I began reading this book that the author subtitles A Biography of the First Amendment on the 4th of July which is indeed America's birthday. I purchased Freedom For The Thought That We Hate by Anthony Lewis at a public library's bookstore for one dollar. George Washington's portrait appears on every one dollar bill. By that measure, a dollar could be considered an appropriately patriotic price.
Representative John Allen of Connecticut said in the John Adams administration's House of Representatives that newspapers in Philadelphia were attempting to "raise an insurrection", but they were actually urging people to vote for Democratic Republicans. This was the opposition party. The Federalists were in power.
So leaping to the 20th century, I was reading internet articles about criticizing the U.S. President and discovered what happened during Wilson's Presidency. Woodrow Wilson prosecuted about 4,000 Americans under the Espionage and Sedition Acts. Hundreds were deported even though they weren't illegal immigrants or even convicted of any crime. See an article about The Palmer Raids. I had no idea that this sort of thing had happened historically. I was flabbergasted. The Palmer Raids were not taught in school when I was of high school age.
The most famous person arrested during The Palmer Raids was Emma Goldman. The link is to her Wikipedia article. Below is a public domain photo of Emma Goldman from her Wikipedia article.
It's mentioned in the Emma Goldman Wikipedia article that she was interviewed by feminist reporter, Nellie Bly. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall during that interview. I recommend a novel dealing with Nellie Bly called The Girl Puzzle by Kate Braithwaite that I reviewed here .
When the U.S. entered WWI, a mob in Lewiston, Montana went into the high school and burned all the textbooks for a class on studying the German language. I suppose that the Americans who would be spying on the Germans would already have mastered their language. A pardon petition for the German textbook burners was circulated among law students at the University of Montana in Missoula. Yet it wasn't until 2006 that Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer pardoned 78 dead Montanans convicted of sedition in 1918.
I admit that I have resisted the idea that FDR was responsible for Japanese American internment, but author Anthony Lewis is absolutely certain of it. I think that FDR would have privately considered Japanese American internment barbaric. Even if he thought it was necessary, surely Eleanor Roosevelt would have been opposed to it.
The alternative to internment for Japanese Americans during WWII was enlisting in the military. No Japanese American who fought in WWII was ever charged with disloyalty. A number of them were honored as heroes by the U.S. military, and by French civilians that some of them rescued.
In a discussion of the definition of obscenity in this book, Justice Brennan was quoted as saying that it wasn't obscene if there was something that redeemed it or had "social importance". Now I know where the phrase in Tom Lehrer's song "Smut" came from --"To be smut it must be utterly without redeem or social importance."
Author Lewis discussed politicians wanting to ban "a film like The Miracle." I'd never heard of it, so I had to look it up. It was the focus of Burstyn v. Wilson (1952) dealing with a movie about a girl who thought the man who seduced her was St. Joseph and that the baby she gives birth to as a result of the seduction was Jesus. There were Catholic protests demanding that the film be banned. The Supreme Court said that banning it because it was religiously objectional was a violation of the First Amendment.
Professor Paul A. Freund of Harvard Law School is quoted as saying "They say money talks. I thought that was the problem, not the solution." In 2007 the Supreme Court decided that restrictions on campaign spending violated the First Amendment. If that is how our political system is going to be run, we will have a country we don't recognize eventually.
No comments:
Post a Comment