From: harelb@MATH.CORNELL.EDU (Harel Barzilai)
Newsgroups: alt.activism,talk.politics.misc
Subject: RE-FRAMING DISSENT AS CRIMINAL SUBVERSION (part 3)
Date: 27 Jul 92 05:51:41 GMT
Organization: misc.activism.progressive on UseNet ; ACTIV-L@UMCVMB

Topic 45        Repression & Paradigm Shift Frame       Response  3 of  4 
cberlet@igc.org
Public Eye Network      10:09 am  Jul 25, 1992 
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CASE STUDY: THE NATIONAL LAWYERS GUILD  

Much of the "documentation" denouncing the  
National Lawyers Guild (NLG) as a communist front  
can be traced to a Congressional report issued  
during the McCarthy Period. This accusation was  
part of a coordinated campaign involving  
Congressional committees, the FBI, right-wing  
groups, and mainstream periodicals. The NLG was  
targeted by the right due to its support for the  
reforms of the Roosevelt presidency, defense of  
labor unions, and criticisms of erosions in civil  
liberties brought on by the birth of the Cold War. 

According to attorney Michael Krinsky who  
represented the NLG in a suit against the FBI,  
the FBI and the Congressional committee  
publicly launched an investigation of the NLG and  
privately fed inflammatory information to  
right-wing and anti-communist contacts. Leaders  
of the American Bar Association cooperated with  
the FBI in a campaign to destroy the National  
Lawyers Guild. Fred Schlafly, Phyllis's husband,  
was a leader in early attempts at red-baiting  
lawyers and legal organizations such as the  
Guild.  

Although right-wing attacks on the NLG began soon  
after the organization was established in 1937,  
the public mood was such that for several years  
the charges never gained wide circulation or  
provoked concern. Articles in the <New York  
Times> from the period show a dramatic change in  
the situation during the late 1940s. <5> 

Up until 1948, articles on the NLG cited in the  
<Times> index center on substantive activities  
and positions of the NLG on law and legislation.  
Starting in 1948, however, the <Times>  
coverage of the NLG through the next ten years  
centers on charges relating to subversion.  

The targeting of the Guild began in earnest when  
an FBI wiretap revealed that Yale Law School  
professor Thomas Emerson was discussing with the  
NLG the publication of a study criticizing as  
unconstitutional a variety of FBI investigative  
methods. The day before the NLG press conference  
releasing the report critical of the FBI, Hoover  
had his friend Richard Nixon, then a member of  
House Committee on Un-American Activities, call  
for an investigation of the Guild as a communist  
front. Hoover then, without hearings or an  
investigation, initiated an FBI report which HUAC  
issued under the its own name. The report was  
titled "Report on the National Lawyers Guild:  
Legal Bulwark of the Communist Party." [CITE]  
Krinsky says, "The FBI files reveal that HUAC's  
report on the NLG, which almost destroyed the  
Guild by labeling it the `legal bulwark of the  
Communist Party,' was not the product of HUAC's  
attempt to carry out any legislative function,  
but was issued by the Committee on the sole  
instigation of the FBI." The NLG fought back in  
court and eventually forced the government to  
remove it from a list of so-called "subversive"  
groups. By then, however, the power of the false  
accusation alone nearly destroyed the NLG, with  
membership dropping from over 4,000 to under 600.  
The Guild eventually recovered, and, unlike many  
political and legal organizations of the period,  
did so with its principles intact, having never  
conducted an internal purge of communists,  
socialists or other targeted groups.  

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