William Preston Jr.

William Preston Jr., a historian and activist whose 1963 book Aliens and Dissenters: Federal Suppression of Radicals, 1903–1933 helped open a new field of scholarly inquiry into government policies that repressed radicals and restricted civil liberties, died on April 19, 2010, at his home in Martha’s Vineyard. He was 85.

From 1973 to 1988, Mr. Preston was chairman of the history department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan.

Born into a privileged family Preston veered away from his roots after serving as a tank gunner in World War II. His unit was in the first wave of U.S. forces that landed on Omaha Beach at H-Hour on June 6, 1944. He was severely wounded during the war and was left partially paralyzed for the rest of his life. The army, he later said, “fed my identification with the underdog . . . I learned something about class, a lot about stupidity in authority, and came out with a very resistant attitude toward higher powers” (Paul Buhle, ed., History and the New Left, 1990).

After the war, his emerging interest in underdogs was nourished by his uncle, Roger N. Baldwin, founder of the American Civil Liberties Union. Preston’s commitment to academic freedom was tested in 1950 after he enrolled as a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley following his graduation from Columbia University. The university would not hire him as a teaching assistant because he refused to sign an oath swearing he was not a member of the Communist party or any alleged subversive group. He moved to Madison, Wisconsin, where he joined a core of radical professors at the University of Wisconsin. With the support of his professors, Preston began delving into the history of government repression of immigrants and radical labor unions between 1903 and 1933. He became the first researcher given access to mountains of Justice Department records that showed a pattern of surveillance, intimidation, raids, deportations that accompanied the post–World War I red scare. He hunkered down for two years at the National Archives to review these materials.

In his August 1963 Washington Post review of Aliens and Dissenters Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas praised the book for revealing “the seamy side of America . . . bigotry, intolerance, hatred, suspicion of foreigners, and the use of class power to pulverize the less privileged.” The book’s use of formerly classified records also pointed the way for a new generation of historians and activists who began to demand access to files that could shed light on government surveillance, wiretapping, and suppression of information. Aliens and Dissenters helped set the stage for revelations that surfaced in the Watergate investigation, the Church committee report on Central Intelligence Agency surveillance of domestic radicals, and the George W. Bush administration. The book is still widely used in classrooms.

From 1954 to 1970, until he resigned in a protest over the administration’s treatment of black students, Preston was professor of history and chairman of the history department at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. In 1973 Preston became chairman of the history department at John Jay, providing him the opportunity to teach civil liberties and constitutional history to police officers at precinct stations. Preston often said that police officers were among the most receptive students he ever had. Preston also served as chairman of the Fund for Open Information and Accountability (FOIA, Inc.), an organization that fought government secrecy and classification, supported the use of the Freedom of Information Act, and helped block the destruction of Federal Bureau of Investigation field office files.

Preston continued to write articles on the history of civil liberties after leaving John Jay, and his account of his Omaha Beach experience appeared in the July 14, 1994, issue of the New York Review of Books. Describing the “near catastrophe” of the day, he wrote that the events “diminished forever the credibility of the concepts of strategic planning and tactical order; it provided me instead with a sense of chaos, random disaster and vulnerability.”

He is survived by a son, Michael Preston, and three daughters, Margo Baldwin, Evie Preston, and Lauren Preston-Wells.