Sunday, Sep 15, 2013 01:54 PM CDT
Inside the conservative brain: What explains their wiring?
Neuroscience can help us understand the strangest of birds: The modern conservative. They really do think different
By Avi Tuschman
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Topics: Books, Editor's Picks, Conservatives, Neuroscience, Barack Obama, Newt Gingrich, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Life News, News, Politics News
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Newt Gingrich, Glenn Beck, George W. Bush (Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster/AP/Andy Kropa/AP/LM Otero)
Excerpted from "Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us"
The question of human nature reliably polarized political philosophers across many centuries and several oceans. One group of these thinkers viewed people as innately cooperative or potentially compassionate; another group argued for an inherently competitive human nature. This division begs the question of whether the split corresponds to a difference in left-right political orientation. In some cases, such as that of Marx, there is little doubt about where to place the thinker on the political spectrum. In other cases, however, identifying the ideological leanings of historical figures is a task better left for professional historians.
In any case, history’s great political philosophers are not the only people who disagree over the nature of human nature; the human-nature question is a perennial problem that also divides contemporary politicians and ordinary citizens. Below we’ll explore what modern political psychology has discovered about this ancient philosophical puzzle. Statistical tools and laboratory experiments can determine precisely how an individual’s perceptions of human nature can predict his or her political orientation.
But first, a very brief tour of more recent political leaders and movements reveals a notable trend: conservatives tend to view human nature as competitive, while liberals are more prone to perceiving human nature as cooperative.
In 1964, the Republican Party nominated Arizona senator Barry Goldwater as its candidate for the U.S. presidential race. Although Goldwater lost the race to Lyndon Johnson, he set the ideological tone for the resurgence of right-wing politics in the 1960s, which earned him the nickname “Mr. Conservative.” The book that launched Goldwater to national prominence was his “Conscience of a Conservative” (1960). This widely read booklet laid out the senator’s views on numerous controversial political issues of the day. It resonated with millions of conservatives across the country.
On the topic of human nature, Goldwater’s book addressed “the corrupting influence of power”: “the natural tendency of men who possess some power,” he wrote, is “to take unto themselves more power. The tendency leads eventually to the acquisition of all power.” In Goldwater’s worldview, man’s competitive nature had no limit.
advertisementIn 1980, when the conservative politician Ronald Reagan asked Americans for their votes at the end of his presidential campaign, he said: “As you go to the polls next Tuesday and make your choice for President, ask yourself these questions: Are you better off today than you were four years ago? Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the store than it was four years ago?” David Sears, a political scientist at UCLA, has pointed out how right-wing politicians like Reagan tend to make more appeals to the public based on the assumption of a self-interested audience.
Sears has contrasted Reagan’s speech to that of the Democratic president John F. Kennedy. In 1961, Kennedy famously entreated his “fellow Americans [to] ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” In Kennedy’s speech, the liberal president invoked a cooperative human nature.
In the late 1960s, left-wing peace activists in U.S. colleges were demonstrating against their country’s war in Vietnam. Psychologists who analyzed the ideological themes of their protests noted “a strong antipathy to self-interested behavior.” When these liberal students took psychometric tests, they measured significantly higher than nonactivists on humanitarianism, which included a strong “desire to help others” and a valuing of “compassion and sympathy.” The researcher noted that the most radical left-wing activists also had unrealistic expectations about how cooperative others would be in supporting them when they graduated; this group of students planned to continue to “work full-time in the ‘movement’ or . . . to become free-lance writers, artists, [or] intellectuals.”
Even though our leaders’ perceptions of human nature are normally less skewed, their biases can nonetheless have wide-reaching policy repercussions. In 2009, the conservative politician George W. Bush had finished eight years as president of the United States. Barack Obama then assumed office, bringing a liberal administration to the White House. Obama apparently believed that his predecessor’s conservative view of human nature hindered U.S. relations with the Muslim world by focusing too much on military interventions, counterterrorism measures, and coercive interrogation techniques. More than right-wing Americans, Obama assumed that human nature is cooperative—even across cultures. Thus, reaching out to Islamic countries was Obama’s top foreign-policy priority.
On the very first day of his presidency, Obama called the leaders of the Palestinian Authority, Jordan, and Egypt. He also called Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert to request that Israel cooperatively open its borders with the Gaza Strip (even though Gaza was under the administration of Hamas, which both the Israeli and U.S. governments considered a terrorist organization). Obama then announced the appointment of a special envoy to promote a US-brokered peace process in the Middle East (a move that President Bush had resisted).
Obama granted his first interview as president to the Arab cable TV network Al Arabiya. One of his first foreign trips was to Turkey and Egypt. At Cairo University, in the heart of the Arab world, the newly elected liberal president reached out to Muslims, offering them “a new beginning” based on “mutual interest and mutual respect.” During his presidency, Obama would prohibit torture and ban the phrase “war on terror” from official government discourse. Underlying these policy shifts was an assumption that Muslim societies had a predominantly cooperative nature—as long as the United States shifted its approach to them in a more egalitarian direction.
Differing perceptions of human nature may divide the left from the right on economic issues as well. Evolutionary economist Paul H. Rubin of Emory University has suggested that “preferences regarding altruism” translate into different fiscal policies. Rubin means that liberals (who perceive human nature as more cooperative) favor greater income redistribution than conservatives (who seek to reduce taxes).
To the extent that people identify free-market capitalism with self-interest, capitalism has polarized the political spectrum. The far left has decried self-interested capitalism as the root of all evil, and accused the right of celebrating self-interest by worshiping the god of free markets. The far right, on the other hand, has denounced socialist control economies for impeding the pursuit of competition and sapping away motivation.
