Subjecting Dissenters to Surveillance (or Worse) is an American Tradition

by Daniel J. Webster
Saturday, January 7, 2006

The furor over domestic spying by the current administration in Washington should come as no surprise. It seems our national paranoia factor rises exponentially when we are waging war, ending a war, or living in a cold war.

Many peace groups seem to be the target of these domestic spies. The Society of Friends (Quakers) claim to have been monitored by the FBI in Colorado, Illinois, and Iowa since the Iraq war began. Peace groups use their constitutionally guaranteed rights to speak out in opposition to what most major religious leaders have called an immoral and unjust war, and therefore powerful advocates of the war find them a threat.

We have witnessed unbelievable actions by our government in the past. President Lincoln suspended the constitutional right of habeas corpus during the Civil War. President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order during World War II interning Japanese-Americans. Topaz, Utah was one of those sites where mostly American citizens were shipped and housed in camps because they were a perceived threat.

In the first half of the twentieth century, three Episcopal bishops in Utah were subject to government spying because of their international peace efforts. Bishop Franklin Spencer Spalding in 1904 was an avowed socialist who spoke up regularly against the need for such a large military in our country. The night before his death in 1914, he spoke in Provo calling the U.S. military nothing more than a "standing committee for war."

In World War I, Paul Jones, another Episcopal Bishop of Utah, was watched by the FBI because he was outspoken against the war with Germany. His opposition to that war cost him his job as Utah's missionary bishop in 1918, but he continued his work for peace. Jones became an executive with the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), and helped establish the Episcopal Peace Fellowship in 1939.

In 2004, FOR received more than 10,000 pages of government documents outlining the years of surveillance government agents had been keeping on the peace organization. The FBI said its surveillance of the group ended in 1983. It took FOR eight years of legal maneuvering to obtain the documents.

The documents proved many things that FOR had long been suspected, including that the FBI had followed Jones to his 1923 speaking engagements in Southern California. According to newspaper reports on the release of the FBI files on FOR, the FBI had claimed that Jones' comments were "made under Radical auspices and his chief sponsors were active Ultra Radicals, so-called 'Parlor Bolsheveki' and Pro Germans and Pacifists who were active and investigated by this Bureau during the war."

Jones' successor as Episcopal Bishop of Utah, Arthur Moulton, was also member of FOR, and he was also the subject of FBI surveillance. "The FBI developed a thirty-three-page file on Moulton, largely based on rewrites of local newspaper clippings from 1949 to 1951, plus a sighting with a luncheon guest at the Alta Club," writes Frederick Quinn in Building the "Goodly Fellowship of Faith" (USU Press, 2004).

Bishop Moulton, who had retired in 1946, was stunned when it was announced he was the only American recipient of the first Stalin Peace Prize in 1951. Quinn cites former FBI agent James W. Beless, who later became chancellor of the Episcopal Diocese of Utah: "He was not a communist," Beless said of Moulton; "he was very badly used." But supposed communist sympathies continued to be employed as an excuse to monitor and harass peace activists both within and outside the church.

During the Vietnam War, Nixon used the Internal Revenue Service to intimidate those on his now-infamous "enemies list" with targeted income tax audits.

And now the IRS is being used once more to intimidate political opponents with a letter of warning to a All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, California. The IRS claimed a 2004 sermon by its retired rector was political in nature and the church was in danger of losing its tax-exempt status. Both J. Edwin Bacon, the current rector, and George Regas, the retired rector who preached the sermon in question, strongly deny the IRS allegations.

Religious leaders have been wrestling with the morality of war for centuries. For the first 400 years of the Common Era, the followers of Jesus Christ were prohibited from serving in an army. Leaders of every major Christian denomination except for the Southern Baptists and the (Mormon) Church of Latter-Day Saints have called this current war immoral or unjust.

Now, in a country which many would present as the most Christian nation and the freest democracy on the planet, religious leaders and peace activists are once again targets of a fearful and paranoid government.

Perhaps our government leaders need to take some advice from Benjamin Franklin, one of our founding fathers, who in 1755 wrote to the governor of Pennsylvania in 1755 that "those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

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The Rev. Daniel J. Webster is an assisting priest at All Saints Episcopal Church, Salt Lake City. He is also an elected member of the executive council of the Episcopal Peace Fellowship.

This article was originally published in the January 2006 edition of the Witness. It is used here with permission.