1968 Columbia SAS Leader Bill Sales: A 1995 Interview by Meg Starr

In its August/September issue of 1995, the anti-imperialist Love & Rage newspaper published the following interview with former Columbia Student Afro-American Society [SAS] Leader Bill Sales by long-time anti-imperialist and anti-racist prisoner solidarity activist Meg Starr. This interview was originally posted in the archives section of the Love & Rage website at the following link:

http://www.loveandrage.org/?q=node/33

During the 1960s Bill Sales was a radical student activist. His experiences show how the Black student movement was shaped by the overall Black liberation movement, and how Black students in turn helped shape the white student movement.

It is interesting to compare Bill’s version of the early stages of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) and the Columbia Strike (an important occupation of buildings at New York City’s Columbia University by Black and white students in 1968) with more mainstream and white-centered accounts of the same period. His stories also bring to life the incredible radical diversity and power of the Black Liberation movement. Readers interested in learning more should read Bill’s latest book, From Civil Rights to Black Liberation: Malcolm X and the Organization of Afro-American Unity (South End Press, Boston, 1994).

U of Penn and the NAACP

Meg Star [MS]: How did you become an activist as a student?


Bill Sales [BS]: “I was involved with the student chapter of the NAACP at the University of Pennsylvania in 1962. I had first come in contact with the movement on that campus through some people who were members of RAM. [The Revolutionary Action movement was a semi-clandestine organization that, beginning in 1963, attempted to combine mass direct action with the tactics of self-defense to push the movement towards revolutionary politics.] Two members in particular were friends of mine: Max Stanford [Muhamed Ahmed] and Stanley Davis. I knew Max from high school, and Stanley was a student at Penn before we became active. We all ran track together, believe it or not.”

In 1962 the Penn Chapter of the NAACP invited Malcolm X to speak on campus, and they picketed Democratic Party Headquarters in Philadelphia to support Robert Williams. Williams had been the president of the NAACP in Monroe County, NC until 1959, when he called for armed defense in the face of growing KKK violence. During the next several years James Farmer, the Rev. Leon Sullivan, and many other Civil Rights leaders also spoke on campus.

BS: “Then I went to the march on Washington and was very impressed by all the goings on. I wanted to come back and assume the leadership of the NAACP on campus; I wasn’t satisfied with its level of activism.”

In the meantime, during the summer of ‘63, CORE [The Congress of Racial Equality was a direct-action-oriented civil-rights group that emphasized community based actions in Northern cities.] and the NAACP were confronting de facto segregation of construction sites in Philadelphia. Bill’s two radical friends were arrested after being beaten by the police at one site. U of Penn was undergoing major renovation, so the students confronted the university’s own hiring practices.

“Now all during the four years at Penn I was being exposed to different ideological currents, both in the Civil Rights Movement and in what came to be the New Left. I didn’t have the slightest idea that that was what it was at the time. In my senior year, protesting segregation, I came in close contact with CORE and the NAACP. I can put it this way: I developed a greater appreciation for CORE and an utter disdain for the NAACP.”

Black Students Organize

When Bill graduated from Penn he went to Columbia University to do graduate work. He arrived in the fall of 1964, the fall after African-American students organized on campus.

“A year after I left Penn, Bob Brand, a white student from the NAACP, got in touch with me. He asked my permission to convert that chapter into an SDS chapter because at that point the only people left were white students who were very much interested in the anti-war situation. Many of those guys who became important in SDS got their first exposure in civil rights activity.”

Bill arrived at Columbia in 1964, the same semester that the Students Afro-American Society was founded. In the mid-’60s campuses that for centuries had been lily-white were opening the doors to Black students for the first time. Columbia, Harvard and Yale were a little ahead of the majority of campuses.

“A whole lot of debate was going on about identity, about who we were as Black students, and what was our responsibility to the movement.”

The numbers of Black students were increasing every semester and the class base of the students accepted by the college was becoming more working class, which affected the level of militancy.

“There was a basis for effective group action. People sensed that potential, and also, no Black person at this time could get away without defining their lives at least in part in terms of the struggle that was going on in the larger society.”

