The threat and fear of Big Brother contributed to the rise of the right to know. (Photograph by 20th Century Fox)

Transparency scholars and advocates have often said that freedom of information laws are a reaction to a growth in government – something I’ve found can be seen at the very beginnings of the modern right to know movement.

In a 2015 paper, public administration professor Alasdair Roberts wrote that such growth happens “either because the country confronts some new challenge, or has the opportunity to adopt some new technology of administration. These movements create risks, such as the possibility that an expanded or more complex bureaucracy might slip from the legislative or public control. Sometimes there are scandals or abuses that give evidence of these new risks. Then there is a countermovement, concerned with the imposition of openness requirements and procedural checks,” which include transparency measures such as freedom of information laws.¹Alasdair Roberts, “Too much transparency? How critics of openness misunderstand administrative development,” (paper prepared for the Fourth Global Conference on Transparency Research, Lugano, Switzerland, June 4-6, 2015).

In the United States, just such a countermovement began in earnest in the early 1950s, as journalists, politicians and others started expressing concerns about the “omnipotent administration” of the “superstate,” which was “so vividly pictured by George Orwell in his novel 1984.”²House Committee on Government Operations, Twenty-Fifth Intermediate Report of the Committee on Government Operations, 74. That countermovement included the publication of The People’s Right to Know. Commissioned by the American Society of News Editors in October 1950 and printed three years later by Columbia University Press, it was the first “scholarly, legally documented presentation on the subject” of freedom of information in the United States.³James S. Pope, Forward to The People’s Right to Know: Legal Access to Public Records and Proceedings by Harold L. Cross (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953), ix.

The 405-page book “nearly sold out within a week of its publication date,” despite a weighty US$5.50 price tag – just over $50 in today’s money.⁴J.R. Wiggins, “An arsenal of arguments for the right to know,” Washington Post, April 26, 1953. Reviewing the book in the Washington Post, the paper’s managing editor James R. Wiggins remarked that such popularity wasn’t surprising since it contained “information so essential to the exercise of a fundamental right.”⁵J.R. Wiggins, “An arsenal of arguments for the right to know,” Washington Post, April 26, 1953. Yet it was New York Times general Louis M. Loeb who offered the most insight into that purported popularity. In his own review of the book, Loeb described it as a timely and helpful text because its publication coincided with Americans’ search for a  “new balance” between “the citizen and his Government owing to the tremendously enlarged field in which the Government enters the life of every citizen”⁶Louis M. Loeb, “The Need for Facts,” New York Times, May 17, 1953. – foretelling one of the principle arguments that would be made in favour of the public’s right to know.

The dangers of atomic bomb tests like this one – conducted by France in the Sahara on February 13, 1960 – contributed to the rise of the right to know movement. (Photograph by ITAR-TASS News Agency/Alamy Stock Photo)

“The obligation to endure gives us the right to know.”¹Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1962; New York, NY: Mariner Books, 2002), 14. Anyone who has read Silent Spring, the 1962 book that “ignited”²Eliza Griswold, “How ‘Silent Spring’ Ignited the Environmental Movement,” New York Times, September 21, 2012. the environmental movement, will remember that phrase. Indeed, it was one of author and biologist Rachel Carson’s favourites.³Samuel A. Tower, “Rachel Carson is Pictured on New 17-Cent Issue,” New York Times, May 31, 1981. Since then, it has been repeatedly used to argue for the disclosure of information about how science, corporations and governments may be damaging us and our environment.⁴David C. Vladeck, “Information Access – Surveying the Current Legal Landscape of Federal Right-to-Know Laws,” Texas Law Review 86, no. 7 (June 2008): 1787. But French scientist and philosopher Jean Rostand, who coined that phrase on April 21, 1960 while accepting the Kalinga Prize for the popularization of science,⁵UNESCO Courier, “Jean Rostand Receives Kalinga Prize,” UNESCO Courier, June, 1960 was concerned with a specific kind of damage.

Earlier that month, on April 1, France completed its second atomic bomb test. The test, which took place at the atomic proving grounds at Reggan in southwestern Algeria, exploded with a force of “less than 19,000 tons of TNT, which was the power of the United States atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima.”⁶W. Granger Blair, “Compact A-Bomb Closer in France: Sizable Step Taken Toward Operational Device with Second Sahara Blast,” New York Times, April 2, 1960. That explosion, and the 16 others that France detonated in the Sahara, “vitrified vast tracts of desert with heat and plutonium and left a legacy of uncontained radiation that is still crippling inhabitants.”⁷Johnny Magdaleno, “Algerians Suffering from French Atomic Legacy, 55 Years After Nuke Tests,” Al Jazeera, March 1, 2015, http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/3/1/algerians-suffering-from-french-atomic-legacy-55-years-after-nuclear-tests.html accessed March 12, 2018

At the time of the second detonation, representatives of 22 Asian and African nations called for a special session of the United Nations General Assembly to consider those tests.⁸Special to the New York Times, “French A-Tests Scored: Africans and Asians Again Ask Special U.N. Session,” New York Tines, April 6, 1960. But, on April 14, those representatives only had 36 of the 42 votes they needed to do so, out of the 82 nations casting ballots. According to the New York Times, one reason for the defeat of the special session was a feeling that since French President Charles de Gaulle was going to be in the city between April 26-27 “it would have been discourteous to take this means of protesting his decision to make France a nuclear power.”⁹Thomas J. Hamilton, “Neutrals in the U.N.: Asian-African Differences Pointed Up by Defeat of Move on Atom Tests,” New York Times, April 17, 1960.