Belief in a Dangerous World
If, as conservatives tend to believe, human nature is fundamentally competitive and self-interest prevails, then people live in a dangerous world. The “dangerous world” metaphor has long been associated with right-wing ideological views. In the last couple of centuries, though, this metaphor has taken the form of folk-Darwinism. University of Michigan philosopher Peter Railton has dubbed this worldview “your great-grandfather’s Social Darwinism,” in which “all creatures great and small [are] pitted against one another in a life-or-death struggle to survive and reproduce.”
In fact, folk-Darwinism’s ruthless “survival of the fittest” concept is a one-sided (and frequently distorted) view of the fuller scientific picture of evolution that has developed over the second half of the twentieth century. Since the 1960s, biologists have made major advances in understanding how evolution motivates various kinds of altruistic cooperation in nature—in addition to self-interest (which we’ll learn about in part VI). Nonetheless, public opinion’s idea of folk-Darwinism, which situates people in a dangerous jungle world, has generally been evoked to support a right-wing moral philosophy.
Numerous political psychologists have commented on the right’s “Darwinian” dangerous-world metaphor. The Authoritarian Personality group at UC Berkeley remarked how highly ethnocentric subjects had “a conception of a dangerous and hostile world” that resembled an “oversimplified survival-of-the-fittest idea.” One conservative subject recalled the discipline that he used to receive from his father: “I always accused him of being harsh. . . . And apparently this all falls in with Darwin’s theory too.” Others who have linked folk-Darwinism’s dangerous-world motif to conservatism include the British psychiatrist Roger Money-Kyrle (1951), Princeton political psychologist Fred Greenstein (1975), and Berkeley metaphor theorist George Lakoff (2002).
The social-Darwinist survival-of-the-fittest idea appears most obviously and prevalently in the discourse of the extreme right. Adolf Hitler saw life as a zero-sum struggle between the races, in which one group would always seek to dominate the other. In a 1928 speech that Hitler gave in Kulmbach, Bavaria, he envisioned a conflict between races in pseudo-Darwinian terms:
The idea of struggle is as old as life itself, for life is only preserved because other living things perish through struggle . . . in the struggle, the stronger, more able, win, while the less able, the weak, lose . . . it is not by the principles of humanity that man lives or is able to preserve himself above the animal world, but solely by the means of the most brutal struggle.
Hitler erred by confusing strength and animal brutality with fitness. He overlooked how cooperative behavior in human and nonhuman animals plays a major role in contributing to fitness, including the struggle for survival. Moreover, the inhuman acts committed by humans in the name of Hitlerism greatly surpassed the brutality of any other known animal. Nonetheless, Hitler viewed the world as extremely dangerous, and he attributed the danger to a misconstrued social Darwinism.
At the turn of the twenty-first century, ethnographer Raphael Ezekiel discovered the same, naturalistic dangerous-world metaphors among extreme right-wing groups in the United States. Richard Butler, the leader of the Aryan Nations, used animals to describe his political convictions:
Of course, we know the jungle, that the lion will eat the rabbit, and a rabbit doesn’t have any right. He doesn’t have any right to life, he has a right to use the endowments that nature and the genetic program have, to save his life. In other words, to run down the hole when he sees something [stronger] coming after him, a coyote or something.
Tom Metzger, the leader of White Aryan Resistance, expressed a perception of human nature in which competition is taken to the extreme. Metzger believed that little had changed since Hobbes’s state of nature, since life remained a war pitting man against man: “either I am strong enough to defeat you or you will smash me. It’s simple,” he said.
Ezekiel uncovered a similarly dangerous worldview among a Detroit cell of neo-Nazis. What most impressed the ethnographer about the neo-Nazis after his months of fieldwork with them was the emotion of fear: “These were people,” he explained, “who at a deep level felt terror that they were about to be extinguished. They felt that their lives may disappear at any moment.”
A palpable fear of a dangerous world figures prominently even in the mainstream American far right. Glenn Beck, the Tea Party–aligned public-opinion leader, feels that people are out to get him. Beck wears bulletproof vests when speaking in public. He also planned to build a six-foot barrier around his home in New Canaan, Connecticut, to barricade his residence against bullets (but the security wall conflicted with local zoning ordinances).
Beyond these individual cases of political leaders, is there any hard proof that right-wingers in general fear a dangerous world any more than run-of-the-mill liberals do? Beyond conventional questionnaires, innovative lab research has shed important light on this human-nature problem. University of New Mexico psychologist Jacob Vigil used computers to alter photographs of human faces; he simplified the photographs into “sketches,” and then blurred them to create emotionally ambiguous expressions. Next, Vigil had 740 adults interpret the emotions on the faces. Republicans were significantly more likely than Democrats to see threatening or dominating emotions in the hazy faces (other factors such as gender, age, and employment status, however, did not affect their perceptions).
Thanks to independent experiments later conducted at the University of Nebraska, we now know that as people process these facial emotions, there are also differences in brain activity between liberals and conservatives. Compared with liberals, conservatives process dominant emotions (like anger and disgust) more quickly. Karl Evan Giuseffi and John Hibbing discovered this curious physiological trend by using electroencephalograms to measure electrical activity in the brains of people as they viewed dominant and neutral facial expressions. Because the brain’s electrical response to these faces occurs within a third of a second, these rapid, ideologically important reactions appear to take place at an unconscious level of awareness.
Is there any other way to objectively determine whether conservatives truly fear a dangerous world more than liberals? Political scientists and psychologists from Rice University and the Universities of Nebraska and Illinois came up with a creative experiment to answer this question beyond a reasonable doubt.
