March 28, 2024
BANGOR DAILY NEWS (BANGOR, MAINE

Acadian report troubles Martin

AUGUSTA — House Speaker John L. Martin, D-Eagle Lake, said this week he was upset to learn that the U.S. State Department monitored Americans of Acadian French descent for signs they sympathized with the Quebec separatist movement.

“The U.S. government spied on me in the 1970s,” Martin, who is of Acadian descent, exclaimed during a brief interview in his State House office.

The monitoring in the 1960s and 1970s was reported on Tuesday by the Montreal Gazette, which obtained a heavily censored copy of a confidential 1970 report about the surveillance activity.

The report said the U.S. State Department feared that Acadians living in New Brunswick, Maine and other U.S. states might join with agents of French President Charles de Gaulle to push for a new French nation in North America.

Martin scoffed at such a notion and said the U.S. government should not engage in spying on its citizens.

“It’s really a shock,” Martin said of the revelation. “The only thing I can equate it to is what college students went through in the 1960s with J. Edgar Hoover.

“It upsets me to think the U.S. government would think that Acadians in this country would join a separatist movement as violent as that was in Quebec at that time,” he said.

Martin said he planned to obtain the State Department report and read it carefully.


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