Take a few moments to read this sickly delicious story from a former Los Angeles Times reporter about what it was like to cover the LAPD when Daryl Gates ran the thing. Under Gates, the department's Public Disorder Intelligence Division had two hundred cops, and they spent the better part of their work week searching for public disorder in the trash cans and gloveboxes of local journalists, activists, and politicians. The chief would interrupt interviews to tell reporters who they were having sex with, what recreational drugs they preferred, and precisely what they had ordered for dinner last night. Now what was your question, again?

The LAPD was one of many law enforcement agencies known for similar behavior. Historians will surely add to the list, but the examples include the FBI's files on members of Congress, the detectives at the Birmingham Police Department who were assigned as the agency's liaison to the Klan in order to coordinate the necessary police absences around bombings, and the Alabama State Police red squad that converted with ease to an anti-integration dirty tricks outfit.

In a thoughtful post and subsequent comments at the Crolian Progressive, Jeremy Young joins our discussion here about the Wisconsin GOP's public records request for William Cronon's email messages. He draws this distinction in Cronon's defense:

"I think where we differ is that you see Cronon’s actions as those of a political player, and I see them as those of an ordinary citizen...As an ordinary citizen, Cronon has the right to make statements against the government without the government or its political supporters retaliating against him."

I don't disagree -- depending on what we mean by"retaliating," because I think politicians have a right to fight their critics and opponents, within reasonable boundaries -- but I also think this"right" has rarely appeared in the American past. Federalist mobs dragged Republican newspaper editors into the street for beatings, then threw their presses in the nearest river. (Federalist officials prosecuted the editors, and imprisoned them.) Wartime censorship has been the norm, with shuttered newspapers and the threat of prison for critics of the government. Nixon's plumbers broke into the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist. Name your own favorite half-dozen examples.

It seems to me -- and this is my feeling, not something I can prove -- that we've turned several corners in our own moment, but that we've turned them in different directions.

On the one hand, Bradley Manning is approaching the one-year anniversary of his exceptionally punitive pre-trial detention, beyond the reach of decency and normal legal process as the government delivers its sentence first, verdict afterward. (And the president overseeing George Bush's third term shamefully pronounces that Manning's detention is"meeting our basic standards.") My guess is that Manning is a very young man whose life is essentially over: he'll eventually be convicted, and will almost certainly be locked away for all or most of his life, though I'd like to wrong about that. It seems to be an extremely dangerous time to be an individual who embarrasses the government.

On the other hand, and I'm willing to be argued out of this position, has there ever been a safer time to be an academic? Ward Churchill and Michael Bellesiles were both targeted over their politics, but finally destroyed by their own recklessness and dishonesty. Norman Finkelstein's career is permanently stalled over his open-throated attacks on Zionism. That's the list of politically damaged careers that I can think of, though I'm sure others can improve on it. For the most part, it seems to me that the biggest threat to academics in 2011 is good luck getting a job, or good luck getting a tenure-track job. But if you can make tenure track somewhere, the likelihood is that you'll retire thirty years later without having been plausibly threatened with destruction over a political matter. Rashid Khalidi has been under attack for years; has he been seriously damaged? Our harbor seems like one of the safest places to be moored, right now.

A measure of the current political safety of academia is that the Wisconsin GOP has thrown an obviously weak and hapless punch at William Cronon, and it has resulted in a substantial controversy over academic freedom. Perhaps it's best to seriously affronted by this sort of dismal provocation, and perhaps that's why academic rights seem to be more secure today than they have been in, for example, the ugliest days of the Cold War. But surely the threat against Cronon registers at a lower point on a long historical scale.

ADDED LATER: But here's another piece of evidence that political attacks on professors are spreading.