While Bill studied Swahili and met African leaders in the internationalist community around Columbia, he also reunited with Max Stanford.

“Max had been working with Malcolm in the OAAU period [the Organization of Afro-American Unity] and I ran into him shortly after Malcolm was assassinated. Max helped me get oriented to the scene in NY.”

“Gym” Crow & Early Alliances

In ‘68 the off-campus and on-campus movements were to come together. Columbia University had admitted Black students while continuing to be a smug and racist institution, completely out of touch with the neighboring Harlem community. The university occupies a small area of land, one side of which is a cliff overlooking the public Morningside Park, which is used primarily by the Harlem community. Columbia worked out an arrangement through its shady Board of Trustees’ ruling-class connections to lease public land for the site of a new gym. Originally the gym was intended to be in Morningside Park, and to be completely closed to community residents. When the community objected to that Columbia started construction of two gyms: a large one for Columbia students and a smaller one for the community residents. Protesting the “Jim Crow Gym” brought together many different insurgent communities.

Already alliances between SDS and the African American students organization had developed through two experiences. By 1967 the university had allowed the student athletes to be developed into a right-wing firing squad that attacked SDS demonstrations.

“So one day Black students went out there. We had our own beef with these cats because they were racists. So we joined in to help the SDS guys because those people just didn’t know how to fight. Not that they weren’t game, they just didn’t know what to do in that kind of situation. So we went out and knocked heads with these jocks.”

CORE was trying to organize a union among the mostly African-American and Latino workers on campus. Black students and some of SDS became involved.

“Ted Gold, one of the activists that got blown up in the townhouse [a member of Weatherman who was killed during an explosion at a safe house in NY on March 6, 1970], was very active in that. We all knew Gold long before we knew Rudd and those cats. The hell with them! They were off on some trip, but we knew the folks that were down. They were down long before it was fashionable to be down.

“One of the things that really got to me about Rudd was how you write a book confessing all the things you did were wrong. That’s bullshit! It wasn’t wrong just because you lost and it didn’t work. There’s a difference between winning and losing and being wrong.”

Alliances off-campus were also very important to the Black students. In ‘67 there was a Black Power Conference in Maryland that had a special meeting for student activists.

“There were no more than 10 or 15 people in the place, but the following spring we were all involved in building takeovers on our different campuses. Herman Ferguson [an important Black activist and political prisoner, Ferguson was involved both in the Republic of New Afrika and the OAAU] was there that day; he was already on the lam.”

Bill became involved in an underground student group called “cadre.” The members were at different campuses. They took karate, studied, and made contact with various groups in Harlem.

MS: Why were you clandestine?

BS: “This was an era when people got shot. H. Rap Brown was already underground. Some of the people we worked with were underground. It wasn’t as if we were planning to blow things up. But we felt that what we were doing was objectively revolutionary. And you just didn’t run around in a public organization. We assigned ourselves public organizations on campus to be in.”

The Columbia Strike

In April and May of 1968 Columbia University exploded into the famous strike and blockade. During those months over 1,000 students occupied four buildings on campus, fought the police, and held a dean hostage (briefly).

The role of the Black students in these events has been somewhat eclipsed in popular accounts. After describing the alliances on campus and off-campus that had been developed over the previous years, Bill described the day the decision was made to occupy the first building.

“1968 in some ways appeared to be spontaneous. On the day the takeover occurred none of us had planned a takeover.”

Bill and his friends went down to an SDS demonstration at the sundial [a central location on the main part of the Columbia campus] to fight the jocks and to support the new president of the Afro-American Students Organization who was speaking.

“When I got there I swear there were 5,000 people. It was a total shocker. I expected 200 people or so—the usual demonstration. The jocks were completely neutralized. The demonstration started by trying to take some demands into the president of Columbia University, but he closed his office building. The Black students wanted to storm the building, but Rudd said no. Someone in Progressive Labor said: ‘Let’s charge the gym site.’ So we all ran down.”

Community activists and campus activists had recently been arrested demonstrating at the site.

“We ran down 1,000 strong and all hell broke loose. It’s the first and only time I ever got into actual combat with the police. We should have all been dead but there was a sergeant who pulled his forces back. At that time I was trying to break this cop’s thumb because I said “If he gets his gun out I’m a dead person.”

