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The Story of Civil Liberty in the United States

by Leon Whipple (more about this book and author)

Chapter 8: The Defense of Liberty
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CERTAIN aspects of civil liberty in the decade before 1917 are worth noting in conclusion. These include: First, the efforts of certain unpopular minorities struggling for liberty to limit the liberty of other minorities; second, the increased interest in the whole problem of civil liberty; third, the rise of individual libertarians and of organizations devoted to the protection of liberty within the State.

Before 1917 and the common need for many minority groups to resist the war discipline, there was a surprising lack of solidarity among the minority groups themselves. Instead of uniting to defend the principle of liberty, certain elements attacked one another or worked so independently that they gave but little mutual aid. There was small recognition of the need of freedom of thought for everybody. The doctrinaires fought among themselves instead of against common oppression. This was particularly true of the Socialists who sought to prevent the Anarchists from hatching eggs in their nest. For example:

On the occasion of the recent Haywood meeting at the Grand Central Palace (New York City), some members of the Socialist arrangement committee attempted to prevent our comrades from distributing the leaflet, “To the Unemployed and Homeless,” issued by the Anarchist Federation. When persuasions and threats proved futile, the Socialists called the police, insisting especially on the arrest of a young woman who was very active in distributing the leaflets. The police did not appear anxious to
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make the arrests, but when the Socialists insisted, finally the hand of the law forced some of our comrades to leave the hall. This is not a solitary example. Such incidents have been but too frequent.1

On the occasion of the May Day celebration this year at Union Square (New York City), the secretary of the Socialist party happened to discover a wagon from which members of the I.W.W. were addressing the audience. He forthwith called in the police to keep the I.W.W. from speaking in the Square.2

The Socialists are declared by the Anarchists to have asked the Washington, D. C., police to stop Emma Goldman from speaking. The lack of solidarity extended even to their own members. Theodore Schroeder declares that when a Colorado Socialist was arrested on an alleged charge of obscenity, but in reality for organizing, Socialists generally refused to help fight the charge as it would prove embarrassing. A Pittsburgh Socialist local refused to hear a syndicalist lecturer, and many of the more liberal members resigned as a protest. We may go outside our time-period to record another instance. At the Socialist national convention in Chicago after the World War, the ruling faction had a minority of radical “left-wingers” excluded by the “capitalistic police.” Max Eastman, editor of the radical periodical, The Liberator, wrote: “Barney Berlin, for twenty-five years a worker in the Socialist movement, presented what seems to me the only justification for the Executive Committee that there is. He reminded the convention of historical instances in which legal and constitutional forms and formulas have been violated in the interest of a deeper principle…. “I glory in their spunk in having saved the party…. Necessity knows no law! … is a maxim that lives in the heart of every live man.”

Victor Berger, once Mayor of Milwaukee, added a comment of suggestive character: “We in Milwaukee would have done it a good deal better than Germer did, because we have our own police.”

The thesis of power remains the same; the Socialist will use
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it to stop the liberty of others. It is very discouraging to the libertarian to discover that men who had personally just been defending their very lives from governmental prosecution would use for justification of their own oppressive acts the ancient excuse that “necessity knows no law.”

But such evidences of oppressive instincts among common claimants of civil liberty are sporadic. The true note of the period is an increased interest in and a vigorous defense of civil liberty. There has been a growing sense that we had too complacently accepted liberty as an inheritance, won by our forefathers, and somehow mysteriously embodied in the parchment of constitutions. This new interest in civil liberty arose partly out of a new realization of its essential value in our complex industrial age; partly out of the common experiences of the social reformers; partly because of the increased number of cases in which liberty was sacrificed to the interests of powerful conservative groups. Something had to be done to resist stifling encroachments and to extend the bounds of liberty for new classes and purposes.

Signs of this restless feeling have been the renewed attention paid to civil liberty by lawyers and their journals, the inclusion of new guarantees in State constitutions (vide Oklahoma's 1908), the organization of the Free Speech League and similar local organizations in California and elsewhere; the activities of various defense leagues of Socialists, I.W. W.'s and other labor bodies; the devotion of an entire annual meeting of the American Sociological Society to the problem of “Freedom of Discussion,” the formation of the American Association of University Professors for the investigation of academic freedom, university control, et cetera; and finally, the scrutiny of the facts about freedom of speech and assemblage by the Federal Industrial Relations Commission of 1915. The last named body put a point to the whole uneasy feeling by the following recommendation:

With full recognition of the gravity of the suggestion, it seems necessary to urge the Commission to make the following recommendations:
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I. That Congress forthwith initiate an amendment to the Constitution providing in specific terms for the protection of the personal rights of every person in the United States from encroachment by the Federal and State governments, and by private individuals, associations, and corporations. The principal rights which should be thus specifically protected by the powers of the federal government are the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, the right to trial by jury, to free speech, to peaceable assembly, to keep and bear arms, to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, to speedy public trial, to freedom from excessive bail, and cruel and unusual punishments.3

Here is a pathetic faith in the paper guarantees,—to reassert rights that had already been guaranteed in the Bill of Rights and by the Fourteenth Amendment. The amendment really needed was in the spirit of the people.

The third sign of the times was the appearance of pure libertarians—men and women who defended the principles of liberty for use by all people, yet without any special axe to grind themselves. These are rare folks even among the social reformers, who on the whole think they have the right prescription for society and who hate therefore to see their plans upset by misguided persons with other plans. They are as sure of their social panaceas as was the Church in the Middle Ages. The minority which comes into power persecutes for its faith's sake as once it died for it … indeed the fact that some died for it proves it true, they figure.

The organizations which have represented the libertarian view have been the Free Speech League; the Legal First Aid Society, and the American Civil Liberties Union (formerly the National Civil Liberties Bureau). The first was a pioneer in fighting cases from 1905 to 1915 and insisting upon the value to society of freedom of speech and press. It was, however, largely made up of philosophical anarchists and interested itself chiefly in freedom of expression for anarchistic and sex ideas. Its publications and protests aroused
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a new interest in liberty, and the organization served as a rallying center. It has now ceased to function.

The two other societies grew out of the needs of the World War, and are beyond our scope. The legal aid group was especially for the help of conscientious objectors in the eastern states during the war period. The American Civil Liberties Union is the first nation-wide organization to enlist the general public in the common cause of protecting all liberties. The Union has done heroic work, both during the War and since. It is made up of Quakers, labor leaders, radicals, liberals and even some conservatives. It functions best in the interest of labor and where economic issues furnish the bases of a struggle. It offers to any person or any group whose liberties have been restricted, an agency of information, and legal advice and financial aid. It is interested in general liberty as opposed to liberty for any particular group. This is an encouraging sign that some day men will realize the inward significance of the struggle for social freedom in a democracy.

Men must learn that liberty can be won only through action—and when won it must be shared. They must realize that restraint on any minority, no matter how obnoxious, injures everyone as it establishes a principle which may in time be used against those now in power. Some day men will realize that it is not a mere phrase—that highest ideal of liberty—to be willing to die that other men may have the right to teach what you believe to be false and dangerous.
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NOTES

1 Mother Earth, III, 123.

2 Ibid., June, 1913.

3 The Manly Report, recommendations I, 61.

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