me that such a label is generally designed to discredit the argument without actually addressing its substance. An institutional analysis is NOT a conspiracy theory.