“I had only jumped him because one of his associates had started hitting one of our guys and then one of CADRE punched him out. This guy was facing me so I grabbed his wrist and twisted him around. I didn’t want to fight this cat and he didn’t want to fight me. I said I can take this guy; he’s scared of me. He’ll shoot me out of fear if he gets his gun out. People don’t realize how things escalate. Lethal confrontations that nobody means to happen—people were all fighting and this sergeant comes down and tells his men to back off and leave us alone. He recognized that it was Harlem and if they grabbed a bunch of Black students all hell would break loose.”

Bill stressed how many different people had their own organizations then and were prepared for confrontation. The Black women on campus, repulsed by the sexism of the African-American students group, had their own organization with their own community contacts.

“They didn’t want to get everything through the guys. That meant that independently they had come to the same decisions we had come to, and they had a structure for functioning. When the shit hit the fan they weren’t tailing behind the men.”

After the confrontation at the gym site SDS and the Black students occupied the first building. While SDS leaders remained ambiguous about the decisions to occupy buildings for several days, the Black Students were firm from the beginning and influenced the actions of the rest of the campus.

The Movement Today?

When asked about the Black movement today Bill said:

“There is no Black movement today. There are a number of different people who are struggling as organizations or individuals, but a movement would imply a consensus on some very basic demands; a clear understanding of who the enemy is and some notion of what the future would look like. We don’t have that yet. I hope we’re building to it...

MS: Is there anything you’d like to say about white solidarity?

BS: “I think there are some obvious errors that white leftists have made that they don’t need to make again! The arrogance and paternalism in relationship to the Black movement—to assume that you know what’s right for everyone because you have a revolutionary analysis of society, etc., etc. To see a certain kind of division of labor—you provide the intellectual muscle and the troops come from various Third World communities—that’s disastrous.

“A second thing that we really want is to build up a left inside of white working-class communities. We need to develop another pole in the communities that have been conceded to the fascists. That has been very difficult to do and very dangerous. That’s why it’s not done much! It’s actually easier for a white person to work in communities of color. Once they know you’re for real, people aren’t hostile to you, whereas in the white communities you can get murdered!

“A third point is not to get manipulated by feelings of guilt. There are a whole lot of opportunists in the Black and Latino communities who’ll try to manipulate you because you are white. You have to stand up for what you believe in.

“And then of course it’s important to study hard, be humble, and really listen. I know that as a 52-year-old one of the really frustrating things is trying to pass on your knowledge to the generation coming behind, because they think they know more than you already. But without an open mind you can screw up and repeat past `mistakes.’”

`Harlem vs. Columbia University: Black Student Power in the Late 1960s'--Review of Stefan Bradley's new book

HARLEM VS. COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
Black Student Power in the Late 1960s
By Stefan M. Bradley
Urbana and Chicago : University of Illinois Press (2009)

In the epilogue of his great new book on the historic 1968 student revolt at Columbia University , Harlem vs. Columbia University,

http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/69erx5xt9780252034527.html

which “attempts to draw out some of the important factors that contributed to the 1968-69 uprisings,” St. Louis University Professor of History and African American Studies Stefan Bradley notes that “although many of the participants have since passed on, the issues at Columbia seem to linger.” This was borne out at a 2008 commemoration event held on Columbia’s campus to mark the 40th anniversary of the student revolt. A Harlem Tenants Council activist denounced the Columbia Administration's current 17-acre campus expansion project in the neighborhood north of West 125th St. and passed out a flyer in which the Coalition to Preserve Community group of community residents vowed to stand against Columbia ’s “ West Harlem eviction plan.”

Professor Bradley also observes that over 40 years after the student revolt, some of the black students who participated in the non-violent student occupation of Hamilton Hall in April 1968, “bristle at the image of the Columbia demonstration that media sources often invoke” and “are dismayed at the representation of the rebellion as one where raucous white youth defied their parents and authority by taking over buildings…”

A key reason why the white students at Columbia and Barnard who were active in its Students for a Democratic Society [SDS) chapter were able to mobilize large numbers of white students to help shut down Columbia a few weeks after Martin Luther King’s assassination was because a political alliance developed between Columbia SDS and the black students who were most active in the Student Afro-American Society [SAS] campus group. So a book like Professor Bradley’s book, which focuses more on the role that the black students who occupied Hamilton Hall played in the 1968 Columbia Student Revolt than on the role of Mark Rudd and the white student demonstrators, is long overdue.

