There Is Time Yet
by RALPH McGILL
1
ABOUT eight years ago I was called upon by a committee which asked me to write a platform for the Georgia state party convention. I went for advice to an old man and an old friend, Colonel Jack Spalding. He was in the twilight of his life and he was ill. He sat in a large chair in his library, an old-fashioned shawl across his knees and another about his shoulders. As a boy he had played with slave children and he had watched with a sensitive heart and an intelligent mind the unfolding developments of events which are now history. He had been a successful lawyer and had accumulated wealth which he had used wisely and without arrogance.
We talked of the platform.
“Say something about liberty and freedom being something which only an informed people care about retaining,” he said. “Nothing is guaranteed except that which is fixed in the mind. Property is not guaranteed. The rights of property, protected as they are by the Constitution of the United States, are not guaranteed except as the minds of people accept those property rights.
“I played with slave children,” he went on, “and I studied that problem and its aftermath as I grew up. You know,” he said, “there were a number of efforts to abolish slavery and to reimburse the Southern slave owners for their property. Every time it was attempted, — and the first attempts were well before the Civil War, — they went to Washington, figuratively clasping their property to their chests and saying, ‘It’s my property. The Constitution and the Supreme Court guarantee it to me and you can’t take it away from me.’”
He made an expressive gesture with his hands.
“Nothing,” he said, “is guaranteed except to an enlightened people who are informed and who understand the significance of what is happening about them. Nothing is so blind and so insecure as the status quo.”
I wrote some of that into the platform, but I did not think too much about it. Things were very secure and he was an old man and not well. Two years later he came crowding back into my memory. I went into Austria a few days after the Germans.
The day of arrival and that first night, I saw the faces of people I shall never forget. I saw frothflecked lips on the faces of shouting men and women. I saw faces of despair. I saw frenzy, cruelty, hypnotic delirium. Everywhere were the red flags and the crooked cross and the steel-helmeted soldiers.
The days spun on. Newspapers disappeared from the stands. So did magazines. There were no radio programs save those sent out by the Germans. There was no information save the information they supplied. One day I went to watch them burn books. A great pile blazed in the center of a square. It was a foolish thing and that was how it seemed.
Another day I went to see the arrival of the German notables. They came early in the morning. They paraded through triple lines of soldiers and brown shirts on each side of the street — Hitler, Göring, Goebbels, Hess, and all the others. It was noon before they had traversed the Ringstrasse about old Vienna and came at last to the great city hall.
For days orders had been written and shouted that when the bugle blast went at noon and the voice of Joseph Goebbels began to speak, proclaiming the union of Austria and Germany, no man, woman, or child in all Austria or Germany should move. For those two minutes no wheel should turn on the street or in the factory. No person should be at his accustomed tasks.
I looked about. There was Oriental richness of decoration. There were the slogans, and chief among them one which read, “Brot und Arbeit — Bread and Work.” It had been a good slogan for that poor, broken country. It broke down the elementals of life into language that could be understood by those who had come from the old Austro-Hungarian Empire as young children into the post-war world with its shock of economics and the hypocrisies of the rival powers which protected, in a fashion, the small nation.
Then came the bugle blast, cutting through the sound from the loud-speakers on posts and trees. There was sudden, utter silence. I stood there as one of 200,000 persons in the square, silent and still. The thin voice went on reading. Somehow it staggered my imagination to picture the great cities and the small, the villages and the farmhouses, silent and still — 80 million persons listening to the one voice. Then it was over and there was bedlam again.
There came to my mind the picture of the old man, dead a year ago, who had insisted that only in the free and informed minds of men who are schooled in the cult of freedom was anything at all — life, liberty, or property — guaranteed. Suddenly I knew that the disappearance of books and newspapers was not just foolishness by a lot of boy bullies. I had been seeing the rights and privileges which we wrote down in the first ten amendments to our Constitution taken away in tangible form.
It was not a pleasant thing to see. What disturbed me most was that the taking away of them seemed so very simple and easy as to be almost casual. A fear began to gnaw at my mind.
There followed that afternoon something which increased that fear. There was a street demonstration by the young people of Austria, supplemented by some of the crack units brought in from the German Reich. It went on for two hours or more.
Some rode in trucks, with banners flung out. Others rode bicycles. But most of them marched singing the new songs. I remember the faces of those young people, of ages from eight to twentyfive, as if it were now. Their faces were strained and emotional as they sang the new songs.
