Hiram Johnson Quotes

The first casualty when war comes is truth.

The federal government was giving no guidance that a reasoning person could credit. Few local governments did better. They left a vacuum. Fear filled it. The government’s very efforts to preserve “morale” fostered the fear, for since the war began, morale—defined in the narrowest, most shortsighted fashion—had taken precedence in every public utterance. As California senator Hiram Johnson said in 1917, “The first casualty when war comes is truth.

The first casualty of (political) war is the Truth

By summer’s end, there were more black than white communists in Birmingham, a situation that infuriated Magic City officials. Everyone knew that the Reds practiced social and racial equality in their ranks, and Hiram Evans, the Klan’s Imperial Wizard, writing in his Kourier newsletter, maintained that they were “dangling before the ignorant lustful and brutish negroes . . . a tempting bait . . . that negro men should take white women and live with them, declaring this is their God-given right under a communist regime.” Several Birmingham Klansmen became so incensed after reading Evans’s editorial that they burned Tom Johnson in effigy.13

As California senator Hiram Johnson said in 1917, “The first casualty when war comes is truth.