Vol. 71/No. 24      June 18, 2007

This was how U.S. attorney general Francis Biddle defended the Post Office Department’s decision in 1943, during World War II, to revoke the Militant’s 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 administration’s 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 paper’s 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 didn’t 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 “Washington’s 50-year Domestic Contra Operation” in issue 6 of the New International magazine—both available at www.pathfinderpress.com.
 
 
Related articles:
Postal hike burdens small publications
 
 
 
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