There was one favorite song. It began, “Wie schön ist Stahl, Wie schön ist Eisen — How beautiful is steel, How beautiful is iron,” and it went on to say, “How beautiful to see an enemy of the state burned at the stake of torture.” They chanted it with inspired faces.
I went away to a warm place, because it was a cold day and a depressing one, and I knew I had seen a new cult: the cult of utter social control over the minds of young people who could be trained to think exactly as others wanted them to think by educational processes and the uses of propaganda. There was no freedom in it and, worse, no desire for it.
The next day the Austrian plebiscite was held and the appeasement chapter of the Second World War had begun.
I stayed on there for a while and then for a while in England and France, a year in all. I tried to think. Last summer I went back again to England and saw something of what is going on there and from there.
2
I HAVE worked for newspapers for almost a quarter of a century. I suppose I always felt that behind me was the great guarantee of a free press. But never until I saw there in Austria the physical disappearance of that freedom, along with others, did it become something vital. Not until then did it happen that I could become coldly angry to see it abused and prostituted, especially by those who claim to be its high priests.
Freedom of the press is not the personal property of any one editor or publisher, or of any association of them. It is not something that can be locked in the safe at night. It is merely one of the guarantees to the people. It is their property. And so, when I see some publishers and editors hugging it to their breasts, while they put it to some venal or personal use, shouting the while, “It is mine! The Supreme Court and the Constitution of the United States guarantee it to me. You cannot take it away from me!” I grow fearful and resentful.
It is not their property, as publishers and editors, nor is it mine as a newspaper worker. And I know that it can be taken away. What is more, I know it can be taken away casually. I know that the people, to whom it is guaranteed, can sweep it away with one great burst of antagonistic opinion or that they can stand by and see it go, inch by inch. The press is free only so long as it exists in that status in the minds and affections of the people.
It seems to me, too, that freedom of the press is something like a muscle. If it is not used it becomes very weak, and then in a crisis it has no strength. On the other hand, if it is brought forth and made to flex its muscles before every sideshow tent within which midgets and freaks perform, it becomes muscle-bound and commonplace.
I have read all the great stories of the battle to maintain a free press. They are a part of the tradition, the truth, the law, and the legend. They helped cement it into the codes and constitutions. They also gave it that quality which attracts loyalties and affections.
It was men who suffered prison and poverty, despair and personal defeat, loss of position and reputation, who made it something stronger than the law printed in the constitutional amendment covering it; stronger than that written in the state codes.
In a way these men did too good a job. They did their work so well they gave it an aura of finality. Now and then there is some argument about it, and people say, “Where is that World Almanac, anyhow?” They find it and look up the Constitution of the United States. And there are the Amendments. One may read them off, and they sound comforting and solid and final.
Unhappily, they are not final. That is why, in my opinion, any discussion of freedom of the press must pause only for a solemn and reverent salute to the men who, by sweat, perseverance, and courage, put the laws on the books, and must then hurry on. We must look to the future.
To date there has not been much to encourage one interested in freedom of the press. It is obvious that the mouse of fear gnaws at the minds of many persons whose daily job is newspapering. One may detect this fact in all the ringing speeches made at meetings of editors and publishers. Freedom of the press must be protected, maintained, and, some say, strengthened.
But how? There’s the rub. No one says how it shall be done. I have examined hundreds of speeches on the subject as reported by the news agencies and by local newspapers. They sound fine, but they are empty. And, in most instances, they show that the man making the speech realizes that fact. There is frustration in them. One can almost hear the small voice whispering in the ear of the man making the speech, saying: —
“Why should you be making this speech? The Constitution guarantees freedom of the press to you. It is there in the framed copy of the Ten Amendments on your wall. It is in all the schoolbooks. Why should you be making this speech? Who makes you afraid?”
All those doubts are between the words and the lines of the freedom-of-the-press speeches. The man making them doesn’t know what he is going to do to strengthen the law about freedom of the press unless it is to buttress it with another law. That won’t work if the original one won’t work. So nothing much has been done except to be emphatic.
What they and many of us forget is that freedom and liberty didn’t come to this country on the ships which brought the settlers. With our passion for generalities and for oversimplification, we have come to lump them all together as our noble forebears, who, except for the Tories who fled to Canada, were all freedom-loving men. Actually, had one been able to melt down all the first arrivals and squeeze out one person, that person would have been an eccentric, without doubt, and he would have had not much of freedom or liberty in him.
