Some of the Soviet citizens present at the dinner had fought for decades and against long odds for the freedoms that most Americans take for granted; indeed, they had been inspired by the American experiment, a real-world demonstration that nations, even multicultural and multiethnic nations, could survive and prosper with these freedoms reasonably intact. They went so far as to raise the possibility that prosperity was due to freedom -that, in an age of high technology and swift change, the two rise or fall together, that the openness of science and democracy, their willingness to be judged by experiment, were closely allied ways of thinking.
There were many toasts, as there always are at dinners in that part of the world. The most memorable was given by a world-famous Soviet novelist. He stood up, raised his glass, looked us in the eye, and said, To the Americans. They have a little freedom.’ He paused a beat, and then added: ‘And they know how to keep it.’
Do we?
The ink was barely dry on the Bill of Rights before politicians found a way to subvert it, by cashing in on fear and patriotic hysteria. In 1798, the ruling Federalist Party knew that the button to push was ethnic and cultural prejudice. Exploiting tensions between France and the US, and a widespread fear that French and Irish immigrants were somehow intrinsically unfit to be Americans, the Federalists passed a set of laws that have come to be known as the Alien and Sedition Acts.
One law upped the residency requirement for citizenship from five to fourteen years. (Citizens of French and Irish origin usually voted for the opposition, Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party.) The Alien Act gave President John Adams the power to deport any foreigner who aroused his suspicions. Making the President nervous, said a member of Congress, ‘is the new crime’. Jefferson believed the Alien Act had been framed particularly to expel C.F. Volney,* the French historian and philosopher; Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, patriarch of the famous chemical family; and the British scientist Joseph Priestley, the discoverer of oxygen and an intellectual antecedent of James Clerk Maxwell. In Jefferson’s view, these were just the sort of people America needed.
[* A typical passage from Volney’s 1791 book Ruins:
You dispute, you quarrel, you fight for that which is uncertain, that of which you doubt. O men! Is this not folly? . . . We must trace a line of distinction between those [subjects] that are capable of verification, and those that are not, and separate by an inviolable barrier the world of fantastical beings from the world of realities; that is to say, all civil effect must be taken away from theological and religious opinions.]
The Sedition Act made it unlawful to publish ‘false or malicious’ criticism of the government or to inspire opposition to any of its acts. Some two dozen arrests were made, ten people were convicted, and many more were censored or intimidated into silence. The act attempted, Jefferson said, ‘to crush all political opposition by making criticism of Federalist officials or policies a crime’.
As soon as Jefferson was elected, indeed in the first week of his Presidency in 1801, he began pardoning every victim of the Sedition Act because, he said, it was as contrary to the spirit of American freedoms as if Congress had ordered us all to fall down and worship a golden calf. By 1802, none of the Alien and Sedition Acts remained on the books.
From across two centuries, it’s hard to recapture the frenzied mood that made the French and the ‘wild Irish’ seem so grave a threat that we were willing to surrender our most precious freedoms. Giving credit for French and Irish cultural triumphs, advocating equal rights for them, was in effect decried in conservative circles as sentimental – unrealistic political correctness. But that’s how it always works. It always seems an aberration later. But by then we’re in the grip of the next hysteria.
Those who seek power at any price detect a societal weakness, a fear that they can ride into office. It could be ethnic differences, as it was then, perhaps different amounts of melanin in the skin; different philosophies or religions; or maybe it’s drug use, violent crime, economic crisis, school prayer, or ‘desecrating’ (literally, making unholy) the flag.
Whatever the problem, the quick fix is to shave a little freedom off the Bill of Rights. Yes, in 1942, Japanese-Americans were protected by the Bill of Rights, but we locked them up anyway -after all, there was a war on. Yes, there are Constitutional prohibitions against unreasonable search and seizure, but we have a war on drugs and violent crime is racing out of control. Yes, there’s freedom of speech, but we don’t want foreign authors here, spouting alien ideologies, do we? The pretexts change from year to year, but the result remains the same: concentrating more power in fewer hands and suppressing diversity of opinion – even though experience plainly shows the danger of such a course of action.
If we do not know what we’re capable of, we cannot appreciate measures taken to protect us from ourselves. I discussed the European witch mania in the alien abduction context; I hope the reader will forgive me for returning to it in its political context. It is an aperture to human self-knowledge. If we focus on what was considered acceptable evidence and a fair trial by the religious and secular authorities in the fifteenth- to seventeenth-century witch hunts, many of the novel and peculiar features of the eighteenth-century US Constitution and Bill of Rights become clear: including trial by jury, prohibitions against self-incrimination and against cruel and unusual punishment, freedom of speech and the press, due process, the balance of powers and the separation of Church and State.
Friedrich von Spec (pronounced ‘Shpay’) was a Jesuit priest who had the misfortune to hear the confessions of those accused of witchcraft in the German city of Wurzburg (see Chapter 7). In 1631, he published Cautio Criminalis (Precautions for Prosecutors), which exposed the essence of this Church/State terrorism against the innocent. Before he was punished he died of the plague – as a parish priest serving the afflicted. Here is an excerpt from his whistle-blowing book:
1. Incredibly among us Germans, and especially (I am ashamed to say) among Catholics, are popular superstitions, envy, calumnies, backbiting, insinuations, and the like, which, being neither punished nor refuted, stir up suspicion of witchcraft. No longer God or nature, but witches are responsible for everything.
2. Hence everybody sets up a clamour that the magistrates investigate the witches – whom only popular gossip has made so numerous.
3. Princes, therefore, bid their judges and counsellors bring proceedings against the witches.
4. The judges hardly know where to start, since they have no evidence [indicia] or proof.
5. Meanwhile, the people call this delay suspicious; and the princes are persuaded by some informer or another to this effect.
6. In Germany, to offend these princes is a serious offence; even clergymen approve whatever pleases them, not caring by whom these princes (however well-intentioned) have been instigated.
7. At last, therefore, the judges yield to their wishes and contrive to begin the trials.
8. Other judges who still delay, afraid to get involved in this ticklish matter, are sent a special investigator. In this field of investigation, whatever inexperience or arrogance he brings to the job is held zeal for justice. His zeal for justice is also whetted by hopes of profit, especially with a poor and greedy agent with a large family, when he receives as stipend so many dollars per head for each witch burned, besides the incidental fees and perquisites which investigating agents are allowed to extort at will from those they summon.
9. If a madman’s ravings or some malicious and idle rumour (for no proof of the scandal is ever needed) points to some helpless old woman, she is the first to suffer.
10. Yet to avoid the appearance that she is indicted solely on the basis of rumour, without other proofs, a certain presumption of guilt is obtained by posing the following
dilemma: either she has led an evil and improper life, or she has led a good and proper one. If an evil one, then she should be guilty. On the other hand, if she has led a good life, this is just as damning; for witches dissemble and try to appear especially virtuous.
11. Therefore the old woman is put in prison. A new proof is found through a second dilemma: she is afraid or not afraid. If she is (hearing of the horrible tortures used against witches), this is sure proof; for her conscience accuses her. If she does not show fear (trusting in her innocence), this too is a proof; for witches characteristically pretend innocence and wear a bold front.
12. Lest these should be the only proofs, the investigator has his snoopers, often depraved and infamous, ferret out all her past life. This, of course, cannot be done without turning up some saying or doing of hers which men so disposed can easily twist or distort into evidence of witchcraft.