Perilous Times
Excerpt from a review by Christopher Capozzola (in the 11.21.04 Washington Post) of the book PERILOUS TIMES, Free Speech in Wartime: From the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism By Geoffrey R. Stone (Norton 2004):
On July 4, 1951, at the height of Cold War tensions, a reporter asked 112 people in a park in Madison, Wis.consin, to sign a petition containing nothing more than quotations from the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. All but one refused. ["Many Found Wary of July 4 Petition," New York Times, July 29, 1951, p. 43. Also reported elsewhere: Time, Washington Post, Nation.* yes, OK] Bitter ironies like this abound in Perilous Times, Geoffrey R. Stone's masterful history of free speech in wartime America. With clarity, moderation and some 2,000 footnotes, Stone explains how Americans could come to fear their own founding documents. We have long needed this book, though perhaps never as badly as we do today.
....
Stone provides a Profiles in Courage for the Sept. 11 generation. But he rejects a simple story of heroes and villains, perhaps because the ragtag assembly of wartime victims in Perilous Times includes some truly unsavory characters: doctrinaire Stalinists, American Nazis, and Northern Copperheads who opposed Lincoln not because war was unhealthy for children and other living things but because they resented the "Negro mania" of the Great Emancipator. Crusaders like Emma Goldman, Roger Baldwin and Fred Korematsu get their due, but Stone reserves his deepest respect for history's unsung heroes: second-tier Justice Department officials in World War I who reined in the Bureau of Investigation, and War department attorneys in World War II who questioned Japanese internment. Stone cherishes men and women with faith in the Constitution; with faith that the cure for bad speech is more speech; with faith, as Hugo Black noted in 1951, "that free speech will preserve, not destroy, the nation." ....
Read the whole review if you get the chance, and of course the book too!
Leaned about this at the Rittenhouse Review.
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