By examining the 1968 confrontation between the Harlem community (and its student supporters at Columbia) and Columbia’s board of trustees, Bradley attempts to: (1) explain how it was possible for Columbia to take land and power from black people before 1968; (2) determine the effects of the confrontation method that the 1968-69 student protesters used; (3) explain why the black and white student protesters separated after Columbia’s Hamilton Hall was jointly seized by them; and (4) explain why Columbia eventually capitulated to some of the demands of the student demonstrators. The first part of Harlem vs. Columbia University explores Columbia’s historic relationship to Harlem’s people and land, while the second part of the book examines the historic role students played in attempting to change Columbia’s institutional policies.

The first part of Harlem vs. Columbia University includes an interesting history of the Harlem and Morningside Heights neighborhoods surrounding Columbia’s campus and explains why community resident opposition to Columbia developed. Bradley recalls that “there was only one full-time black faculty member at Columbia by the mid-1960s;” and, during the 1960s, 9,600 tenants, “approximately 85 percent of whom were black or Puerto Rican,” were pushed out of the Morningside Heights and West Harlem apartment buildings or Single-Room Occupancy [SRO] residential hotels which Columbia University purchased and demolished or converted for its own institutional use.

Bradley next focuses more specifically on Columbia’s plan to construct a gymnasium for its students in Harlem’s Morningside Park and the history of community protests against this project. We learn, for example, that in a January 29, 1966 editorial, Harlem’s African-American newspaper, the Amsterdam News warned:

“If Mayor Lindsay permits Columbia University to grab two acres of land out of Morningside Park for a gymnasium it will be a slap in the face to every black man, woman and child in Harlem…Columbia University, one of the richest institutions in the nation, only admits a handful of Negro scholars each year and its policies in dealing with Negroes in Harlem have been described as downright bigoted…Why then should the parents of Harlem give up their parkland to Columbia? What has Columbia done to merit such favoritism?”

Thirty-one years before, W.E.B. DuBois had also written in his classic 1935 book Black Reconstruction In America that “the Columbia school of historians and social investigators have issued between 1895 and the present time sixteen studies of Reconstruction in the Southern States, all based on the same thesis and all done according to the same method: first, endless sympathy with the white South; second, ridicule, contempt or silence for the Negro…”

By digging up flyers of various 1960s community groups and articles that appeared in various neighborhood newspapers and the local African-American press, Bradley indicates that between April 1966 and March 1968 there were at least four community rallies against Columbia’s gym construction project and at least 25 arrests of anti-gym protesters before April 1968. As Bradley observes:

“After realizing that they would receive access to only 15 percent of the proposed structure that Columbia University would control, and be forced to use a different entrance, many black residents in the community saw that things were once more separate, but hardly equal…Instead of fighting against Jim Crow, the community now fought against Gym Crow…”

In the second part of his book, Bradley relates the growth of the New Left and Black Power movements on U.S. university campuses during the 1960s and describes the initially integrated protest effort of the black and white student demonstrators at Columbia on April 23, 1968, on campus and at the Morningside Park gym construction site as well as inside Hamilton Hall during the first few hours. He goes on to show how the black student protesters in Hamilton Hall won some concessions from the Columbia Administration by aligning themselves with off-campus Black Liberation Movement groups and the Harlem community. Bradley also provides a good description of what happened inside Hamilton Hall, after the white student demonstrators were told to leave Hamilton Hall and explains the political and strategic rationale of SAS leaders for their decision to separate themselves from their white student allies.

Bradley goes on to indicate the supportive role of SDS and its objective of increasing white student support for the Black Liberation Movement at Columbia and includes a description of what happened when a thousand New York City police were called in by the Columbia Administration on April 30, 1968, to arrest student protesters.