The American Revolution was able to sustain itself largely because of those who had gone out with the steadily extending frontier. They had fought the forest and the Indians. They had learned what liberty was. It became a cult, growing in their minds. They had to learn it, to experience it, and to feel it. That was why they stuck. Many ran away from that Continental Army. Many left the frontier. But that feeling for liberty was in the minds of enough of them to stick it out through long years when at times it seemed hardly worth while.
3
BEHIND all those who learned liberty and who could taste it on their tongues were hundreds of little minds and mean persons who never learned it. They were there all the time and they were, God help us, breeding children and new generations of their sort. They, too, were among our forebears. But they are not the ones we have in mind when we make Fourth of July speeches.
I have the feeling that this thing called freedom or liberty is mixed up in the minds of a lot of us. When this war came along there was a great deal of confusion about it.
There are too many easy formulas for freedom and liberty. The demagogues among us know all the tricks. I have seen them in my own state and it was astonishing how easily the America Firsters went about their work. The speaker would stand before his audience and, after a harangue, say something like this: —
“ My friends, I believe in this great nation of ours, and all that it stands for; all that our noble forefathers fought and died for. I believe in it before all else. Everyone who believes in America First stand up.”
They would all stand, of course.
Once, during a political campaign, I attended a meeting held by J. Frank Norris, the evangelist who once was tried on a killing charge out in Texas. He was speaking in behalt of one of Georgia’s demagogues and, after a harangue in which God and Jesus and hellfire and eternal life were tossed about between deep-pulled breaths, he said:-
“All those who think we ought to nail to the fence the hides of the newspaper editors who don’t support these things, stand up.”
They all stood.
It is a very easy technique, and on the way home on that hot, sweaty day I became suddenly horrified to find that, standing stark and clear in my mind, was the undeniable fact that too many newspapers had been using the same technique.
No wonder the editorial pages had sunk to low level in reader-interest. No wonder the columnists and radio commentators were popular. The average newspaper editor — and this was true in all cities regardless of size - had adopted the comfortable technique of what amounted to a call for a showing of hands. From his speaker’s stand he was contenting himself with saying, “This is something in which all right-thinking persons must concur.” Communists must not be allowed to become the termites in our oak beams of liberty and freedom.” “Citizens will demand of the police force that it get down to business and enforce the laws.” “It is regrettable ... it is unfortunate ... it must cause all good citizens real concern. . . .” “Free enterprise must not be endangered.” “We must protect the American way of life.”
It was the same technique, but it lacked the fire of those who, like J. Frank Norris and Gerald Smith and bather Coughlin and others, were speaking with passion and pounding their fists. Their utterances, while vicious and false, at least were not sterile.
The newspapers, the most concerned with freedom, were sterile and lulled by the fact that freedom is guaranteed. All they asked was a show of hands. All the while, the golden vessel of liberty and freedom was being carried about in the arms of a great many persons who have never really cared about liberty anyhow, and was being offered to any person with the uncouth and vulgar vigor to reach out and take it.
There has been in our time only one person to come along with the vulgar vigor to reach out for it. If you don’t think he had a chance you might discuss it with the Honorable James A. Farley, who was chairman of the National Democratic Executive Committee at the time Huey Long was getting ready to run for the Presidency on a “Share the Wealth” platform.
They made a little survey on Huey and what they found was enough to make them breathe a sigh of relief when the harassed little man killed Huey down in Baton Rouge. I don’t mean they approved of murder. They were just relieved, that’s all.
There will be others reaching out for it. There are those reaching now, but all of them are a lot dumber than Huey. He alone of the demagogues of our time has been a combination of rabblerouser and able organizer. All the others yelping along the trail of fascism have been rabble-rousers in one degree or another. Happily, they have not been able organizers. When this war is done there may again be someone with both abilities. And that is something to think about. 4
THERE still is time for the newspapers to meet the test. There is still time to make freedom of the press a living thing and not something sterile. I do not mean that one must shout and harangue from the editorial columns or devote his news columns to learned discussion. It is not a question of the flexing of muscles. Horace Greeley achieved a sort of reputation by flexing his editorial muscles. If one goes back to read his editorials today, one is surprised to find them the worst sort of tripe. They are all congested with muscle.
Newspapers must come down and live with the people; walk the streets with them; sit in their homes with them; fight with them and for them and make freedom of the press have a living meaning — Something the people can see and appreciate, something they want for their very own.
It will mean some changes. The publishers of newspapers, and their editors, will have to regain, if they have lost it, the vision of serving the people of their state and community. Publishers and editors often have become interested in other ventures and enterprises which had the effect of watering out their newspaper interest.