The researchers showed a series of thirty-three images to a group of adults with strong political beliefs. Three of the pictures depicted threatening conditions: the first had a very large spider on the face of a frightened person; a second image showed a dazed individual with a bloody face; and the third one showed an open wound with maggots in it. In a control condition, the psychologists replaced the three startling pictures with nonthreatening ones (a bunny, a bowl of fruit, and a happy child).
While the subjects viewed the images, the scientists monitored their skin conductance to measure fear (arousal causes tiny amounts of perspiration, which alter how well electricity flows across the body’s surface).
The research team discovered that the individuals who had a higher physiological response to the threatening images (i.e., the people who were more startled and therefore sweat more) were significantly more likely to have conservative attitudes. For instance, they tended to support capital punishment, patriotism, and the Iraq War. Those who were less startled by the threatening images generally supported pacifism, foreign aid, and liberal immigration policies. Physiological responses to bunny rabbits and bowls of fruit, of course, did not predict political orientation.
This dangerous-world experiment is particularly valuable because it is quite clear what causes what. If an MRI scan reveals differences between the brains of liberals and conservatives, we cannot be sure whether nature or nurture is ultimately responsible. Brain differences could be innate or environmentally acquired or both. But the physiological fear responses in this “spider” experiment depend on sweat; and the sweat glands are controlled by the sympathetic nervous system, which is involuntary. It’s highly unlikely that sweating in response to a spider depends on the environment in which a subject was nurtured (especially if the subjects are from the same location) and that the conservatives happened to have more traumatic spider experiences than the liberals.
Beyond introspective surveys and subjective ratings of facial emotions, then, it seems as though conservatives truly do perceive the world to be a more dangerous place than liberals do—even while asleep. Research on the dream lives of Americans found that Republicans reported nearly three times as many nightmares as Democrats. Conservatives were also more likely to initiate physical aggression in their dreams, and they were twice as likely as liberals to dream about male characters. Left-leaning dreamers, in contrast, reported more female characters in their dreams.
Belief in a Degenerating World
In addition to believing in a competitive human nature and a dangerous world, right-wingers are also more likely to perceive that the world and its morality are increasingly degenerating. The term “conservatives” itself implies a desire to keep what is good and prevent it from deteriorating into something worse. The political left, in contrast, is more prone to thinking that human nature can evolve into something better. The term “progressives” implies this belief that the advancement of morality is possible and desirable.
The sensation of deteriorating social morality is not merely an artifact of the modern Western world; people in ancient Greece, Israel, China, Rome, and nineteenth-century Europe have expressed similar concerns, according to the research of social psychologist Richard Eibach. Likewise, many Americans commonly point to a perceived rise in teenage pregnancy as proof of moral decay. A 2003 poll revealed that 68 percent of adults thought teen pregnancy was on the rise—even though teen births had fallen by 31 percent over the last decade.
The likelihood of holding a “degenerating world” perspective, however, depends significantly on one’s political orientation. The 2000 National Election Study asked Americans whether they thought that “newer lifestyles are contributing to the breakdown of our society.” Fully 80 percent of conservatives agreed with this statement, compared with 59 percent of moderates, and 49 percent of liberals.
The RWA test takes advantage of this relationship to measure political orientation. The scale’s content within the “human nature” category heavily pertains to the “degenerating world” theme. Conservatives are more likely to agree with RWA items that include the following phrases:
* “The way things are going in this country, it’s going to take a lot of ‘strong medicine’ to straighten out the troublemakers, criminals, and perverts.”
* “. . . the rot that is poisoning our country from within.”
* “The facts on crime . . . and the recent public disorders all show we have to crack down harder on deviant groups and troublemakers if we’re going to save our moral standards. . .”
* “In these troubled times . . .”
Each of these phrases suggests a society in the process of moral decay. They express the sensation not only that human nature is bad, but also that it’s growing even worse.
It’s quite easy to find “reactionary” politicians on the right of the political spectrum who believe that the present and future are decadent eras, and who yearn to return to a past that they believe was more moral. Newt Gingrich is one of them. Gingrich served as a Republican congressman from the conservative U.S. state of Georgia for twenty years. In March 2011, he announced his bid to run for president on the Republican ticket. In Gingrich’s worldview, the moral fabric of America is increasingly deteriorating. He has especially expressed this “degenerating world” opinion during the administrations of liberal presidents.
In 1995, Gingrich had just become speaker of the House of Representatives, to lead his party in opposition to Bill Clinton. Gingrich claimed: “We had long periods in American history where people didn’t get raped, people didn’t get murdered, people weren’t mugged routinely.” Fifteen years later, in 2010, Gingrich published a book titled “To Save America.” It argued that the values of the United States’ founding fathers were quickly slipping away. America’s morality was under dire threat, Gingrich argued, from President Obama’s “secular-socialist machine.”
Further to the right, the “degenerating world” theme grows even stronger. Commentators have described Glenn Beck’s television program as having an ethos of “extreme doom and pessimism.” Even an anchor from Beck’s own conservative outlet, the Fox News Channel, called Beck’s show “the Fear Chamber.”
On the extreme right end of the spectrum, people’s assessment and prognosis of human nature becomes the gloomiest. A Detroit neo-Nazi interviewed by Ezekiel offered his thoughts on the subject: “People are getting worse and worse and worse . . . and murder and torture and all this. Just for the sake of laughing and enjoying it.”
If conservatives fear that human morality is deteriorating, then the political left is well known for its hope that human nature will improve. Before he became a liberal president, Barack Obama gained his country’s attention by publishing a book called “The Audacity of Hope” (2006). During his Nobel Peace Prize lecture at the end of 2009, the progressive president touched on his theory of human nature: “we do not have to think that human nature is perfect for us to still believe that the human condition can be perfected,” Obama said. Not “improved,” but “perfected”—the same term that Rousseau used.
