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  • “A Readiness to Act”: William Preston Jr.’s Aliens and Dissenters: Federal Suppression of Radicals, 1903–1933
  • Gerda W. Ray (bio)

Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas’s 1963 review of William Preston Jr.’s Aliens and Dissenters was characteristically emphatic. “A brilliant work,” the book revealed “the seamy side of America... bigotry, intolerance, hatred, suspicion of foreigners, and the use of class power to pulverize the less privileged.” An outspoken defender of civil liberties (except, importantly, for Japanese Americans during wartime), Douglas appreciated the “meticulous detail” with which Preston used the recently declassified records of the Justice Department, Immigration and Naturalization Service, and other federal agencies to analyze the rationales and techniques of state repression enlisted against the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). 1 Douglas’s enthusiasm for Aliens and Dissenters reflected personal ties as well as his commitment to civil liberties. Sixty years earlier, as a teenager, Douglas had worked with IWW members in the wheat and fruit harvests of eastern Washington’s Yakima valley. He remembered the IWW respectfully in his 1974 autobiography: “I traveled extensively with the IWW’s and came to know them as warmhearted people who... had higher ideals than some of the men who ran our banks and were the elders in the church.” Douglas had seen the police treating poverty like a crime: “though few who rode the rods were criminals, we were all treated as outcasts or vagrants; we were even fired on by the police in railroad yards.” 2

Most reviewers agreed with Douglas’s favorable assessment of Aliens and Dissenters. Milton Cantor, writing in the Nation, applauded Preston for breaking with the practice of professional historians who “display indecent coyness when dealing with ‘controversial’ subjects” to write instead “with passion as well as precision” making “the reader share his concern for the contemporary relevance of his findings.” In the American Historical Review, Theodore Saloutos termed the 1950s extension of the screening process described in Aliens and Dissenters “frightening” and noted its stifling impact [End Page 744] on dissent. In the Political Science Quarterly, Stanley Coben called the book “not only a comprehensive history of federal policies, but a plea for revision of those policies as well.” Unlike the reviewers sympathetic to Preston’s civil libertarian agenda, Benjamin Wright, in Annals of the American Academy, dismissed the book’s “indignant narrative” and suspected that the author would advocate tolerating anarchism “even when there is incitement to violence.” 3

Two political activists provided the most searching criticisms: Fred Thompson, IWW historian, and Socialist party leader Norman Thomas. In a largely appreciative review in the IWW’s Industrial Worker, Thompson argued that Preston’s emphasis on nativism failed to account for similar repression of radicals and unionists “duplicated in European countries that had no immigrants to blame for their revolutionary upsurge.” Thomas’s “A Case Poorly Made” in Dissent also saw radicals, not aliens, as the most important target and criticized Preston’s benign portrayal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s stance on civil liberties, especially in light of Japanese internment. On the whole, Thomas wrote, “the racial aspect of the problem of aliens in the U.S. is slighted. 4

I did not notice these limitations when I first read Aliens and Dissenters in a Berkeley, California, study group in 1974. Anti-Vietnam War organizing and a useless stint as a VISTA volunteer had left me with many questions about politics, power, and human agency, which modernization theory did not address. Aliens and Dissenters, by contrast, seemed to depict an earlier version of the government-sponsored outrages of Attica, the murder of Black Panther Fred Hampton, the repression of the Chicano Moratorium and Wounded Knee, against which defense committees formed so large a part of left politics in the 1970s. I met the book’s author sixteen years later when the discovery of some political surveillance files led me to consult him, and we became good friends.

More than friendship, however, leads me to welcome the second edition of Aliens and Dissenters (published this year by University of Illinois Press, with a new foreword by Paul Buhle and a new epilogue by the author) as both a classic and a work...

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