Vol. 71/No. 24 June 18, 2007
This was how U.S. attorney general Francis Biddle defended the Post Office Departments decision in 1943, during World War II, to revoke the Militants second-class mailing rights.
The extortionate second-class rate increase the Postal Service is set to impose on small publications (see article above) is a new chapter in a long history of measures the U.S. government has taken to aid big-business newspapers and stifle the working-class press and other publications opposing government policies.
During World War II, Washington attacked publications that challenged the Roosevelt administrations war policies or denounced its support for Jim Crow segregation. Thousands of newspapers and magazines were inspected for subversive speech. Between May 1942 and May 1943, some 70 periodicals were deprived of second-class mailing rights.
In November 1942, without notice, the Post Office began to withhold issues of the Militant from delivery. Some were destroyed, others delayed for weeks. In March 1943 the government revoked the papers second-class mailing rights. After waging a broad campaign the Militant won their restoration a year later.
The government also argued that the Militant stimulated race issues by exposing the brutality of the Jim Crow system and describing the rising struggle to overturn it. Calvin Hassell, assistant to the solicitor of the Post Office Department, said at the present moment, that is, in wartime, it was subversive to urge Negroes to fight for their rights.
Black newspapers were also a key target of this campaign. In mid-1942 Biddle summoned the editors of several Black weeklies to Justice Department headquarters in Washington. He told them they should stop covering the clashes between Black and white soldiers in the then-segregated armed forces, threatening to shut them all up if they didnt comply.
Seven government agencies including the FBI, the Justice Department, the Post Office Department, the Office of Facts and Figures, the Office of War Information, the Office of Censorship, and the Army were involved in investigating Black newspapers.
More on the subject can be found in the book Fighting Racism in World War II, and the article Washingtons 50-year Domestic Contra Operation in issue 6 of the New International magazineboth available at www.pathfinderpress.com.
Related articles:
Postal hike burdens small publications
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