From “Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us,” by Avi Tuschman (Prometheus Books, 2013). Reprinted by permission of the publisher
Sunday, September 15, 2013
The Birmingham Church Bombing: A Coverup?
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40 years for Justice: Did the FBI Cover for the Birmingham Bombers?
by Gary May Sep 15, 2013 7:17 AM EDT
Why did it take 40 years to bring the perpetrators of the Birmingham church bombing to justice? Was is it because the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover stood in the way? Historian Gary May looks back to the horrific attack 50 years ago and presents the evidence.
94
inShare.30 On Wednesday, September 11th, the nation paused to remember the worst terrorist attack the country ever sustained. But the week also brings another anniversary, that of the worst crime in the history of the Civil Rights Movement whose aftermath was equally disturbing. While it took the United States a decade to execute Osama Bin-Laden, it took almost forty years to convict those responsible for this crime of domestic terrorism. Who was responsible for that long delay? The answer may be J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI.
Unidentified mourners, who overflowed the church, stand across the street during funeral services for 14-year-old Carol Robertson, Sept. 17, 1963, Birmingham, Ala. The girl was one of four young African Americans killed in a bomb blast the previous Sunday. (AP)
On Sunday morning, September 15, 1963, fifty years ago, a massive explosion tore through the basement of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Killed instantly were four African American girls—Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, and Addie Mae Collins all fourteen, along with Denise McNair, who was eleven. Addie Mae’s sister, thirteen year old Sarah, blinded and bleeding from her wounds managed to free herself from the wreckage that had once been the women’s lounge, where the girls were dressing for the Sunday service. Sarah would spend months in the hospital; the doctors saved her life but had to remove her right eye. Sixteen others—parishioners and people just walking past the church—were injured. “In church! My, God, we’re not even safe in church,” said one anguished woman
An angry crowd quickly gathered. They threw rocks and pieces of glass at the police and sheriff’s deputies. They responded by firing shotguns over the rioters’ heads, forcing them into nearby streets and alleys.
Two other lives were lost that day. Birmingham police shot a black teenager in the back of the head, claiming that he ran after throwing rocks at them. In a Birmingham suburb, Larry Joe Sims and Michael Lee Farley, two sixteen-year-old Eagle scouts, were riding a red motor scooter covered with Confederate stickers when they came upon two black boys on bikes. Sims shot at them, killing one, thirteen-year-old Virgil Ware. Sims and Farley were later arrested and found guilty of second-degree manslaughter but the Judge, who considered the shooting merely “a lapse” in judgment, suspended their sentences and placed the boys on two years probation. In all, the bombing and its aftermath caused six fatalities, none older that sixteen.
The FBI responded immediately. Over the next few months, more than 200 agents came to Birmingham, part of the largest investigation, it was said, since the FBI tracked down John Dillinger. The Bureau named the case BAPBOMB.
What was also unusual about the crime is that authorities quickly identified the men responsible for building and placing the bomb: they were members of a radical Klan splinter group called the Cahaba River Boys. Nevertheless, it took decades to bring them to justice. First to fall was Robert Chambliss, who was convicted of murder in 1977, in part on the testimony of his own niece who had heard him boast on the eve of the bombing that after the next day the blacks would end their campaign to integrate the city’s schools. When Chambliss’ wife Flora (who had also provided information about her husband’s activities to the authorities) learned of the verdict, she was heard to yell, “Hallelujah!” Chambliss died in prison in 1985.
a later Justice Department investigation concluded that "of the hundreds [involved] ... Rowe was one of the handful most responsible for the violence," the FBI covered up his actions that day.
Chambliss first joined the Klan when he was twenty years old, reportedly after watching The Birth of A Nation, and during the next twenty-seven years, rose to become Exalted Cyclops of the Robert E. Lee Klavern. He resigned in 1951 because of “unfavorable publicity,” he later said, the result of his “one man war” against blacks, Catholics, and Jews. In the mines and quarries of Alabama, he learned about dynamite and, in 1947, first used it to destroy the home of a black man who legally won the right to move into a white neighborhood. Chambliss had found his life’s work. In 1956, he bombed Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth’s Bethel Baptist Church and by the end of the decade was responsible for most of Birmingham’s bombings which earned him the nickname, “Dynamite” Bob. His friendship with long time Police Commissioner Bull Connor won him a job in the city garage and also protected him from prosecution for his numerous crimes. The integration of Birmingham’s schools in September 1963 sent him over the edge and the result was four dead young girls.
His partners, Thomas Blanton, Jr. and Bobby Frank Cherry, also virulent racists, were finally tried, convicted, and incarcerated in 2001 and 2002, respectively. Cherry died in 2004.
Why did it take so long to imprison the men responsible for this terrible crime? Agents found several eyewitnesses who could place Chambliss and the others at the church at around 2:00 a.m., eight hours before the bomb exploded, and two members of Chambliss’ own family—his niece and sister-in-law who heard him make incriminating statements—were willing to testify at trial. Twice in 1965 Birmingham’s FBI field office asked Director J. Edgar Hoover for permission to consult with the U.S. Attorney and the local prosecutor, neither of whom knew the identities of alleged perpetrators, or the nature of the evidence against them, because Hoover refused to share information. And twice, Hoover turned them down. “From an evaluation of the evidence received thus far,” Hoover wrote the Special Agent in Charge on May 19, 1965, “the chance of successful prosecution in State or Federal Court is very remote.” Although Hoover constantly reminded the Birmingham Field office “that the reputation of the FBI depends upon your ability to solve [the bombing],” he would not act unless the case was rock solid. Hoover did not bother to seek the counsel of the Attorney General or other Justice Department divisions (like Civil Rights) before reaching these conclusions. Ignoring his field agents who “believed the climate of opinion…is very favorable toward…prosecution…,” Hoover believed strongly that no Alabama jury would convict white men, even for the murder of black children.
