Source: Fraser, C. (1998). "Excerpts from an Affidavit" In Revolution, She Wrote (pp. 214-217). Seattle, WA: Red Letter Press.
First Published: Freedom Socialist, September 1991
Transcription/Markup: Philip Davis and Glenn Kirkindall
Copyleft: Internet Archive (marxists.org)
2015. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
Before the Washington Public Disclosure Commission
In Re: Application of FSP for Campaign Disclosure Exemption
Clara Fraser declares as follows:
I am the National Chairperson of the Freedom Socialist Party. I joined a socialist youth group in the 1930s and was engaged in radical and labor organizations throughout high school and college. In 1944, I joined the Socialist Workers Party and stayed with it until 1966 when I helped found the FSP.
I have firsthand experience with police, government and employers spying on, infiltrating, firing, intimidating, and discriminating against individuals and organizations. I know that public disclosure of the contributors to Advocates for Alaniz and Durham — FSP candidates for City Council — will have a seriously chilling effect on people’s willingness to give money to our campaign and will result in harassment.
I can readily testify to the power of redbaiting, blacklisting, slander, threats, and enforced isolation to silence activists, send sympathizers underground, and shatter organizations.
I have been subjected to considerable personal retaliation for my beliefs, associations, and activities: job losses; antagonism from school authorities against my children; physical assaults; death threats; avoidance by certain friends, associates, coworkers, neighbors and relatives; attempted FBI invasions of my home; extensive (and absurd) police files on my beliefs and activities; arrests and jailings; character assassination on the job and in the media; punitive insurance rates; denial of credit; and frivolous lawsuits.
For ten years after I was fired from Boeing for my views and leadership in the 1948 strike, I was unable to hold a job for more than six months before an informer or government agent notified my employer of my ideas and associations.
Only my good education and wide span of job skills enabled me to work at all.
Nor did political discrimination end with the McCarthy era, as exemplified by my political ideology and sex discrimination case against Seattle City Light (1975-82). The punitive harassment of my supportive coworkers at City Light prevails to this day.
My FBI file contains names of people who signed antiwar and other petitions. Informants stole our mailing lists and turned them over to the FBI. Names of persons who signed nominating petitions to get our candidates on the ballot were promptly turned over to the FBI by state officials. FBI agents harassed our supporters, making it extremely difficult to obtain the required signatures.
During a 1952 speech by Myra Tanner Weiss, SWP candidate for U.S. vice president, uniformed Seattle police openly photographed supporters entering and leaving her meeting, causing a number of people to turn away out of fear of being publicly identified.
Obtaining a lawyer, or help from public agencies, continues to be difficult. Only a very few lawyers assisted us. I had to search long and hard to find an attorney to represent me in my divorce/ custody trial, which featured flagrant political slander, redbaiting, and feminist-baiting by my husband.
Lacking an attorney, I had to resort in 1971 to defending myself against bogus criminal charges resulting from a police raid on a Freeway Hall fundraiser for the Seattle Seven, a group of Seattle liberation Front leaders on trial for their antiwar actions.
After years of search failed to locate a lawyer, I had to drop a 1971 sex and political ideology discrimination claim against Seattle Opportunities Industrialization Center (SOIC), a federally funded anti-poverty program, for wrongfully firing me.
Later, the Seattle Human Rights Department (HRD) attorney handling my City Light case was pressured away from it. The replacement attorney dumped my case after the deposition process. The third attorney walked off the case at a critical juncture in the trial and had to be ordered back. Both private attorneys who represented me in Superior Court against City Light have been the target of separate harassment lawsuits that arose out of their public association with me. One HRD investigator who handled my retaliation case after I won and returned to work was fired immediately after finding in my favor, and others were pressured.
Because of the harm caused by disclosure of names of supporters and defenders, I have adamantly refused to do this for the government or courts. Recently, in the Snedigar v. Hoddersen ‘Freeway Hall’ case, my commitment to this principle was tested by imposition of a $42,500 default judgment and a jail sentence for contempt of court when I refused to disclose information that would identify FSP members and supporters.
I was gratified when my right not to betray sacred confidences was upheld by the state Supreme Court in February 1990. The FSP should not and indeed cannot now be asked to violate the confidentiality of donors as a condition of participating in the electoral process as a minor party!
Bureaucratic insistence on disclosure would totally exclude us from the supposedly democratic process of electoral politics and rob the FSP and its supporters of the fundamental rights afforded to capitalist parties and mainstream candidates.
(Editor’s note: The Seattle Times on August 15 front-paged the FSP request to be exempted from turning over names of contributors. A companion story featured a large photo of Alaniz and Durham and lauded their platform for being serious, tough, clear, candid, and humorous.)