Vol. 76/No. 37 October 15, 2012
October 16, 1987
Recent revelations offer startling new evidence of decades of government spying on the nation’s most illustrious novelists, playwrights, poets, and literary critics. The known list of those victimized includes such figures as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Sinclair Lewis, John Steinbeck, Thorton Wilder, Tennessee Williams, Pearl Buck, E.L. Doctorow, Eugene O’Neil, William Saroyan, and Thomas Wolfe.Virtually every winner of the Nobel Prize for literature has been on the government’s list of suspects.
Most of the secret dossiers were compiled by the FBI. Others were the work of the CIA, the State Department, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and army intelligence.
The new disclosures underline how broadly the government cast its net in its unrelenting drive to record and, where possible, curb dissenting views and activity.
October 15, 1962
NEW YORK—“Despite the barrage of propaganda by all the major news media in the country, designed to whip up a war hysteria against Cuba, only a minority of the American people favor U.S. military intervention against that country,” said Carl Feingold, Socialist Workers Party candidate for Senator from New York, at a street corner rally in lower Manhattan. Part of the meeting was televised by a local station.“One point I always make,” he said, “is the defense of the Cuban revolution. Many find themselves agreeing with me as to the right of the Cubans to make a socialist revolution.
“The mere fact that most of them do not favor what the newspapers have been screaming for is an indication of the basic decency of the mass of the American people. They don’t know the truth about Cuba, but they sense there is something fishy about what they are being told.”
October 16, 1937
The address on the international situation, delivered by President Roosevelt is the first grand-sale step in the mobilization of public opinion in the United States for the coming war.It means that the outstanding spokesman of United States capitalism, concluding from his analysis of the world crisis that the war is inevitable, and recognizing that the United States must necessarily take part in it, has charted his firm and direct course toward entry and participation in the manner and on the terms that will yield the most fruitful results for the American bourgeoisie.
Roosevelt announced that the most favorable area for United States imperialist expansion—and expansion already begun on a serious scale—is the Far East; and that the United States is prepared to defend its rights of exploitation in the Far East against the challenge of Japan and of any or all other powers.
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