That vote happened just seven days after an American Chemical Society symposium designed to “describe in detail the path of nuclear particles from bombs through the soil, plants, food, animals, and milk into human bone and tissue.”¹⁰Frank Carey, “85 per cent of fallout now down,” Washington Post, April 8, 1960. During the symposium, Columbia University geochemistry professor John Laurence Kulp said that plants used for food may have picked up “less radioactive poison than earlier calculations indicated.”¹¹Editorial, “Qualified Comfort,” Cincinnati Enquirer, April 7, 1960. However, Wright Haskell Langham, the group leader for the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory’s biomedical research division, also said fallout from past nuclear weapon tests may have increased “the incidence of bone cancer and leukemia 5 to 10 per cent in the generations presently growing up.”¹²Editorial, “Qualified Comfort,” Cincinnati Enquirer, April 7, 1960.

It was against this backdrop, at UNESCO House in Paris, that Rostand – whose father was the author of Cyrano de Bergerac – said, “Any distinction between the man of science and the ordinary man is no longer admissible, any more than a form of segregation based on an inequality of knowledge. Whether we like it or not, the laboratory henceforward opens right onto the street. Science not only affects us at any given moment of our day-to-day existence, it dogs us, it pursues us. Have we not all of us been transformed into involuntary guinea pigs ever since atomic fission, without asking our opinion, began to plant harmful particles in our bones?”¹³Jean Rostand, “Popularization of science,” Science 131, no. 3412 (May 20, 1960): 1491.

As a result, he continued, “The obligation to endure gives us the right to know. The time is clearly coming when the man in the street will have his say with regard to the great social, national, international and moral issues latterly raised by certain applications of science; and it may be that the specialist himself, weary of bearing on his own the weight of his too-heavy responsibilities will rejoice at finding understanding and support in public awareness.”¹⁴Jean Rostand, “Popularization of science,” Science 131, no. 3412 (May 20, 1960): 1491.

Martin Grove Brumbaugh shared his ideas on education and democracy when he was the superintendent of public schools of Philadelphia. (Photograph courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)

The aphorism “information is the currency of democracy” has often been used by transparency advocates to lobby for openness in government. Most attribute that phrase to consumer advocate Ralph Nader.¹Senate Subcommittee on Intergovernmental Relations of the Committee on Government Operations, Hearings on S. 1637 to Establish Standards and Procedures for Government Advisory Committees, 92^nd Cong., 1^st sess., 1971, 985; Washington Bureau of The Sun, “Flaws in Congress are Next Target for Nader’s Band of Reformers,” The Baltimore Sun, November 3, 1971; Ralph Nader, “The Underachievements of Congress,” The New York Times, December 23, 1971. Nader used that phrase on October 11, 1971 while testifying before a Senate subcommittee. He used it again and more publicly during a November 2, 1971 speech to the National Press Club where he announced the launch of “the most comprehensive and detailed study of the Congress since its establishment.” Others misattributed it to Thomas Jefferson.²Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia, s.v. “Information is the Currency of Democracy (Spurious Quotation),” accessed March 2, 2018, https://www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/information-currency-democracy-spurious-quotation. The Thomas Jefferson Foundation, a non-profit corporation that owns and operates the American Founding Father’s former plantation, currently has “no evidence to confirm that he ever said or wrote, ‘Information is the currency of democracy.’” As a result, it has labelled it a spurious quotation. But I’ve found what appears to be an antecedent of sorts to the saying. In his 1908 annual report, the superintendent of public schools of Philadelphia, Martin Grove Brumbaugh wrote:

Two individuals can participate in a common cause only to the extent that they possess common sentiment and common knowledge. To increase their effective participation requires a broadening of their common knowledge. To make participation impossible requires only the absence of common knowledge. This holds true throughout. Hence our democracy depends upon the possession by all its individual participants of a fund of common knowledge, which fund is the currency of democracy; and the function of the public school is to impart such a fund of common knowledge to all that participate in our democracy as to make facile the interchange of ideas and the reciprocal regard of each for the other. The initiation into democracy should always be contingent upon the possession of this common knowledge. For that reason the stranger from without should serve an apprenticeship in the American public school before he is invested with the toga of American citizenship. Likewise any one in our midst, native or foreign born, that has neglected to fit himself for participation in our democracy should be denied what his own neglect prevents him from comprehending.

Moreover, the growth of democracy, as well as its security, depends upon the widening of this fund of common knowledge. Hence the specific means of promoting the best traditions in our national life will be found to lie in the increased efficiency of the schools. What the school is as the creator of common thought and common sentiment determines what our democracy is. Upon this basis the state supports the school, and the system of education is maintained by taxation prescribed by the laws of the state. The measure of this financial support is the measure of our belief in democracy. When any citizen opposes an equitable, indeed, a liberal support to the schools, he opposes the government itself.³Superintendent of Public Schools of the City of Philadelphia, Annual Report of the Superintendent of Public Schools of the City of Philadelphia for the Year Ending December 31, 1908 (Philadelphia, PA, 1909), 18.

Brumbaugh, who “drastically reorganized the ways schools operated and taught children by building additional primary and secondary schools, reforming academic programs in the high schools, and raising teacher salaries,” would go on to become the Republican governor of Pennsylvania.⁴The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, s.v. “Martin G. Brumbaugh,” accessed March 2, 2018, http://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/education-and-opportunity-2/3c09824v/.