The Outlaw
She was led to the underground garage of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg and placed in a car. It was 1972, and the Vietnam War raged across the Pacific. Horn had refused to testify in a nationally publicized case against seven peace activists, and now one university.
In June 1972, Tropical Storm Agnes wreaked massive destruction across central and eastern Pennsylvania, killing three people in Lewisburg and causing extensive flood damage in the borough and on the Bucknell campus. But another crisis earlier that year had already rocked Bucknell and Lewisburg. For 10 weeks from February to April 1972, six Roman Catholic peace activists and a journalist faced trial in Harrisburg for allegedly conspiring to blow up heating tunnels under Washington, D.C., and kidnap presidential adviser Henry Kissinger. The defendants became known as the Harrisburg Seven, and the prosecution’s case was based primarily on testimony from an FBI informer installed at Bucknell.
On the witness stand, Horn tried to explain to Judge R. Dixon Herman why she could not testify. She began by objecting to government surveillance in the Bucknell library and classrooms.
She said, “I cannot in my conscience lend myself to this black charade —”
Judge Herman interrupted: “Just hold on a minute, we can’t have anything like this —”
Horn continued, “Spying in libraries and schools is something I protest.”
With that, Judge Herman declared her in contempt of court and sent her to jail until she reconsidered. “Take her away!”
She would not reconsider before the trial’s end, and spent the next 20 days in a cell. As the first U.S. librarian imprisoned as a matter of conscience, Horn was a trailblazing advocate for privacy and intellectual freedom. She kept up her fight into the 21st century, decades after she left Bucknell.
“Those were principles she lived for,” says Carrie Pirmann, social sciences librarian at Bucknell. “Challenges to intellectual freedom continue every day. We live in a country that stands on freedom of thought, and we have the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, which guarantee freedom of expression. But in some areas of the country, in some school districts and public libraries, people may not have the privacy or the ability to access important information that they need.”
The Informer
The FBI recruited a felon named Boyd F. Douglas Jr., serving time for fraud at the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary, as one such informer. For years, the University had cooperated with a penitentiary program to rehabilitate prisoners awaiting release through an established work/study program. Douglas — who made the 3-mile trek from the prison to Bucknell and back on his bike — took classes and was assigned a part-time job pasting labels in books at Bertrand Library.
At age 30, Douglas had spent his youth in the shadows. Before his prison sentence, he belonged to the “hobo milieu, single-room occupancy hotels, bus-station habitues, transients,” wrote author William O’Rourke in a 1972 book about the Harrisburg Seven trial. Douglas was a con man and thief, skilled at gaining the trust of others — until the law caught up to him. Now he had an opportunity to gain early release from prison and start his life over by cooperating with the FBI.
Berrigan was serving a six-year sentence as a leader of the “Catonsville Nine,” a group of nuns and priests convicted for a peaceful demonstration in which they burned Selective Service records in the parking lot of the Catonsville, Md., draft board in May 1968. The act earned Berrigan a charge for defacing public property. He had planned to be the first American priest jailed as a political prisoner, believing his clerical training had prepared him for incarceration, but found prison harsher and more isolating than he had imagined. It was a relief to gain an ally on the cellblock — Douglas, a fellow Catholic — who could walk in and out of prison each day with handwritten notes copied into his school notebooks.
What Berrigan did not know was that Douglas photocopied those correspondence and gave them to the FBI.
Outside the prison walls, Douglas won favor with some Bucknell students by lying about his incarceration, telling them he was in prison for anti-war activities. Douglas organized or attended suppers, picnics and other events among peace activists, often embellishing to the FBI what he heard at those events. One of them took place in Horn’s home.
Activist nuns and priests visiting Berrigan in prison would often stop afterward in Lewisburg. On one occasion, Douglas asked Horn if she would host two nuns and two priests close to Berrigan after they had conferred with him at the penitentiary. The gathering gave interested students and faculty the opportunity to meet Berrigan’s fellow peace activists, and the two nuns stayed overnight with Horn. “I was delighted to have them,” Horn wrote, “[I] served food to them and the students and faculty who came to meet them, and I fell asleep on the carpet.”