Other factors may also have influenced Hoover’s decision. Some evidence was tainted by illegal taps on Klansmens’ telephones and the installation of microphones in their homes through unlawful entry. The 1200 pages of transcripts obtained were useless in court. (When the Justice Department asked to see them anyway, Hoover refused their request.)
It is also possible that Hoover did not act because a public trial might reveal that the FBI had recruited a number of Birmingham’s citizens, including known Klansmen, as FBI informants and this revelation would have badly damaged the Bureau’s reputation.
The FBI’s most important informant inside the Alabama Ku Klux Klan was a nightclub bouncer, brawler, and self-proclaimed "hell raiser," named Gary Thomas Rowe. Rowe was recruited by the FBI in March 1960 and encouraged to join the Eastview Klavern of the Alabama Klan. Although his FBI handler warned him that he was not an FBI agent and must avoid violent activities, Rowe considered himself an "undercover man," a redneck James Bond. He soon discovered that in order to protect his "cover" (and because he enjoyed a good fight), he needed to take a leading role in the Klan's attacks on civil rights workers.
In May 1961, when Birmingham police officials learned that a bus carrying Freedom Riders was coming to Birmingham on Mothers Day, they turned to Rowe and the Klan to arrange a violent reception for the activists. Public Safety Director Bull Connor gave the Klan 15 minutes to "beat" the Freedom Riders "until they looked like a bulldog got a hold of them."
Rowe warned his FBI handler of the imminent attack, but FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover kept it secret from Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and the bureau did nothing to stop the attack. A local news photographer snapped a picture of Mr. Rowe and other Klansmen beating an African-American with their fists and pipes; the victim was not a Freedom Rider but an ordinary Birmingham citizen who was at the bus terminal to pick up his fiancée. Mr. Rowe also assaulted a news photographer and a television reporter before the Klan's time ran out and police arrived on the scene.
Protecting its most valued informant may well explain why it took decades to bring the Sixteenth Street Church bombers to justice.
The FBI's response to Mr. Rowe's actions that day revealed how an informant can dominate his handler and escape punishment for his crimes. Although a later Justice Department investigation concluded that "of the hundreds [involved] ... Rowe was one of the handful most responsible for the violence," the FBI covered up his actions that day.
Rowe told his contact that he had beaten the innocent bystander but the agent lied to the FBI's special agent-in-charge, assuring him that "Rowe was not personally involved in the fighting."
Instead of being arrested and his relationship with the FBI terminated, the Bureau rewarded Rowe with a cash bonus of $175 and praised him as "without doubt the most alert, intelligent, productive and reliable informant ... currently being operated."
In the years that followed, Mr. Rowe rose within the ranks of the Eastview Klavern and continued to attack African-Americans and civil rights workers with impunity, knowing that the FBI would protect him from prosecution.
Was Rowe involved in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church? At first, the FBI feared that he might have been since they encouraged him to stay away from the crime scene and never showed his picture to those witnesses who later placed Chambliss, Blanton, and Cherry in the vicinity of the church the night before the bomb exploded. Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley, who prosecuted Chambliss in 1977, and U.S. Attorney Doug Jones, who won convictions of Blanton and Cherry in 2001 and 2002, did not consider Rowe a likely suspect.
But given the central role that Rowe played in the violent events that occurred in Birmingham in the early 1960s—the attack on the Freedom Riders, the bombing of black homes, and an aborted attempt to assassinate Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth—it seems likely that Rowe knew that the church was going to be bombed on September 15 and never reported it to the FBI.
The FBI considered Rowe too important a source to investigate where Rowe was the night before the explosion—he had difficulty explaining what he was doing—and Rowe initially identified a number of men as the likely bombers but never mentioned Chambliss, Blanton, and Cherry until December, 1964, long past the time when it was clear to the Bureau that the three were responsible for the murder of the three girls and the maiming of the fourth. Hoover’s failure to act was later called “a serious error” by a Justice Department Task Force investigating Gary Thomas Rowe.
Despite the Bureau’s uncertainty about Rowe’s connection to the bombing, they continued to allow him to run amuck. In March 1965, at the conclusion of the historic Voting Rights March, Rowe and three other Klansmen fired their guns at a car driven by Viola Liuzzo, a Detroit mother of five, who had come to Selma to work with Dr. Martin Luther King’s voting rights movement. Liuzzo died instantly when a bullet struck her in the head. Rowe denied that he had shot at Liuzzo and his FBI handler accepted his story without further investigation. Following the Liuzzo shooting, Rowe quickly made a deal with the Justice Department: In exchange for immunity from prosecution, he agreed to testify against his fellow Klansmen at their federal trial in December 1965.
On the strength of his eye- witness testimony, the Klansmen were convicted of violating Ms. Liuzzo's civil rights, but they served less than 10 years in prison. Mr. Rowe was again rewarded by a grateful Justice Department with a gift of $10,000, a new identity and a job as an assistant U.S. marshal in California.
He could change his name but not his nature—his habitual brawling and drinking cost him his job a year later. Blaming his problems on the FBI, Rowe testified before the Church Committee in 1975, revealing his (and the FBI’s) complicity in the attack on the Freedom Riders and other crimes of the 1960s. Rowe spent his last years working as a private investigator in Savannah, Georgia. He died there in 1998.
