Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one” - A.J. Liebling
My father Bob Wilson took this to heart, and bought one and started his own newspaper, the Prairie Post of Maroa, Illinois in 1958, and ran it until he died in 1972. It never had a circulation of more than 2500 or so, but every week, he would fire off editorials at everyone and everything from local events to the actions of the nations of the world.
He may have been a Quaker peace activist in a Republican district, but his love and support of the farming communities garnered him enough respect that he eventually ran for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1962, though he lost. (He might have tried again, had he not died of an accident while only 49.) Many of his views ring true today. And he might have been willing to change the ones that fell behind the times. Although raised in the casual racism of the 1920s and 1930s, at the age of 15 he took stock of what he was being taught and discarded much of it as being wrong, and lived his life with respect for all. [well, almost all. I have found that his views on homosexuality were those common to his time. Would he have been able to change again? Maybe...]
I decided to transcribe his old editorials (I may make a book for some of my relatives) and every once in a while I will repost one here, as a view of how the world has changed wildly, or remained stubbornly the same.
February 4, 1965
HOW FREE ARE WE?
A documentary movie on television last Sunday afternoon disclosed to Americans a shameful chapter from their recent past.
Now, in the cold light of retrospect, it is easy to see what a monstrous injustice was done by seizing hundreds of thousands of American citizens of Japanese ancestry and herding them into prison camps behind barbed wire.
As the Dean of the Yale Law School soberly pointed out, this was done in defiance of all the guarantees of the Constitution which are supposed to give the private citizen protection against search and seizure. There were no charges, no trials, only summary notice that they had three days in which to dispose of their property and be packed to go to camp.
At the very moment of our victory over Hitler in Europe, Hitlerism was overcoming us here at home. The monstrous supposition was that these people were all, by reason of their ancestry, disloyal to the America which was the only home they had ever known.
The white citizens of California, just as the decent burghers of Germany had before them, gleefully bought up the victims' houses, stores and truck farms at a fraction of their value. We did not go so far as the Nazis had, to torture, starve, and exterminate our captives. But we did confine them in the most wretched kind of hovels for months that seemed like an eternity to the puzzled Nisei.
When the internees held elections for their little self-government set-up, a heart-stirring picture showed them casting their ballots against a backdrop of an American flag – their flag – proudly hung upon the walls of their prison.
White Americans only understood their error after they had permitted the young men of these camps to volunteer for military service, and had seen the “Go For Broke” heroes become the most-decorated unit in the services... and the one with the heaviest casualties. When these boys returned home on leave, their USOs were set up to serve them and their families – inside the barbed wire camps!
It is easy to see now, but at that time most Americans were shrieking with hysteria against “The Japs”. It is worth noting that in Hawaii, where one-third of the populace are of Japanese origin, no such steps were undertaken, and none of these people ever turned against the United States.
This writer remembers well the fury of frightened people at that time. It was one of the first of many times we have felt called by conscience to take a stand against the will of the great majority. This writer protested the Relocation Camps THEN, not now, as a betrayal of all our claims about freedom at home. It provided a dread precedent for the imprisonment of ANY racial-origin group in time of war. (Was your grandfather from Russia? Will they drag you off to a camp if we get into a war with Russia?)
This writer well remembers helping to pack large boxes with Oregon Myrtlewood, a rare wood esteemed for carving, and sending them to the Nisei camps as a gift of friendship from the Civilian Public Service camps where we were building roads and fighting forest fires in the rain-forest of Oregon. In return, they sent us some tiny, beautifully-carved and painted birds.
At eighteen, you see, this writer believed with all his heart that the world might be won by peace if all the people of all the nations resisted the preachments of their leaders to hate and ill the people of some other nation. For that reason, following the teachings of the Quaker faith, we spent two years of our service as a draftee working in hospitals, in the forest camps, and in helping to transport shiploads of horses to Europe so that war-riven farmsteads might once more be worked and planted.
This work, under the direction of General Lewis B. Hershey, was for young men who were willing to do “work of national importance”... but whose religious training and beliefs forbade them to bear arms. We who were in those camps became known as “Conscientious Objectors,” and to some unthinking people this became a term of abuse.
This was because they confused it with other terms such as “Draft Dodger” and “Slacker”. There were none of those in our camps. A man who will neither work nor fight is out of step with suffering and the national peril of his times. A man who runs away is of no use to anyone.
We understood the plight of these Nisei. It is a great nation under whose freedoms there is room for a man to serve both his nation and his God. It will be a greater nation when we can grow beyond hasty and dictatorial actions such as the Great Relocation.
Do you understand why the people of other nations sometimes think Americans to be pompous fools for boasting so much of our freedoms when we imprisoned thousands without charge or trial? Do you understand why we look with some suspicion on the shifts of national policy which ask us to hate first one racial group, and then another? During World War II, the Germans and the Japanese were the enemy, and the Russians and the Chinese described as our friends and our allies... Now it has been exactly reversed.
Could Jesus really have been right? Did he mean it when he said, “Love your enemies”? If EVERY war is a tragic error on both sides, costing far more than any possible benefit, isn't this reason enough to control our anger and our pride and bring every conflict to the conference table where all wars finally come?
Perhaps at eighteen we did not believe that police actions by a peace-keeping force would be necessary, but we can see this now and gladly support such action. The world and its people are as yet too imperfect for everyone at once to lay down their arms, and the lion sleep beside the lamb, and so forth. There will yet be long and difficult campaigns by UN forces – to restore and to maintain peace and order in many lands. But the right course at least has now been undertaken, and must now be pursued to its successful end.