Essay: THE PETITION GAME: Look Before Signing

WHEN the Chartists marched on Parliament in 1839 to protest the plight of Britain’s working class they did not, as some feared, batter down the doors. Instead, in a tactic they were to use twice more in the next decade, they brought forth a scroll that stretched for three miles and contained 1,200,000 signatures. Each time the lawmakers bluntly rejected their demands. Despite this failure, the Chartist movement was a dramatic expression of a right that runs threadlike through Anglo-American history, secured in Eng land first by the barons, then by Parliament, and finally by the people. In the U.S., the right “to petition the government for a redress of grievances,” protected in the First Amendment of the Constitution, importantly reinforces the power of the ballot and gives citizens the chance to practice a kind of instant democracy.

Today, although well-oiled lobbying may be more effective and mass demonstrations more dramatic, the U.S. is witnessing a marked resurgence of petitions. With Chartist fervor, miles of signatures are collected each year on hand-drawn circulars passed from neighbor to neighbor, in organized mail campaigns, or to adorn elaborate newspaper ads. The greatest impetus to the petition business has been Viet Nam, but other, infinitely varied causes range from civic issues, such as the restoration of trolleys on New Orleans’ Canal Street, to campus concerns, such as student demands at Berkeley that the university hospital provide birth control devices on request.

In November, 327 statewide propositions will appear on the ballot in 46 states, plus countless others on local ballots, many of them placed there by citizens’ petition campaigns. Thanks to petitions, New York City voters will decide on the city’s new civilian-dominated police review board, Nebraskans will vote on the state’s recently enacted income tax laws, and Columbus residents will determine whether they want to keep their old Central Market — even though it has already been razed. In California, where petitioners succeeded in getting a dubious anti-obscenity measure on the ballot (TIME, Sept. 30), several other drives fell short of the necessary signatures, including one to ban pay toilets.

Ads Hoc

For best results, the petitioning art requires showmanship. Thus, last February, 100 Minnesota women lugged a 680-ft.-long petition to a congressional hearing, won plenty of press coverage that helped secure a hefty appropriation for the federal school-lunch program. But the chief attention getters are the proliferating newspaper advertisements on such issues as nuclear disarmament, civil rights and Viet Nam. The ads, bearing massed names in eye-straining type, are sponsored by organizations that seem almost ritualistically to include the tag ad hoc in their titles, such as the Ad Hoc Committee of Veterans for Peace in Viet Nam. Many of them are prepared by advertising-agency volunteers, notably those from Doyle Dane Bernbach, who helped develop the disarmament ads sponsored by the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE).

On national issues, the New York Times is the favorite petition medium, followed by the Washington Post. In the past two years, the Times has carried at least 15 major petition ads on Viet Nam, at $6,000 a page. Biggest was a three-page spread in June that catalogued 6,000 academicians and professional men opposed to U.S. Viet Nam policy. Dr. Rodger Swearingen, a political scientist at the University of Southern California, checked out each name (some were used twice). His conclusion: hardly any of the signers had any expertise in foreign affairs.

While no one questions any citizen’s right to sign any petition, the very use of academic or other titles may lend a petition an unwarranted air of authority. Invoking big names, a practice that psychologists call “prestige suggestion,” is becoming as commonplace in petitioning as it has long been in product testimonials. Harvard Biochemist Konrad Bloch, a Nobel-prizewinner who recently signed a petition protesting chemical warfare in Viet Nam, believes that a scientist’s renown should carry weight only in his own field. Otherwise, he says, “the fact that you are a Nobel laureate should be irrelevant. But it never is. When these letters are gotten together, they choose people who sound impressive to the public.”

Others heatedly reply that as a citizen, the scientist has a right and duty to speak out on public issues. But what riles Political Scientist John Roche, President Johnson’s new intellectual consultant, is petitions like the one in which 198 “Asia scholars” assailed U.S. policy toward Red China. “Apparently,” says Roche, “anybody who collected Chinese stamps was authorized to sign it.” To answer that petition, a New York Times ad last month opposed Red China’s admission to the U.N.; it was supported by 30,000 U.S. clergymen (see LETTERS).

Letters Preferred

Signing of petitions may have become too automatic. The situation does not fully parallel that of the 1930s, when the Communists produced machine-tooled party-line petitions at a moment’s notice; politics of protest today are more splintered and piecemeal. But there does exist a lot of uncritical conformity. Freedom House Chairman Leo Cherne observes: “One does not earn one’s credentials on a university campus today without signing an anti-Viet Nam petition.” Philosopher Sidney Hook, who believes that petitions are of value on specific and neglected causes, feels that on complex, emotion-charged issues they are apt to be muddled. “Like mass meetings, they do not permit any nuance of judgment,” says Hook, because “any statement that many people find satisfactory must be based on the lowest common denominator.”

The impact of petitions is hard to measure. No doubt they dramatized—and perhaps exaggerated—the intellectual community’s discontent with U.S. Viet Nam war policy. By now, however, petitioning ads have become seriously overworked. Donald Keys, SANE’s executive director, says: “Now it’s not enough to run full-page ads in the New York Times. You have to run double-page spreads.” In fact, petitions are apt to be most successful on local issues. Nationally, a notable failure involved the school prayer amendment, which again died in Congress, even though Sponsor Everett Dirksen could point to petitions signed by some 500,000 people. While Dirksen professes to take the “wagonloads” of such documents seriously, most Washington legislators are wary of them, suspect that many people do not know what they are signing.

Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield confesses: “Frankly, I prefer private letters.” The National Association of Manufacturers finds it far more effective, says a spokesman, “to send the head of one member plant into the office of a Senator than to send him a petition full of names of all the heads of our member plants.” Of campus-circulated petitions, Harvard Historian Oscar Handlin, a confirmed non-signer, says: “I think they have no effect whatsoever except to let people blow off steam. In the past, the academic community was more responsible and therefore more effective.”

In the U.S., the right of petition has been abridged on occasion, as in 1836 when the House of Representatives’ “gag rule” cut off abolitionist demands. Fortunately, the right has survived all such challenges. If, however, the petition is to remain a meaningful force for “redress of grievances,” it must be employed more sparingly—and as a precise, if impassioned, plea rather than as a manufactured publicity device.