[Later this
year, my next book, Of Thee I Sing: The Contested History of
American Patriotism, will be published in Rowman &
Littlefield’s American Ways series. So this year’s July 4th
series, I wanted to highlight a few of the contested histories of American
patriotism that project includes. Leading up to a special weekend post on the
book itself!]
On three telling
moments from the histories of the extreme
1917 and 1918
laws.
1)
A Xenophobic Argument: It’s easy to imagine that
the Espionage
and Sedition Acts were a direct offshoot of the U.S. entry into World War
I, and that was indeed the timing of their passage by Congress. But in truth,
President Woodrow Wilson had been making the case for such laws since at least
his December
7th, 1915 State of the Union address (at a time when he was
still entirely opposed to the U.S. entering the war). In that speech, he
argued, “There are citizens of the United States, … born under other flags but
welcome under our generous naturalization laws to the full freedom and
opportunity of America, who poured the poison of disloyalty into the very
arteries of our national life … I urge you to enact such laws at the earliest
possible moment and feel that in so doing I am urging you to do nothing less
than save the honor and self-respect of the nation.” “Pour the poison of
disloyalty into the arteries of national life” is perhaps the clearest image
ever created in service of the argument that to criticize America is to be
unpatriotic and treasonous—an argument that is often most potently deployed in
wartime, but that as Wilson here reflects goes far deeper than those moments
(and is very often used to target immigrants in particular).
2)
A Totalitarian Clause: When Congress did pass
the two interconnected laws (after a couple full sessions of debate, with the
Espionage Act passed in June 1917 and the Sedition Act in May 1918; it does
again seem likely that the U.S. entry into the war offered the final push),
they were just as extreme, in both language and ideology, as Wilson’s request
would indicate. Exemplifying that extremism is the Sedition Act’s goal of
banning “any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form
of government of the United States ... or the flag of the United States.” The
entirety of that quote stands out as (ironically but definitely) un-American in
its attack on both free speech and dissent, but I would highlight the final
clause in particular: any nation that makes it illegal to say negative things
about its flag has at that moment, I would argue, taken a significant step
toward totalitarian fascism. I’ve written before (and do again in Of Thee I Sing) about the gap
between narrative and reality when it comes to the
Pledge of Allegiance—but even the most celebratory version of the Pledge
doesn’t view it as a legally binding statement of blind worship of that item
itself. That’s where the Sedition Act took us.
3)
A Ridiculous Court Case: Such extremist language
might seem more for show than for action, but in fact these laws were used to
prosecute Americans in a number of disturbing ways. None was more absurd than
the attacks
on the Revolutionary War-set silent film The
Spirit of ’76 (1917): the print was seized by the government for
portraying the English (now America’s WWI allies) too harshly, and the film’s
producer, a Jewish American immigrant from Germany named Robert Goldstein, was
sentenced to ten years in prison; at the sentencing
Judge Benjamin Bledsoe told Goldstein, “Count yourself lucky that you
didn’t commit treason in a country lacking America’s right to a trial by
jury. You’d already be dead.” I’m not sure anyone was lucky to be living
in America in the age of the Espionage and Sedition Acts, a moment that truly
reveals the destructive potency of our most extreme visions of patriotism.
Last patriotic
post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other moments or stories of patriotism you’d highlight?
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