Bradley breaks some new ground in late 1960s Columbia historiography by showing how, “at Columbia, the strategies and goals of Black Student Power continued into the spring of 1969 as the black student group, with the support of SDS, called for changes in admission policies” and observes that in the 1960s Columbia’s black students “were regularly stopped by the security guards…to have their identifications checked while most white students were not stopped.” Bradley is among the first historians to write a detailed historical summary about black student activism on Columbia’s campus during the 1968-69 academic year. He also provides a concise summary of black student protests at Harvard, Yale, University of Pennsylvania and Cornell (that received less mass media publicity than did the 1968 Columbia student protests) which reveals to readers that Columbia University was “not the only Ivy League university to be impacted by Black Power” in the late 1960s. Yet as late as 1984 there were still only three tenured black professors at Columbia and the university did not recognize a black studies program until 1987.

One very useful feature of the book is a collection of rare photographs of some of the black participants in the 1968 Columbia uprising and the excavated gymnasium construction site in Morningside Park that weren’t included in most previously-published books about the student revolt. But there are also a few omissions or inaccuracies in the book. For example, it inaccurately states that Mark Rudd “decided not to return to school” in the Fall of 1968, when--as Rudd notes in his recent autobiography, Underground-- he was actually expelled from Columbia. In addition, although Bradley notes that “SAS and SDS participated in student-supported on-campus demonstrations throughout the month of May”, readers of the book would not learn that on May 21, 1968, the Columbia Administration called police onto its campus a second time, the police rioted again and, a leader of SAS, Ray Brown, was clubbed to the ground and then kicked systematically by a crowd of cops.

Despite these few omissions or inaccuracies, Harlem vs. Columbia University does a much better job than previously published books about the 1968 Columbia Student Revolt of-- from a deeper anti-racist perspective-- highlighting the relationship of the late 1960s Black Power Movement, the history of the Harlem community, the Black radical left and left nationalist intelligentsia and the role of Black students and Harlem community activists to what happened at Columbia in 1968 and 1969 and the current position of African-Americans in the Ivy League academic world. So if you’re interested in the history of 1960s movements, Harlem and Columbia University or if you’re a 21st-century opponent of institutional racism at Columbia University and at other Ivy League universities, Harlem vs. Columbia University should be considered required reading.

`Reader's Digest''s Hidden History--Part 12

(The following article originally appeared in the October 27, 1993 issue of the now-defunct alternative Lower East Side weekly, Downtown. Between 2007 and its recent bankruptcy, Reader’s Digest has been owned by Citigroup board member Tim Collins’ Ripplewood Holdings’ private investment/leveraged buy-out firm. See below for parts 1 to 11 of article).

About 53 percent of the non-voting stock of the profit-making Reader’s Digest Association was owned by “non-profit” institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lincoln Center and the New York Zoological Society in the early 1990s. But the DeWitt Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund and the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund which Mr. & Mrs. Wallace established before their deaths in the 1980s still owned over 50 percent of the voting stock of the Reader’s Digest Association, as well as about 30 percent of its non-voting stock, in the early 1990s.

The “non-profit” DeWitt Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund owned $1.1 billion in assets and was the 15th-largest U.S. foundation in terms of assets in the early 1990s. The “non-profit” Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund owned $802 million in assets and was the 20th-largest U.S. foundation in terms of assets in the early 1990s. And the same U.S. Establishment figures who directed both the “non-profit” DeWitt Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund and the “non-profit” Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund also directed the then-profit-making Reader’s Digest Association Incorporated in the early 1990s. (end of part 12)

(Downtown 10/27/93)

`Reader's Digest''s Hidden History--Part 11

(The following article originally appeared in the October 27, 1993 issue of the now-defunct alternative Lower East Side weekly, Downtown. Between 2007 and its recent bankruptcy, Reader’s Digest has been owned by Citigroup board member Tim Collins’ Ripplewood Holdings’ private investment/leveraged buy-out firm. See below for parts 1 to 10 of article).

