“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.
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.
March 17, 1960
THE CAMPAIGN OPENS
On March 7th, the opening gun was fired on what may be the foulest presidential campaign in many years.
On the eve of the New Hampshire presidential primary, Governor Wesley Powell of New Hampshire declared to a press conference that Senator John F. Kennedy had shown “Softness toward communism.”
The following day, of course, the voters went to the polls and gave Kennedy a greater showing than Mr. Nixon, his competitor.
So the smear failed of its purpose; or did it? Without it, the primary vote might have been a veritable landslide for Kennedy.
Of course, the statement had scarcely gone out over the wires before Senator Kennedy called on Nixon to repudiate it, and Nixon issued from Washington a complete refutation of the charge.
Please note: the accusation, infamous lie though it was, made streamer headlines all across the country; the denial followed in small print. Governor Powell was Nixon's campaign chief in the New Hampshire struggle. He COULD NOT POSSIBLY have made a major statement OF ANY SORT on the eve of the election, without the approval and advance planning of the Vice-President himself.
Do you get the picture?
The slime is thrown, but “Tricky Dicky” has clean hands. He stands by, murmuring apologies.
We have pointed out before that Dick Nixon clawed his way into Washington by defeating two fine and loyal Americans out in California, Jerry Voorhies and Helen Gahagan Douglas. He did it by repeating over and over again the thinly-veiled hint that his opponents were Communists.
In Kennedy's case, the statement is ridiculous. Kennedy is a Catholic, and if there is one organization in the world that is sincerely dedicated to the destruction of Communism, it is the Roman Catholic Church.
It did not really matter to Dick Nixon that the accusation was a flat lie. Those who know him say that Nixon has never in his public life been known to take a stand on principle, but only on what would help Dick Nixon.
“A little man in a big hurry”, Bob Taft called him. After a lifetime in Washington, Sam Rayburn described Nixon as having “The cruelest face I ever saw in the Congress.”
The Republican Party has candidates of stature and character; we cannot understand why they have not put them forward. We are convinced that Richard Nixon is the most dangerous man in America today, dangerous to the freedoms that all Americans hold dear. This weak and vicious man pretends to the highest elective office in the land; we should consider it a tragedy if he were to obtain it.
April 14, 1960
AFRICA IN FLAMES
Our white western civilization suffers from a monumental egotism. This kind of monument may one day be useful – as a headstone.
We suffer from the soft-headed notion that we the white-skinned peoples are superior to people with colored skins.
We take them to be savages, inferior beings, more related to animals than to men.
Question any of these people who talk of “Keeping the negro in his place”... it soon becomes apparent they think the negro's place is at the long end of the whip, and the short end of everything else.
Yesterday they WERE savages. Today, they are breathing down our necks. As we have adapted and adopted the inventions of other cultures, the dark-skinned peoples are, in a few swift years, falling heir to ours.
The Industrial Revolution is bursting upon Africa in the same moment of time as the political revolution. The Zulu who yesterday carried a spear and knew nothing but his own tribe, today can drive a truck – or fire a rifle – and hears the world's news on the radio – like as not from Radio Moscow. He feels himself a part of a race, a nation... a world movement.
What news does he hear? He hears that the white Afrikaaner police are gunning down his people in Durban and Capetown and Johannesburg, simply because they marched and sang in the streets.
He hears that in Russia, people of all colors are treated alike, and he hears that in the State of Mississippi, there are fourteen counties with a total population of 230,000, of which 109,000 are negroes, and NOT ONE REGISTERED NEGRO VOTER.
How have the white rulers answered the African cry for freedom? In Ghana and in Kenya, the British yielded up the rights of self-government. In South Africa, the Boers have been torn between fear of the black man, and the greed and laziness that cause them to exploit his labor. They keep him in huge barb-wire compounds, and pay him only pennies per day.
Fear stalks the streets. The outnumbered whites carry revolvers at all times, and bar their doors at night.
The white British settlers – like the unfortunate David Pratt who last week attempted to assassinate the apparently demented Prime Minister, want to give the Zulu some rights as human beings. The Dutch Boers, who are in control, refuse.
The opening guns have been fired on what may soon envelope Africa – and the world? - in the most imaginable kind of war, a war of extermination between the white peoples and those with colored skins.
Thus far, one curious fact has prevented it; the Africans march, they sing, they refuse to carry passes; but THEY HAVE AVOIDED VIOLENCE WHEREVER POSSIBLE. Few people really know why; it is largely because of the eldest son of the late Mahatma Gandhi of India has for twenty years been teaching the South Africans the same non-violent resistance by which the Indians gained their independence!
The same curious fact appears in all the accounts of the mass demonstrations by the negroes in our own Southland. They march, they sing, they enter busses and lunch counters and respectfully request service – but they carry no weapons, they strike no blows, they are courteous to those who abuse them!
The teachings of Gandhi, and of Christ, have been at work here too. The Reverend Martin Luther King and his fellows have preached resistance, but without violence or hatred.
It is a humbling thought, that we, the white rulers of the world, who call ourselves “Christian” and forget the meaning of the term, may in the end be saved from our own folly and arrogance by that same Christian ethic, in the hands of the dark-skinned peoples of the Earth.