Rowe's experiences suggest the dangers of recruiting informants and putting them into terrorist groups. To reassure their associates that they are truly committed to their cause, they, too, must commit brutal acts. And to hide their association with despicable characters, intelligence agencies become silent partners in the crimes their informants commit. Protecting its most valued informant may well explain why it took decades to bring the Sixteenth Street Church bombers to justice. As we remember 1963’s tragedy, we would do well to re-examine the role played by the FBI and CIA’s informants before history repeats itself.
40 years for Justice: Did the FBI Cover for the Birmingham Bombers?
by Gary May Sep 15, 2013 7:17 AM EDT
Why did it take 40 years to bring the perpetrators of the Birmingham church bombing to justice? Was is it because the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover stood in the way? Historian Gary May looks back to the horrific attack 50 years ago and presents the evidence.
94
inShare.30 On Wednesday, September 11th, the nation paused to remember the worst terrorist attack the country ever sustained. But the week also brings another anniversary, that of the worst crime in the history of the Civil Rights Movement whose aftermath was equally disturbing. While it took the United States a decade to execute Osama Bin-Laden, it took almost forty years to convict those responsible for this crime of domestic terrorism. Who was responsible for that long delay? The answer may be J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI.
Unidentified mourners, who overflowed the church, stand across the street during funeral services for 14-year-old Carol Robertson, Sept. 17, 1963, Birmingham, Ala. The girl was one of four young African Americans killed in a bomb blast the previous Sunday. (AP)
On Sunday morning, September 15, 1963, fifty years ago, a massive explosion tore through the basement of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Killed instantly were four African American girls—Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, and Addie Mae Collins all fourteen, along with Denise McNair, who was eleven. Addie Mae’s sister, thirteen year old Sarah, blinded and bleeding from her wounds managed to free herself from the wreckage that had once been the women’s lounge, where the girls were dressing for the Sunday service. Sarah would spend months in the hospital; the doctors saved her life but had to remove her right eye. Sixteen others—parishioners and people just walking past the church—were injured. “In church! My, God, we’re not even safe in church,” said one anguished woman
An angry crowd quickly gathered. They threw rocks and pieces of glass at the police and sheriff’s deputies. They responded by firing shotguns over the rioters’ heads, forcing them into nearby streets and alleys.
Two other lives were lost that day. Birmingham police shot a black teenager in the back of the head, claiming that he ran after throwing rocks at them. In a Birmingham suburb, Larry Joe Sims and Michael Lee Farley, two sixteen-year-old Eagle scouts, were riding a red motor scooter covered with Confederate stickers when they came upon two black boys on bikes. Sims shot at them, killing one, thirteen-year-old Virgil Ware. Sims and Farley were later arrested and found guilty of second-degree manslaughter but the Judge, who considered the shooting merely “a lapse” in judgment, suspended their sentences and placed the boys on two years probation. In all, the bombing and its aftermath caused six fatalities, none older that sixteen.
The FBI responded immediately. Over the next few months, more than 200 agents came to Birmingham, part of the largest investigation, it was said, since the FBI tracked down John Dillinger. The Bureau named the case BAPBOMB.
What was also unusual about the crime is that authorities quickly identified the men responsible for building and placing the bomb: they were members of a radical Klan splinter group called the Cahaba River Boys. Nevertheless, it took decades to bring them to justice. First to fall was Robert Chambliss, who was convicted of murder in 1977, in part on the testimony of his own niece who had heard him boast on the eve of the bombing that after the next day the blacks would end their campaign to integrate the city’s schools. When Chambliss’ wife Flora (who had also provided information about her husband’s activities to the authorities) learned of the verdict, she was heard to yell, “Hallelujah!” Chambliss died in prison in 1985.
a later Justice Department investigation concluded that "of the hundreds [involved] ... Rowe was one of the handful most responsible for the violence," the FBI covered up his actions that day.
Chambliss first joined the Klan when he was twenty years old, reportedly after watching The Birth of A Nation, and during the next twenty-seven years, rose to become Exalted Cyclops of the Robert E. Lee Klavern. He resigned in 1951 because of “unfavorable publicity,” he later said, the result of his “one man war” against blacks, Catholics, and Jews. In the mines and quarries of Alabama, he learned about dynamite and, in 1947, first used it to destroy the home of a black man who legally won the right to move into a white neighborhood. Chambliss had found his life’s work. In 1956, he bombed Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth’s Bethel Baptist Church and by the end of the decade was responsible for most of Birmingham’s bombings which earned him the nickname, “Dynamite” Bob. His friendship with long time Police Commissioner Bull Connor won him a job in the city garage and also protected him from prosecution for his numerous crimes. The integration of Birmingham’s schools in September 1963 sent him over the edge and the result was four dead young girls.
His partners, Thomas Blanton, Jr. and Bobby Frank Cherry, also virulent racists, were finally tried, convicted, and incarcerated in 2001 and 2002, respectively. Cherry died in 2004.
Why did it take so long to imprison the men responsible for this terrible crime? Agents found several eyewitnesses who could place Chambliss and the others at the church at around 2:00 a.m., eight hours before the bomb exploded, and two members of Chambliss’ own family—his niece and sister-in-law who heard him make incriminating statements—were willing to testify at trial. Twice in 1965 Birmingham’s FBI field office asked Director J. Edgar Hoover for permission to consult with the U.S. Attorney and the local prosecutor, neither of whom knew the identities of alleged perpetrators, or the nature of the evidence against them, because Hoover refused to share information. And twice, Hoover turned them down. “From an evaluation of the evidence received thus far,” Hoover wrote the Special Agent in Charge on May 19, 1965, “the chance of successful prosecution in State or Federal Court is very remote.” Although Hoover constantly reminded the Birmingham Field office “that the reputation of the FBI depends upon your ability to solve [the bombing],” he would not act unless the case was rock solid. Hoover did not bother to seek the counsel of the Attorney General or other Justice Department divisions (like Civil Rights) before reaching these conclusions. Ignoring his field agents who “believed the climate of opinion…is very favorable toward…prosecution…,” Hoover believed strongly that no Alabama jury would convict white men, even for the murder of black children.