As a result of their 100 percent ownership of the Reader’s Digest Association’s voting stock, both DeWitt “Wally” Wallace and Lila Acheson Wallace became quite wealthy during their lives [before both dying in the early 1980s]. Fortune magazine estimated DeWitt Wallace’s worth at nearly $300 million [in 1960s money] in 1968 and this made the Reader’s Digest co-founder among the 31 wealthiest men in the United States at that time, according to Theirs Was The Kingdom by John Heidenry. The same book also noted that, at the time of her death in 1984 at the age of 95, Reader’s Digest co-founder Lila Acheson Wallace “was the richest woman in the United States,” with a net worth of at least $250 million [in 1980s money] that was “two and a half times the size of the estate left by Henry Luce” of the Time-Life magazines media conglomerate.

As early as 1935, Mr. & Mrs. Wallace had pocketed a huge fortune from their Reader’s Digest publishing hustle and they used part of this fortune to buy 105 acres of land in Mount Kisco, New York, upon which the childless couple built a 22-room castle called “High Winds”—during the height of the Great Depression. Although Mr. & Mrs. Wallace were quite eager to spend $277,336 [of 1930s money] in the 1930s to build their “Reader’s Digest Castle,” in 1936 their Reader’s Digest Association only donated $4,418 to 13 organizations, including “a check for a mere $10” to the American National Red Cross, according to Theirs Was The Kingdom. The same book noted, however, that “As the Digest’s fortune grew, Wally and Lila…established trust funds for numerous members of the Wallace and Acheson families.” But over $500,000 [in 1930s money] per year from their Reader’s Digest Association’s gross income was personally taken home by Mr. & Mrs. Wallace in the form of salaries during the late 1930s.

To reduce their federal income tax bills, Mr. and Mrs. Wallace apparently utilized the “non-profit” philanthropic foundations which they established. As Theirs Was The Kingdom revealed in the early 1990s:

“Wally’s greatest vulnerability lay with his philanthropies, which he often used as a cover to pad the retirement or compensation packages of favored employees…He arranged for Digesters to serve on the boards of organizations to which he gave money. But honorariums, free travel, and other perquisites—many of them nontaxable—were often involved. Another of Wally’s tax-evading ploys was to arrange for the children of privileged Digesters to travel abroad courtesy of the Reader’s Digest Association’s Foreign Study League…”

(end of part 11)

(Downtown 10/27/93)

Firefighter Appeals For New 9/11/01 Investigation

On the Fire Fighters For 9-11 Truth blog

http://firefightersfor911truth.org/

, a retired firefighter named Anton Vodvarka recently made the following appeal for a new investigation of what actually happened on 9/11/01 in Downtown Manhatan:

An Appeal to Firefighters, Present and Past

Fellow Firefighters, A great tragedy befell our community on September 11, 2001, an unprecedented 343 deaths in the line of duty. As horrible as that toll is, if there were a rational explanation for it, we could accept it and mourn. We all understood the risk we accepted when we took the oath of office, that chance might cut short our lives when we placed ourselves in harm’s way in the public’s service. This is what we are paid for and it is our honor. However, in short, the official explanation of the events of that day are not only insufficient, they are fantastic and cannot bear rational examination. We are asked to believe that on that day three structural steel buildings, which have never before in history collapsed because of fire, fell neatly into their basements at the speed of gravity, their concrete reduced to dust. We are asked to believe that jet fuel (kerosene) can melt steel. We are asked to believe that the most sophisticated air defense system in the world, that responded to sixty-eight emergencies in the year prior to 9-11 in less than twenty minutes allowed aircraft to wander about for up to an hour and a half. We are asked to believe that the steel and titanium components of an aircraft that supposedly hit the Pentagon “evaporated”. There is much, much more if anyone cares to look into it. Trade Tower #7 by itself is the “smoking gun”. Not hit by an aircraft, with only a few relatively small fires, it came down in a classic crimp and implosion, going straight into its basement, something only very precise demolition can accomplish, which takes days if not weeks to prepare. The 9-11 Commission actually stated the they DIDN’T KNOW WHY IT COLLAPSED AND LEFT IT AT THAT. Brothers, I know that the implications of the above are hard, almost unthinkable, but the official explanation is utter nonsense, and three hundred and forty three murdered brothers are crying out for justice. Demand a genuine investigation into the events of September 11!

