BIG SISTER IS WATCHING YOU Margaret H. Bacon Don't Assume
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BIG SISTER IS WATCHING YOU Margaret H. Bacon Don't assume that because you are an average American housewife with thoughts no more subversive than getting rid of ring-around-the-collar or establishing a local day care center, that you have been immune to the attack of government spying that has lately convulsed our country. You haven't, if your case is any- thing like Joan B.'s. Joan had been mildly active in the movement against the Vietnam War back in the late 1960's. Recently, having heard alarming reports of government snooping during this period she decided to send for her FBI files under the new Freedom of Information Act. What then her total surprise to find that she had indeed been spied upon, and by the most unlikely person imaginable, the Welcome Wagon lady ! When Joan had first moved to Glencoe, Illinois, the Welcome Wagon woman had come to make her feel at home, and offer her coupons for merchandise, and ask a few polite questions: Where had they lived? How many children did they have? What did her husband do? The answers to these questions were evidently transmitted to the FBI: "The records of the 'Welcome Wagon' determined that the subject and her husband moved to Glencoe, Illinois from Chicago on October 3, 1968. In Glencoe they reside at 663 Fernwood, a home purchased by husband John Doe. The record disclosed that at the time they had two children, ages five and nine. The husband is employed as a sales executive for . The wife is a full time housewife." (Excerpted from Joan B.'s FBI file.) -2- Or take the case of Barbara B. a housewife in St. Louis, Missouri active in the civil rights movement, again in the late 1960's. As Barbara became involved in planning various actions, and attended night meetings, her marriage with Fred B. suffered. She was never quite sure why he seemed so remote, and almost suspicious of her activities. Finally the marriage dissolved, and the two were divorced. Only last year, when the civil rights organization for which she had worked wrote for its files, did Barbara learn that Fred had been receiving letters crudely penned supposedly by inner city black women (but in fact written by FBI agents) saying that she was sleeping with the black leaders of the demonstrations. The charges were entirely false, but it was far too late to undo the damage they had caused. Sometimes the spying is conducted by local police "Red Squads" (a common term for police intelligence units). In Chicago a middle-aged Quaker woman, Mary McDougal Hannaford, learned that she had been the subject of surveillance by the Chicago Red Squad for her activities in support of the peace movement at the time of the Demo- cratic National Convention. When the Chicago police files were made public as the result of a law suit, there were some twenty cards reporting Mary Hannaford's presence at meetings, some in her own home, to discuss nonviolent solutions to the tensions of the times. "They were all small groups, in my home or in friends' homes," Mary Hannaford commented. "You can tell there had to be a spy among us, and that is very dis- turbing to me. I used to wonder how it could happen in Germany and Russia. There must be people willing to inform on other people. I'm afraid this must mean it could happen in every society. If they are encouraged, and there is a climate for it, then people are apparently willing to spy on their friends." A suit against the Chicago police for spying on thousands of citizens like Mary Hannaford was filed by The Alliance to End Repression made up of 15 organizations, 4 churches and 18 individuals. One of the organizations, the Board of Church and Society of the Northern Illinois Conference of the United Methodist Church, was represented at Alliance meetings by a pleasant and earnest woman whom we'll call -3- Jane Smith. Other members of the Alliance recalled vaguely that Jane Smith had once represented a right-wing Methodist group, but felt she had become aware of the dangers of a police state. So in sympathy with the objectives of the Alliance, and so willing to work hard was Jane Smith that she was soon made a member of the Steering Committee. When she attended meetings of the Chicago Police Board in this capacity she often spoke strongly against police abuse. But Jane herself, it turned out, was a spy for the police, writing undercover reports on the Alliance. These were disclosed when the Alliance received material as the result of a disclosure motion in the federal suit. By a process of checking who was present at each meeting from which a report was filed, the author was nar- rowed down to one person, Jane Smith. Her conversion to a civil liberties position had been only protective covering all along. Other women representing church groups on the Alliance were upset to realize that the nice woman who had sat next to them at so many meetings had in fact been willing to report on them. Like Pandora's box, the opening of the Chicago police files revealed a stream of horrors. Not only was the Alliance to End Repression spied upon, but so were its member agencies, including the United Methodist Church itself. Some 55 pages of police files were turned over to the church as a result of a court action. They reveal that operatives attended meetings of the Board of Social Concerns, dealing with such issues as prison release, ministry, aid to migrant farm workers, a center for summer youth activities, and community action against racism. Matters of church budget and pastoral appointments were scrutinized, and an Annual Conference attended by some 900 ministers and laity from 420 churches was infiltrated. The revelation of spying on Methodists has caused many other church groups to wonder about their activities. The American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker Service Organization, ha2 earlier requested its files from nearly a dozen federal agencies and discovered it has been under continual surveillance by the FBI since 1921. Mail had been opened and meetings infiltrated in order that the government could observe such activities as the organizing of parent groups in the deseg- regation of schools or the holding of seminars on international problems in church basements. In the process of the AFSC revelations it was discovered that the CIA was also watching the Society of Friends, having included at least one issue of the Newsletter of the Washington, D.C. Florida Avenue Friends Meeting in its files. This was the Meeting which Herbert Hoover, hardly our most radical president, attended while in the White House. Among the names circled for further checking was that of George Fox, the founder of the Society of Friends, who died in 1691! In Baltimore, Libby Jones joined a women's consciousness raising group in the late sixties. Libby was home with two small children while her husband was going to medical school. She had received her master's in English before having Ronnie; she found the small apartment and the constant stream of diapers less than stimu- lating. In the group she was helped to understand that her feelings were not wrong, or particularly unusual, and that she owed a duty to herself as well as to her children and would, in fact, be a better mother for developing her own capacities. As part of its action program, the group with which she met discussed establishing a child care center where small children would receive adequate care while their parents worked. Dave Jones went to Cleveland for his residency, and Libby found she could combine part time editing with the care of her children. Years after she left the Baltimore area she discovered that her name was in the FBI files for her participation in the consciousness raising group. The agent, who could only have been one of the group, was apparently mystified by the whole process: "The movement started in Baltimore in the summer of 1968. There was no structure or parent organization. There were no rules or plans to go by. It started out as a group therapy session with young women who were either lonely or confined to the home with small children, getting together to talk out their problems. Along with this, they wanted a purpose and that was to free women from the hum-drum existence of being only a wife and a mother. They wanted equal opportunities that men have in work and in society. They wanted their husbands to share in the housework and in rearing their children. They also wanted to go out and work in whatever kind of jobs they wanted and not be discriminated against." In the volumnious files which have now been made public on the FBI's sur- veillance of the women's movement, the same note of petulant puzzlement can be heard. "This movement reflects the same restlessness and dissatisfaction which has motivated minority, student and a variety of other groups to engage in agitation," a San Francisco plant wrote. A poor Cleveland informer could make little of it: "Women's Liberation is currently even less defined than the year previously in the Cleveland Division. Some of these issues (child care, abortion, counselling, birth control) are gaining respectable support from clergy and from public and private social workers. " Women interested in parent participation in the development of day care centers, or in programs for dealing with women's health issues both came under scrutiny in the early 1970's.