Other factors may also have influenced Hoover’s decision. Some evidence was tainted by illegal taps on Klansmens’ telephones and the installation of microphones in their homes through unlawful entry. The 1200 pages of transcripts obtained were useless in court. (When the Justice Department asked to see them anyway, Hoover refused their request.)
It is also possible that Hoover did not act because a public trial might reveal that the FBI had recruited a number of Birmingham’s citizens, including known Klansmen, as FBI informants and this revelation would have badly damaged the Bureau’s reputation.
The FBI’s most important informant inside the Alabama Ku Klux Klan was a nightclub bouncer, brawler, and self-proclaimed "hell raiser," named Gary Thomas Rowe. Rowe was recruited by the FBI in March 1960 and encouraged to join the Eastview Klavern of the Alabama Klan. Although his FBI handler warned him that he was not an FBI agent and must avoid violent activities, Rowe considered himself an "undercover man," a redneck James Bond. He soon discovered that in order to protect his "cover" (and because he enjoyed a good fight), he needed to take a leading role in the Klan's attacks on civil rights workers.
In May 1961, when Birmingham police officials learned that a bus carrying Freedom Riders was coming to Birmingham on Mothers Day, they turned to Rowe and the Klan to arrange a violent reception for the activists. Public Safety Director Bull Connor gave the Klan 15 minutes to "beat" the Freedom Riders "until they looked like a bulldog got a hold of them."
Rowe warned his FBI handler of the imminent attack, but FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover kept it secret from Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and the bureau did nothing to stop the attack. A local news photographer snapped a picture of Mr. Rowe and other Klansmen beating an African-American with their fists and pipes; the victim was not a Freedom Rider but an ordinary Birmingham citizen who was at the bus terminal to pick up his fiancée. Mr. Rowe also assaulted a news photographer and a television reporter before the Klan's time ran out and police arrived on the scene.
Protecting its most valued informant may well explain why it took decades to bring the Sixteenth Street Church bombers to justice.
The FBI's response to Mr. Rowe's actions that day revealed how an informant can dominate his handler and escape punishment for his crimes. Although a later Justice Department investigation concluded that "of the hundreds [involved] ... Rowe was one of the handful most responsible for the violence," the FBI covered up his actions that day.
Rowe told his contact that he had beaten the innocent bystander but the agent lied to the FBI's special agent-in-charge, assuring him that "Rowe was not personally involved in the fighting."
Instead of being arrested and his relationship with the FBI terminated, the Bureau rewarded Rowe with a cash bonus of $175 and praised him as "without doubt the most alert, intelligent, productive and reliable informant ... currently being operated."
In the years that followed, Mr. Rowe rose within the ranks of the Eastview Klavern and continued to attack African-Americans and civil rights workers with impunity, knowing that the FBI would protect him from prosecution.
Was Rowe involved in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church? At first, the FBI feared that he might have been since they encouraged him to stay away from the crime scene and never showed his picture to those witnesses who later placed Chambliss, Blanton, and Cherry in the vicinity of the church the night before the bomb exploded. Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley, who prosecuted Chambliss in 1977, and U.S. Attorney Doug Jones, who won convictions of Blanton and Cherry in 2001 and 2002, did not consider Rowe a likely suspect.
But given the central role that Rowe played in the violent events that occurred in Birmingham in the early 1960s—the attack on the Freedom Riders, the bombing of black homes, and an aborted attempt to assassinate Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth—it seems likely that Rowe knew that the church was going to be bombed on September 15 and never reported it to the FBI.
The FBI considered Rowe too important a source to investigate where Rowe was the night before the explosion—he had difficulty explaining what he was doing—and Rowe initially identified a number of men as the likely bombers but never mentioned Chambliss, Blanton, and Cherry until December, 1964, long past the time when it was clear to the Bureau that the three were responsible for the murder of the three girls and the maiming of the fourth. Hoover’s failure to act was later called “a serious error” by a Justice Department Task Force investigating Gary Thomas Rowe.
Despite the Bureau’s uncertainty about Rowe’s connection to the bombing, they continued to allow him to run amuck. In March 1965, at the conclusion of the historic Voting Rights March, Rowe and three other Klansmen fired their guns at a car driven by Viola Liuzzo, a Detroit mother of five, who had come to Selma to work with Dr. Martin Luther King’s voting rights movement. Liuzzo died instantly when a bullet struck her in the head. Rowe denied that he had shot at Liuzzo and his FBI handler accepted his story without further investigation. Following the Liuzzo shooting, Rowe quickly made a deal with the Justice Department: In exchange for immunity from prosecution, he agreed to testify against his fellow Klansmen at their federal trial in December 1965.
On the strength of his eye- witness testimony, the Klansmen were convicted of violating Ms. Liuzzo's civil rights, but they served less than 10 years in prison. Mr. Rowe was again rewarded by a grateful Justice Department with a gift of $10,000, a new identity and a job as an assistant U.S. marshal in California.
He could change his name but not his nature—his habitual brawling and drinking cost him his job a year later. Blaming his problems on the FBI, Rowe testified before the Church Committee in 1975, revealing his (and the FBI’s) complicity in the attack on the Freedom Riders and other crimes of the 1960s. Rowe spent his last years working as a private investigator in Savannah, Georgia. He died there in 1998.