-Anton Vodvarka, Lt. FDNY (ret)

Lt. Vodvarka served on FDNY Ladder Co 26, Rescue Co. 3, Rescue Co. 1, Engine Co. 92, Ladder 82 and Ladder 101. He was awarded the Merit Class 1 award, the Prentice Medal

`Reader's Digest''s Hidden History--Part 10

(The following article originally appeared in the October 27, 1993 issue of the now-defunct alternative Lower East Side weekly, Downtown. Between 2007 and its 2011 bankruptcy, Reader’s Digest  was owned by Citigroup board member Tim Collins’ Ripplewood Holdings’ private investment/leveraged buy-out firm. See below for parts 1 to 9 of article).

In 1950, the Reader’s Digest Association established its lucrative Reader’s Digest Condensed Book Club which condenses a number of novels and/or nonfiction books into one volume and distributes these volumes around the globe to its members. The Reader’s Digest Condensed Book Club quickly became the largest book club in the world, with over 2.5 million members by 1955.

In 1955, after its newsstand sales began to drop when many of its readers began buying TV sets, Reader’s Digest then began to sell ad space for the first time in its U.S. edition to make up for its lost revenues. Reader’s Digest has also sold ad space to U.S. corporations like Eastman Kodak, Gillette, international Harvest, Exxon, Mobil, U.S. Steel, Texaco and Lockheed in its international edition. By 1980, a full page ad in the U.S. edition of Reader’s Digest cost $65,000 (in 1980s money) per issue.

Although $1.6 million worth of Reader’s Digest equipment at its Havana, Cuba plant—that had been used to produce its Spanish-language edition for Latin America—was confiscated in June 1960, following the Cuban Revolution, the Reader’s Digest Association continued to prosper during the Vietnam War Era of the 1960s and early 1970s. A division to sell vinyl record albums around the globe, which had been set up in 1959, had also proven to be quite profitable.

By 1980, the Reader’s Digest Association was a billion dollar/year business that employed 10,000 people around the globe and earned $100 million (in 1980s money) per year in profits. But in 1981, Reader’s Digest co-founder DeWitt Wallace died at the age of 91 and, in 1984, Reader’s Digest co-founder Lila Acheson Wallace died at the age of 95. (end of part 10)

(Downtown 10/27/93)

`Reader's Digest''s Hidden History--Part 9

(The following article originally appeared in the October 27, 1993 issue of the now-defunct alternative Lower East Side weekly, Downtown. Between 2007 and its 2011 bankruptcy, Reader’s Digest was owned by Citigroup board member Tim Collins’ Ripplewood Holdings’ private investment/leveraged buy-out firm. See below for parts 1 to 8 of article).

According to the book Little Wonder by John Bainbridge, the “transformation of the Reader’s Digest into something other than a digest began in the early 1930s.” The magazine began to hire writers directly to produce articles for Reader’s Digest to reprint—after Reader’s Digest first “planted” these same articles in other magazines. Theirs Was The Kingdom by John Heidenry recalled: “The Digest…subsidized original articles in its client magazines” like Harper’s and the Atlantic Monthly, but “nowhere in those magazines, were readers given notice that articles purporting to be original with the respective editor of each publication were, in fact, either original with the Digest or paid for with Digest money.” According to Little Wonder:

“In the five years from 1939 through 1943, the Digest planted articles in more than 60 publications…Of 47 articles reprinted from Harper’s, eight were Digest plants; of 39 furnished by the Atlantic Monthly, eight were plants;…of eight taken from The Nation, five were plants; of 26 credited to the New Republic, eight were plants and 13 others were on the Digest’s presses before the New Republic appeared on the stands with them…The Digest gave Commonwealth credit for nine reprinted articles; all were plants…”

By 1962, according to Theirs Was The Kingdom, “articles planted in other magazines for reprinting later in the Digest now constituted 70 percent of every issue in the U.S. edition.” Its policy of subsidizing and planting articles in other magazines before re-printing them in Reader’s Digest “gave the Digest power to propagandize its right-wing political views across a broad spectrum of the periodical press,” according to a reference book titled The Magazine In America. (end of part 9)

(Downtown 10/27/93)