American Encounter

Leseprobe

His first name, like Marzani’s, is Carl — Carl Braden (“... after Karl Marx,” he said, “but as a concession to public opinion my old man spelled it with a ‘C’ and left out the Marx....”). He is fifty years old, the father of three children and, for all his rugged appearance, a journalist by profession — a man who (“How else with a namesake like that?”) was twice sentenced to terms in prison, the first time in 1954 on a charge of sedition, the second time in 1961 on a charge of contempt of Congress.

Briefly this is what happened:

A Negro ex-serviceman named Andrew Wade wanted to buy a house in a Louisville suburb where no Negroes had lived before. Prevented from doing so (this had by no means been his first failure) he approached Braden whom he knew to be sympathetic. Braden agreed to purchase the house under his own name and then to transfer it. Shortly after the Wade family moved in, the events described in Anne Braden’s book transpired: Windows were smashed, shots fired through the walls, a cross was burnt in the vicinity and finally the house itself was partially destroyed by a bomb blast. Although three men, among them the former owner’s son, confessed to the cross burning, no prosecution ensued. Instead it was Carl Braden who was brought to trial. (Later six more supporters of the Wades were served with summonses.)

From the beginning Carl Braden was left in no doubt about the nature of the prosecution: He was charged with setting the stage for “communistic troublemaking” and in the course of the trial (the records are there to prove this!) the phantastic accusation was leveled at him that Braden himself had conspired to damage the property for a political end — namely the “overthrow of the government of Kentucky and the U.S.A.” Books from Carl Braden’s library were hauled into court in an effort to substantiate the charge of “seditious plotting” and before long the all-white jury agreed that he was a guilty man. Thus he was sentenced to a term of fifteen (!) years in prison.

Carl Braden: “The jury knew what was expected of it and the facts made little difference. I was a friend of Negroes; I owned books; I discussed social questions with my friends; I worked for peace and a professional F.B.I. informer called me a Communist. Not one shred of evidence connected me with any act of violence. It was enough for the jury that I owned books on forbidden tonics like socialism and communism.”

By the time he had served eight months of his sentence the American Civil Liberties Union supported by the CIO and the Louisville Federation of Labor succeeded in forcing a retrial before the Supreme Court of Kentucky where the action was reversed.

Carl Braden was released from jail. But for a marked man who won’t renege there is always a sequel:

In 1958 the Un-American Activities Committee summoned Braden to Atlanta, Georgia in order to investigate his politics: Who is this troublemaker the Kentucky courts have twice needed to deal with? Braden appeared and was duly sentenced to a year in jail for refusing to cooperate. Later he published the following statement:

“I am sure the Court understands that I do not really have contempt for the Congress of the United States. I acted as I did because I firmly believe that Congress is wrong in creating a committee to investigate so-called un-American activities. This committee seeks to investigate in a field in which Congress cannot legislate without violating the First Amendment to our Constitution. The First Amendment guarantees our right to privacy; to say, think and write what we please; to belong to organizations of our own choosing, and to complain to the government when we don’t agree with what it is doing. I do not believe we will ever bring about full civil rights in the South until these fundamental liberties are completely restored and exercised. I am willing to risk my freedom, and even my life if necessary, to regain our basic liberties and to establish equal rights for all.”

Now, this Sunday evening in Louisville, the man who declared this did not at all convey the monolithic impression the unacquainted might gain from his statement — very much the family man, he was casually rolling up his sleeves to attack nothing more obnoxious than a pile of dishes accumulated in the kitchen sink after six people had eaten.

“I’ll wash these, dear,” he was saying to his wife, “you’d better get ready for the meeting.”

When I took up a tea towel to help him, he waved me off: “You’d better get ready too — unless you’d rather rest up a while.”

“What sort of meeting is it?” I asked.

He told me and I agreed that he was right — regretting at the same time that by departing I was depriving myself of getting to know something more of his background.

“There’s always time for that,” he reckoned when I told him so.

There wasn’t — as it turned out: Circumstances diverted me after that meeting and throughout the following days Carl, of his own volition, receded into the background. Not till he saw me off at the airport, both of us waiting for my delayed plane to Atlanta, did we find time to delve into what I needed to know.

In 1922, when Carl Braden was eight years old, his father became unemployed after a prolonged and finally defeated strike in the big Louisville & Nashville Railroad shops. Later he went to work on the assembly line in Ford’s Louisville plant. Carl’s memory of those years is of his father coming home at night and falling into bed too tired to eat. He died in 1935.

That railroad strike proved the dominant experience in Carl’s life — it impoverished the family and there were months when every meal consisted mainly of beans. He remembers that he and his brothers and sisters were often hungry. The carefree years of childhood had ended. He became acutely aware of belonging to “the have-nots in this world” and of the injustice which that entailed. He also became aware of certain fundamental concepts: The Christian ones of his devoutly Catholic mother and the socialist ones of his father. These concepts merged and unified in his mind — two brotherhoods, one of man in God, the other (more practical) of men on earth. And so it followed that the saints along with Eugene V. Debs, the labor leader, became the guiding heroes of his youth.

“Father had no quarrel with that — he never argued with people about their religion. To him Jesus Christ was nothing but an early socialist, which settled the matter. It settled the matter for me as well.”

Being a healthy and vigorous boy of above average intellect Carl did well at scholl — particularly since from early childhood on he had been encouraged to read avidly and was never excluded from discussions at home. Soon the nuns who taught him singled him out and urged him to enter a proseminary. The idea, so much in line with his developing sense of social responsibility, appealed to Carl. His father, not wishing to deny him this opportunity for an education, raised no objection and so at thirteen Carl began his preparatory study for the priesthood. Yet three years later, in an upsurge of adolescent revolt, he had decided against becoming a priest. He left the seminary and broke with the church. But what he had been taught of the unity of all mankind and the duty of each man to the whole continued to influence his life.

His now firmly founded intellectual interests caused him to gravitate not to manual work, like his father, but to a semi-intellectual field of endeavor— journalism. If he subsequently advanced to an editorial position on a newspaper it was despite and not because of his previous work as a police reporter. For, as he said himself, as a police reporter, seeing what he did see, experiencing what he had to of wrecked and ruined lives around the courts and police stations, he might as easily have ended up as one of three things — a drunk, a cynic, or a reformer.

“I did my share of drinking in those days, and my share of reforming too — and only the devil knows what saved me from becoming a cynic.”

Even though his own economic problems were solved when he became an editor, he continued to feel a sense of personal injury when he encountered injustice and a compulsion to do something about it. By 1947 he had given up his post again (“I didn’t like being a boss”) and had returned to reporting. As a labor reporter he now identified himself with the trade union movement of Louisville and took to challenging with his pen every kind of repressive measure against the workers — and “other things I thought unjust.”

“It was all very simple,” Carl Braden told me when, before we parted, I pressed him again about the Andrew Wade affair back in 1954 and all that resulted from the help that he had given to a Negro. “In the first place, Andrew asked me to do it for him as a favor. And in the second place, I felt that he had a right to live in the house of his choice. And I felt that if I was going to preach democracy,

I should practice it. I could do nothing else.”