As a provocateur, Douglas unsuccessfully encouraged peace activists to abandon nonviolent protests and commit violent acts. He lied that he had been a demolitions expert in the army and offered his skills in the anti-war cause, although it later turned out that his knowledge was limited to reading demolitions manuals.
Douglas’ behavior did not add up for Horn. “In time,” she wrote, “I wondered how it was that an inmate from the penitentiary could have an apartment in town, where he had liquor, and freedom to go to occasional evening parties.”
The Defender of Privacy
In her memoir, she recalled the prosecutor’s questions in front of the grand jury: “ ‘What happened at this place, at that time?’ the prosecutor asked. ‘Who was there? What was said? Who said it? What was being discussed?’ I felt nasty, ugly and alone … watching myself being turned into an informer on neighbors and friends.”
March 9, 1971
June 23, 1971
March 9, 1971
June 23, 1971
In June 1971, Horn left Bucknell and moved to California, where she had accepted another job and married her second husband. Nine months later, she received a subpoena to return to Pennsylvania for testimony in the Harrisburg Seven trial.
This time she refused to cooperate, and was jailed for contempt.
At trial, prosecutors exhibited contraband letters between Berrigan and the nun Sister Elizabeth McAlister, his younger lover and a co-defendant in the Harrisburg Seven trial. (Berrigan and McAlister later left their religious orders and married.) The activist couple discussed an increasing disenchantment with pacifism as a strategy to stop the Vietnam War, and they wrote about the relative merits and risks of two radical steps floated by fellow activists that could attract public attention to their cause. One was to kidnap Kissinger, and the other was to bomb heating pipes in tunnels below Washington, D.C.
But the prosecution’s case depended primarily on Douglas, whose testimony proved erratic and unconvincing. After the jury told Judge Herman they were deadlocked on major charges, he declared a mistrial. Horn was released from jail after 20 days, and the government did not try the case again. As for Douglas, he disappeared into the federal witness protection program.
The American Library Association (ALA) would not endorse Horn’s refusal to testify, although it did commend her “commitment … in defense of intellectual freedom.”
The FBI, under pressure from Congress, abandoned its program of library surveillance in the mid-1980s. In the 2000s, however, new surveillance programs in libraries were allowed under the Patriot Act that Congress passed following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Fighting back, Horn was an outspoken member of the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. Since 2002, the Intellectual Freedom Committee of the California Library Association has annually bestowed the Zoia Horn Intellectual Freedom Award. “For decades, she urged the American Library Association to do more to help protect librarians — including public and school librarians — and their patrons from censorship and threats to privacy,” says Pirmann.
But Horn believed that her refusal to testify in the Harrisburg Seven trial derailed her career. She was not explicitly blackballed, but she never worked in a high-level librarian position again. She died in 2014.
Horn was decades ahead of her time in the battle for privacy and against censorship in libraries, and her work had an impact that she did not live to see. In 2019, the ALA made its strongest statement about protecting the privacy and freedom of library users, declaring that surveillance and monitoring produce a “chilling effect on users’ selection, access to and use of library resources.”
“Horn became known as an advocate of intellectual freedom and the freedom to read without censorship,” says Isabella O’Neill, head of Special Collections and University archivist at Bertrand Library. “She advocated for your freedom to read and write and make your own judgments without dictating the information that you may or may not have access to.” But O’Neill says she feels the country is back-sliding from Horn’s era. “I view all libraries as a social good, and the trend we see now toward more censorship, particularly in school libraries, is appalling.”
“The privacy that Horn advocated for was not just for libraries at the university level,” says Pirmann. “She was advocating for all libraries and all library users.”
The fight, as O’Neill and Pirmann attest, goes on.