The Conspiracy Spectacle

The Roman emperor Juvenal is recognized in history for his domestic policy of bread and circuses. Sage enough to realize that the slightest expression of widespread popular discontent could send his regime toppling, he fastened upon superficial appeasement of the masses as the solution to his own social problems.

America, too, has its share of bread and cirouses. As welfare and other federal handouts help curb the daily appetites of ten million hungry people, most of the American public is well feasted on a myriad variety of public spectacles that range from television and Thanksgiving to baseball and Congress.

ONE SUCH spectacle, as it turned out, was the Chicago conspiracy trial. The portrayal of the defendants in the national media as petulant, effeminate hippies was readily absorbed by an audience which had long been fed on the media's anti-radical biases. At a time when the majority of Americans were in desperate need of social and political change, those who offered the most far-reaching and challenging critique of American society became stereotyped outcasts.

Equally theatrical, of course, was the media's depiction of the American judicial system in the person of Judge Julius Hoffman. By focusing on Hoffman's personality as the cause of the defendants' grossly unjust treatment, it tended by implication to minimize the fundamental injustices of American courts. What would otherwise have appeared to be a matter of straightforward political repression suddenly became the last-gasp salvation of an expiring 74-year-old man.

It was in part to dispel these misleading notions about the Chicago trial that attorney William Kunstler and defendant John Froines came to Harvard last week. But the appearance of Kunstler and Froines on the stage of Sanders Theatre had something of a circus-like quality to it. Those who saw them knew exactly what they were coming to hear, and their presentations changed few minds. Above all, the two were a spectacle. People came to find out what they looked like, what they talked like. Still, in spite of it all, they bore their message gracefully and honorably, with a lightness that one would not expect from men who may spend lengthy periods in prison for contempt of Hoffman's court.

In a way that was almost as sad as it was funny, Froines onumerated the evidence which the prosecution had collected against the conspiracy defendants. One defendant had made a speech in California which ended with "I'll see you in Chicago." Another was said to have suggested abducting the Chicago Chief of Police with the words, "Let's kidnap the big cheese and take him to the amphitheatre." Froines himself was charged with a "stink bomb plot." Abbic Hoffman was charged with inciting to "fornication" in Lincoln Park. "We all know Abbic," Froines said. "Abbie never used the word 'fornication' in his life."

Kunstler's principal contention was that "the court system was designed with one end in view: to keep a system moving smoothly and officiently, and to grind out the enemies of the state." He pointed out that American courts do not take up fundamental social issues such as the war in Vietnam, and that, to determine the validity of competing contentions surrounding these issues, one would have to "put the legalities aside."

In the case of the Chicago trial, Kunstler viewed the conduct of the court as proof that "the government is perfectly willing to use what it considers legal process to attempt to kill a movement." He cited Hoffman's conduct and sentencing as a conscious effort to suppress the ideas-and programs for which the defendants and thousands of demonstrators had been fighting.

IT IS A damning indictment of what Kunstler and Froines called the "system" that, on its own terms, it was able to compile a minimum of evidence against the Chicago defendants and convict them without seriously violating any of its own principles. The defendants had not seriously intended to absolve themselves on any legalistic basis; in fact, with the passage of the "inciting to riot" law, they could not possibly have done so. It is conceivable that the "inciting" law will be overturned by a higher court; it is unlikely that a federal judge's power to convict and sentence for contempt will ever be challenged, though Hoffman's particular citations may eventually be toned down.

The defendants fully acknowledged that they had come to demonstrate in Chicago. They realized that they would commit a judicial offense and may even have expected to pay a penalty. As Froines said, "I didn't come to Chicago to save the electoral process; I came to tear it down."

"When a movement has grown that wants to take power and has an emergent society in view," Froines explained, "repression must take place." It is this basic reflex of a threatened social order that makes an aging judge's personality and the particular legalisms of a judicial, structure almost extraneous to the central question.

In order to gauge the full meaning of "repression," it may be necessary to examine, not the particular repression of the conspiracy defendants, but rather the political and social climate which surrounded their trial. It was the war in Victnam, for example, and the utter inflexibility of the "electoral" system which upholds the war, which engendered the original protest and made it successful; the repressive effect which the war has had on society may be viewed in rising taxes for "defense" spending, an inflationary economy which has actually lowered purchasing power and spread poverty in America during the past five years, and the horror of being drafted for and possibly killed in a war which benefits no one except the handful that govern this country.

THE special treatment of Bobby Seale, which both Kunstler and Froines agreed was the gravest part of the trial, is largely a reflection of institutional racism in America. It is a racist ideology toward Oriental people which has, in large measure, made it possible for the American public to tolerate the carnage in Indochina; and it is racism which has led to, and in turn grown out of, the particularly oppressive living conditions which black people face in this country.

As Kunstler concluded, repression will not be dealt with in the courts, but rather in relation to those governing institutions which determine the laws and enforce the decisions which the judicial structure is charged with making. "We have clenched the fist with mass resistance," he said, "and we can only open it in two ways; we can open-it in brotherhood if the system has the capability of responding to immediate human needs, or we can open it to curl the index finger around a trigger guard.

"These are the choices. In time, the system will have to make its choice. And when it makes its choice, it makes ours."