I believe, too, that a great many editors and publishers do not realize that what they consider to be freedom of the press is not at all the definition possessed by that well-known character, the Man in the Street. To most publishers and editors freedom of the press means the right to publish. Any infringement by the government on that right is viewed as an assault on the freedom of the press.
But to the Man in the Street the phrase “freedom of the press” means something else, something very different. He thinks of it, if he thinks of it at all, as meaning a free press. When he looks at a newspaper and sees it deliberately slanting news toward its oft-shouted policies; when he learns that news of the other side is kept out of the paper — he knows it isn’t, so far as he is concerned, a free press.
Now he may keep right on reading the paper. He may like its comics, its features, or its state news coverage. The publisher and editor, seeing the circulation figures, may think in their hearts that all is well. But if they get around to asking the Man in the Street, they may be shocked to hear him say: “A free press? Don’t make me laugh. It stinks.”
The same person, seeing a newspaper give at least a fair showing to news unpleasant to that newspaper and hostile to its policies, is smart enough to appreciate that fact. He would be quick to speak up for the newspaper and for his idea about freedom of the press. “Sure,” he’d say, “I’m for it. It’s a fine idea to print both sides.”
It simply would not occur to him to think of freedom of the press as a guarantee to the publisher that he may keep his presses rolling and that the government may not tell him what news to print.
I have never agreed that advertisers dominate newspaper policies. They would not be that stupid. In cities where it seemed this fact could be demonstrated, it usually turned out that the owner of the paper quite honestly thought as his advertisers did. He associated with them; they were his friends, perhaps even his relatives. And often along with his advertisers, he might be a stockholder in business ventures quite foreign to newspapering.
But if freedom of the press is to survive and be the living thing the Constitution meant it to be, the newspaper must live with the people and be of and for them.
The newspapers have failed in the past, and I think they have failed miserably, to interpret America to the people. The result is that today the phrases “free enterprise” and “the American way of life” are just phrases which no one can define. They are mocked in some quarters. They are used foolishly in others.
The newspaper staffs of the future could be a lot smaller and a lot better. They will have to be better paid, generally speaking, because they must include more able men and women.
I do not mean that newspapers should become journals heavy with learned discourse. But they must be staffed with men and women who know history, economics, and the facts of life, and who can write of them so that newspaper readers can understand. In the past we have failed to do that and, consequently, we have failed to inform the people. And giving information is the job of newspapers. If we go back to our own newspapers of the period beginning with October, 1929, and continuing through that depression, we find they themselves were not prepared for it. I do not say they should have foreseen it. But when it came they did nothing but flounder and attempt to see, with the gentleman in the White House, around the corner. They were not living with the people.
Now, in time of stress, they express the fear that freedom of the press may be abrogated or destroyed. Of what are they afraid? What most of the gentlemen who have spoken on the subject are afraid of is the people. Don’t they know this? Or are they unwilling to admit it?
But they are afraid of the people for the very good reason that the only agency in the world which can impair or destroy freedom of the press is the people. The people can take it away. And they may, too, if so many newspapers continue to stand on the sidewalks in front of their buildings offering the vessel of freedom to any who will take it.
Newspapers have got to come down and be close to the people — not merely interested in informing them and in interpreting for them, but interested in their health, their housing, their living conditions, their children, and their whole panorama of interests. They must recapture for themselves the American Dream. And in turn they must give it back to the people.
The feeling for freedom is not lost. There is confusion about it, and the meaning of it. There are many voices crying out about it. And the newspaper voices have been among them. They should have been clearest of all. Some of them were the most confused.
There is time yet. There is time enough for the newspapers to say, “This guarantee of mine is a guarantee only so long as it exists in the minds of the people. And no longer. It is that simple. That is the essence of any guarantee in the Constitution. The people guarantee it .”
They may say, too, “If the Man on Horseback comes, he will come riding on a path paved with the sheets of those newspapers which have not been a free press but which have distorted the news and deliberately misinterpreted it to the people. And when he comes, he will be supported by these newspapers and allowed to destroy those which have remained free. So much has history shown us.”
There is time yet. But the beginning must be in the right place. That is not the courts, the legislatures, or public addresses. The beginning must be in the columns of the newspapers themselves and in the hearts and minds of the people where it still exists in one degree or another.
Freedom of the press must no longer have reason to be afraid of those who guarantee it.