Rowe's experiences suggest the dangers of recruiting informants and putting them into terrorist groups. To reassure their associates that they are truly committed to their cause, they, too, must commit brutal acts. And to hide their association with despicable characters, intelligence agencies become silent partners in the crimes their informants commit. Protecting its most valued informant may well explain why it took decades to bring the Sixteenth Street Church bombers to justice. As we remember 1963’s tragedy, we would do well to re-examine the role played by the FBI and CIA’s informants before history repeats itself.
9/15/63
On September 15, 1963, a bomb went off at the 16 St. Baptist Church in Birmingham. Four young girls were killed. This is one of the tragic and seminal events in the history of civil rights in this country. Sadly, I do not remember the incident. I was 15 years old and you'd think I would remember it but I don't. There was no internet then and the only news came from the Birmingham News and Birmingham TV. I'm sure the tragedy was downplayed in those news outlets. I remember it today. How sad.
Saturday, September 14, 2013
On Racial Profiling
Racial profiling terrifies me. If they ever start pulling over dumb looking white Southerners outside of Dixie with an Alabama plate I might as well stay here for I won't be able to drive 5 miles without getting pulled over up North. At least there are no outstanding warrants on me that I'm aware of anyway. Sheesh!
Wednesday, September 11, 2013
Comforting to Know
.Some things are conforting to know. If I get hit by a big truck, there are lawyers that will "make them pay." I sleep better at night knowing this.
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
Not Fooling Anybody
Let's not try and fool anybody. Most of us over 60's are the same person inside that we were 40 years ago. The exterior is another story, but the interior is mostly the same: the same bumbling, halting, fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants person we've always been.
Monday, September 9, 2013
Republicans Are Either Stupid or Willfully Misinformed
The Wonk GapBy PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: September 8, 2013
On Saturday, Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming delivered the weekly Republican address. He ignored Syria, presumably because his party is deeply conflicted on the issue. (For the record, so am I.) Instead, he demanded repeal of the Affordable Care Act. “The health care law,” he declared, “has proven to be unpopular, unworkable and unaffordable,” and he predicted “sticker shock” in the months ahead.
So, another week, another denunciation of Obamacare. Who cares? But Mr. Barrasso’s remarks were actually interesting, although not in the way he intended. You see, all the recent news on health costs has been good. So Mr. Barrasso is predicting sticker shock precisely when serious fears of such a shock are fading fast. Why would he do that?
Well, one likely answer is that he hasn’t heard any of the good news. Think about it: Who would tell him?
My guess, in other words, was that Mr. Barrasso was inadvertently illustrating the widening “wonk gap” — the G.O.P.’s near-complete lack of expertise on anything substantive. Health care is the most prominent example, but the dumbing down extends across the spectrum, from budget issues to national security to poll analysis. Remember, Mitt Romney and much of his party went into Election Day expecting victory.
About health reform: Mr. Barrasso was wrong about everything, even the “unpopular” bit, as I’ll explain in a minute. Mainly, however, he was completely missing the story on affordability.
For the truth is that the good news on costs just keeps coming in. There has been a striking slowdown in overall health costs since the Affordable Care Act was enacted, with many experts giving the law at least partial credit. And we now have a good idea what insurance premiums will be once the law goes fully into effect; a comprehensive survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation finds that on average premiums will be significantly lower than those predicted by the Congressional Budget Office when the law was passed.
But do Republican politicians know any of this? Not if they’re listening to conservative “experts,” who have been offering a steady stream of misinformation. All those claims about sticker shock, for example, come from obviously misleading comparisons. For example, supposed experts compare average insurance rates under the new system, which will cover everyone, with the rates currently paid by a handful of young, healthy people for bare-bones insurance. And they conveniently ignore the subsidies many Americans will receive.
At the same time, in an echo of the Romney camp’s polling fantasies, other conservative “experts” are creating false impressions about public opinion. Just after Kaiser released a poll showing a strong majority — 57 percent — opposed to the idea of defunding health reform, the Heritage Foundation put out a poster claiming that 57 percent of Americans want reform defunded. Did the experts at Heritage simply read the numbers upside down? No, they claimed, they were referring to some other poll. Whatever really happened, the practical effect was to delude the right-wing faithful.
And the point is that episodes like this have become the rule, not the exception, on the right. How many Republicans know, for example, that government employment has declined, not risen, under President Obama? Certainly Senator Rand Paul was incredulous when I pointed this out to him on TV last fall. On the contrary, he insisted, “the size of growth of government is enormous under President Obama” — which was completely untrue but was presumably what his sources had told him, knowing that it was what he wanted to hear.
For that, surely, is what the wonk gap is all about. Political conservatism and serious policy analysis can coexist, and there was a time when they did. Back in the 1980s, after all, health experts at Heritage made a good-faith effort to devise a plan for universal health coverage — and what they came up with was the system now known as Obamacare.
But that was then. Modern conservatism has become a sort of cult, very much given to conspiracy theorizing when confronted with inconvenient facts. Liberal policies were supposed to cause hyperinflation, so low measured inflation must reflect statistical fraud; the threat of climate change implies the need for public action, so global warming must be a gigantic scientific hoax. Oh, and Mitt Romney would have won if only he had been a real conservative.
It’s all kind of funny, in a way. Unfortunately, however, this runaway cult controls the House, which gives it immense destructive power — the power, for example, to wreak havoc on the economy by refusing to raise the debt ceiling. And it’s disturbing to realize that this power rests in the hands of men who, thanks to the wonk gap, quite literally have no idea what they’re doing.
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