Hawk1981
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- Apr 1, 2020
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The equation of democracy with civil liberty was a central aspect of American thought in the 20th century. Against mounting pressures for conformity, efforts were made to institutionalize civil liberties as a bulwark for the protection of individuality. In effect, individualism was detached from its traditional economic focus and associated with American social values: with freedom to speak and to disseminate information, freedom of assembly, and freedom to implement religious convictions.
The individualistic ideal entered into the definition of the national creed. It helped to give the United States its national personality in terms of which attitudes toward both domestic and foreign issues were shaped. Because loyalty to the nation was evoked in part by national personality, the relationship between personal liberty and national loyalty became a sensitive issue.
Virtually all Americans have agreed that liberty does not shelter the individual from acts of treason, sabotage, or espionage as defined by the Constitution or statutes. But, short of these overt acts, where is the dividing line between legitimate right of dissent and subversive intent. At one extreme were those who placed civil liberty at the heart of their conception of the democratic ideal. This was the tradition of Thomas Jefferson, of Oliver Wendell Holmes, of William O. Douglas, and of Hugo Black. At the other extreme were those who subordinated civil liberties to patriotic loyalty. Although the precise principles of these loyalists remained elusive, they frequently appeared to be motivated by ethnic or economic impulses, confusing loyalty with their own programmatic objectives.
This democratic ideal of civil liberty found an early expression in President Jefferson's Inaugural Address of 1801. The United States had been struggling to confirm its independence and establish its identity in the community of nations during the previous decade when Europe had been convulsed by the French revolutionary wars. The issues of foreign policy were further complicated for Americans by conflicting sympathies and ideological commitments. The Federalist administration of John Adams, moved by a mixture of patriotic and political motives, had enacted the repressive Alien and Sedition laws and had used them to silence outspoken critics of the administration, ostensibly in defense of national security.
Jefferson characterized the heated political atmosphere as the "revolution of 1800." He assured his fellow citizens that there would be no reprisals. Even those who favored the dissolution of the Union or the establishment of a monarchy or a dictatorship would be allowed to "stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it." Jefferson carefully restricted the issue to freedom of speech; it was "error of opinion" with which he was concerned rather than overt acts. Nevertheless, he was confident that through unrestricted freedom of speech a consensus would crystallize which the public-spirited citizen might contemplate with security.
In the early 20th century, Jefferson's modern successor was Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Like Jefferson, Holmes relied upon uninhibited freedom of speech as the best if not the only means of forming a viable public opinion. Holmes famously defined the point where freedom of speech gave way to the collective right of self-protection as the point where an utterance "produces or is intended to produce a clear and imminent danger" of some substantive evil to the community. As he described in his dissenting opinion in Abrams v. United States (1919), he believed that if men would only take a sufficiently detached and comprehensive view of human history, they could not fail to see that the good was best achieved by free trade in ideas, "that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market," and that men's purposes were worthy of realization only when they could survive such a truth test.
The individualistic ideal entered into the definition of the national creed. It helped to give the United States its national personality in terms of which attitudes toward both domestic and foreign issues were shaped. Because loyalty to the nation was evoked in part by national personality, the relationship between personal liberty and national loyalty became a sensitive issue.
Virtually all Americans have agreed that liberty does not shelter the individual from acts of treason, sabotage, or espionage as defined by the Constitution or statutes. But, short of these overt acts, where is the dividing line between legitimate right of dissent and subversive intent. At one extreme were those who placed civil liberty at the heart of their conception of the democratic ideal. This was the tradition of Thomas Jefferson, of Oliver Wendell Holmes, of William O. Douglas, and of Hugo Black. At the other extreme were those who subordinated civil liberties to patriotic loyalty. Although the precise principles of these loyalists remained elusive, they frequently appeared to be motivated by ethnic or economic impulses, confusing loyalty with their own programmatic objectives.
This democratic ideal of civil liberty found an early expression in President Jefferson's Inaugural Address of 1801. The United States had been struggling to confirm its independence and establish its identity in the community of nations during the previous decade when Europe had been convulsed by the French revolutionary wars. The issues of foreign policy were further complicated for Americans by conflicting sympathies and ideological commitments. The Federalist administration of John Adams, moved by a mixture of patriotic and political motives, had enacted the repressive Alien and Sedition laws and had used them to silence outspoken critics of the administration, ostensibly in defense of national security.
Jefferson characterized the heated political atmosphere as the "revolution of 1800." He assured his fellow citizens that there would be no reprisals. Even those who favored the dissolution of the Union or the establishment of a monarchy or a dictatorship would be allowed to "stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it." Jefferson carefully restricted the issue to freedom of speech; it was "error of opinion" with which he was concerned rather than overt acts. Nevertheless, he was confident that through unrestricted freedom of speech a consensus would crystallize which the public-spirited citizen might contemplate with security.
In the early 20th century, Jefferson's modern successor was Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Like Jefferson, Holmes relied upon uninhibited freedom of speech as the best if not the only means of forming a viable public opinion. Holmes famously defined the point where freedom of speech gave way to the collective right of self-protection as the point where an utterance "produces or is intended to produce a clear and imminent danger" of some substantive evil to the community. As he described in his dissenting opinion in Abrams v. United States (1919), he believed that if men would only take a sufficiently detached and comprehensive view of human history, they could not fail to see that the good was best achieved by free trade in ideas, "that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market," and that men's purposes were worthy of realization only when they could survive such a truth test.