On the eve of the first anniversary of Sept. 11, President Bush proposed expanding the powers of law enforcement officials to strengthen the USA Patriot Act of 2001.
Designed to improve the government’s ability to counter the threat of terrorism, that measure was largely ignored by a sleepy watchdog of a press and was passed in less than six weeks after the attacks on the World Trade Center by a Congress that gave it little scrutiny.
After reading it, however, civil libertarians began to voice concerns about the nearly unchecked authority it gives government snoops to listen to our telephone conversations, track our web surfing, and check on the books we buy or borrow from bookstores and libraries.
Dangers lurk, they warned, in the downing of barriers between FBI and CIA erected when we learned that they had overstepped their bounds in ferreting out “commies” for Senator Joe McCarthy in the 1950s.
Bush, however, insisted nothing in the act is a danger to the civil liberties of law-abiding Americans. But listen closely to his justification and, especially, to his charge that those who opposed the Patriot Act were aiding terrorists.
You can hear the mournful echoes of other difficult periods in American history, when outside threats paled beside those from the government itself.
The Sedition Act of 1798, passed when war with France seemed likely, provided fines and imprisonment for individuals defaming government officials or bringing them “into contempt or disrepute.” Police rounded up 25 people for violating the law, and 15 were convicted. The public was outraged, and tossed John Adams out of the White House in 1800.
During the Civil War, General Ambrose Burnside moved against antiwar Democrats of the North. When Clement L. Vallandigham, a former U.S. Congressman, uttered what Burnside considered ” disloyal sentiments and opinions,” he was arrested as a traitor. Crowds in Dayton rioted in protest.
When The Chicago Times’ Wilbur Storey blasted Burnside editorially, the general suppressed the Times. Irate Chicagoans took to the streets.
World War I’s Sedition Act of 1918 forbade publication of “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States or the Constitution, military or naval forces, flag, or the uniform of the army or navy of the United States,” or any language that might bring any of those into “contempt, scorn, contumely, or disrepute.” Nearly 2,200 people wound up in court for violations; more than 1,000 went to prison.
The Smith Act of 1940, passed on the eve of World War II, made it a crime to publish anything that advocated “overthrowing or destroying any government in the United States by force or violence.”
Like the Patriot Act, the Smith Act, and its threat to First Amendment freedoms, received only perfunctory consideration by Congress, and about 100 people went to prison for violating its provisions – most during the post-war McCarthy era.
Now we have the Patriot Act, perhaps the most sweeping threat of all, and the president says that it does not go far enough. Yet there is still no outrage.
A Michigan State University study released earlier this week concludes that a majority of us are willing to let security concerns overweigh our civil liberties.
Are we the leaden-eyed of whom Vachel Lindsay lamented, “Not that they die, but that they die like sheep.”?
Gen. Richard D. Myers, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday, “You may have to go back to the Civil War to find a time when the values that we hold dear have been threatened like they’ve been threatened today.”
No one doubts that is so. We face terrible threats from terrorists. But let us be clear-eyed and remember that in perilous times, an overzealous government can also be a threat to our values, civil liberties among them.
And if and when that occurs, let us be outraged.
*Larry Lorenz is a A. Louis Read Distinguished Professor of Communications
