War and Civil Liberties

Introduction

"…Civil or Social Liberty: the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over an individual." John Stuart Mill, On Liberty¹

"I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually." James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son²

"Citizen Voices in Peace and War: A Portal into AP English Lit" is designed to be both an entry way and a recurring theme for the Advanced Placement course in English Literature and Composition. Many works of literature encompass the struggle for the human liberty to speak in the face of societal or governmental control. Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage and Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front poignantly depict the fate of youngsters conscripted to fight a war begun by their elders. Richard Wright's Black Boy (American Hunger) and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man show how economic and political battles moved and involved African Americans. Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's Farewell to Manzanar and Marge Piercy's Gone to Soldiers detail the impact of World War II on minority civilian life. Arthur Miller's The Crucible is a thinly-disguised discourse on the excesses of McCarthyism in the Cold War 1950's.

Writers themselves, as citizens as well as artists, must seek freedom of expression in the context of societies which may set limits or even penalties for their individual civic and artistic statements. Governments set on political or military goals rarely welcome public questioning by an articulate author. In our own nation's history, public stances by racial or religious minority citizens questioning societal structures have often been doubly unwelcome. For example, an inclination for African Americans (Langston Hughes and Richard Wright) and Jews (Arthur Miller and Allen Ginsberg) to affiliate with non-mainstream political parties has often been viewed as subversive rather than understandable. Wright, in his book American Hunger, attempts an explanation for this alienation:

My knowledge of how Negroes react to their plight makes me declare that no man can be individually guilty of treason, that an insurgent act is but a man's desperate answer to those who twist his environment so that he cannot fully share the spirit of his native land. Treason is a crime of the state.³

Wright soon rejected Communist party strictures, but he voted with his feet by moving to France for the later part of his life. In June, 1956, in an appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Arthur Miller iterated his opposition to outlawing the Communist Party and "…refused to name people he had seen at a Communist writers' meetings seventeen years earlier." Nine years after that, Miller registered his opposition to the Vietnam War by turning down President Johnson's invitation to the White House.⁴ Even in cases where African Americans were anxious to serve in their country's uniform, the opportunities were limited. Lt. Col. (Ret.) Michael Lee Lanning, in his 1997 history, The African-American Soldier: From Crispus Attucks to Colin Powell, noted along with Langston Hughes the reluctance of whites to see "…blacks in military dress..." but not "in other kinds of uniforms." In the poet's words, "We are elevator boys, janitors, red caps, maidsa race in uniform."⁵ Finally, in the case of my uncle, Frederic Adler, the military service he gave in World War II was not sufficient grounds in the 1950's for exemption from being confronted with the demand to sign a loyalty oath as a condition of keeping his job.⁶

Through an introductory unit in the AP class, students will embark upon a brief journey into the history of civil liberties in speech and action, reflect on the importance of human rights in their own lives, and begin to discern meaning from challenging texts and develop skill in producing complex written responses. From the outset, we will make use of the Self-Evaluation Rubric for the Advanced Placement Essays.⁷

Once the introductory unit is complete, the class will reference our reflections on civil liberties as we proceed through the standard AP English Literature and Composition class, making use of John Stuart Mill's broad definition as a thematic thread throughout the year. A readily available AP preparation guide, Thomson/Peterson's AP* Success: English Literature & Composition, 5th Edition (2004), offers a comprehensive choice of readings on the themes of liberty and war, including Mary Wollstonecraft's "A Vindication of the Rights of Women," Shakespeare's "Sonnet 55 and Henry V's St. Crispin Day speech," Henry David Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience," Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Self-Reliance," Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass," Paul Laurence Dunbar's "Douglass," Frederick Douglass' "My Bondage and My Freedom," and George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language." We will round out the segment with a Virginia Woolf disquisition on the reasons for war from her book, Three Guineas.⁸

This unit is derived from a Yale National Initiative summer seminar on "War and Civil Liberties," in which we took a chronological trek through the varying losses and gains in civil liberties in American history beginning with the Civil War and Lincoln's suspension of the Writ of Habeas Corpus - a vaguely offered right seemingly eligible to be suspended by Congress "in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion" where "public Safety" is in jeopardy. Until the issue was settled in 1865, Lincoln's unalloyed sainthood (an article of faith in my family of origin) was, in the view of some, rather in doubt. During World War I and its aftermath, government agencies, citizen's groups delegated to enforce patriotism, and random self-appointed enforcers wreaked havoc on the rights and persons of innumerable citizens who demonstrated insufficient enthusiasm for the battle in Europe. The 1920's provided a Red Scare and the government-assisted demise of the International Workers of the World (IWW or Wobblies.) West Coast citizens of Japanese extraction bore the brunt of civil liberty loss in WWII, and fervent anti-Communism carried us through the Cold War and Vietnam until September 11, 2001, when FDR's characterization of "nameless unreasoning fear" became horrifyingly apt. The students we are teaching in high school today were four years closer to their babyhood on that horrifying, heart-wrenching day. The current administration has avoided much of the more egregious abrogation of civil liberties in the American past, yet a sense of uneasiness, exacerbated by the tragically costly enterprise in Iraq, lingers as we see electronic surveillance of citizens and advocacy groups increase, a blurring of the distinction between foreign and domestic intelligence, the replacement of civilian with military tribunals, and the admixture of immigration and criminal spheres of official enforcement.⁹ In order for our students to keep whole their constitutional entitlements, they need to be fully informed as to their rights as well as to the history of the establishment and periodic endangerment of those same rights. Knowledge is power.

The tension, of course, in a time of war, aside from the essential question on the justice of the conflict engagement, is the balance of security with citizens' rights. For our highly idealized democracy, the tension is particularly difficult to resolve. As Chief Justice William Rehnquist cogently points out in All the Laws but One, Lincoln's suspension of the Writ of Habeas Corpus came in the midst of credible pre-Inauguration assassination threats and actual post-Fort Sumter attacks on Federal troops and burning of critical bridges in Baltimore.¹⁰ Flash forward one hundred forty-four years to July 7, 2005, to the terrorist bombings in the London Underground. The Boston Globe opined on July 17th, before a second, unsuccessful though frightening set of attacks had occurred, that although additional security measures are called for, these "…must be scrutinized to make sure they are truly necessary and will not curtail civil liberties that are the justified pride of Europe's liberal democracies." Yet who would dispute the comment by Charles Clarke, British Home Secretary, included in the editorial, that "It is a fundamental civil liberty of people in Europe to be able to go to work on their transport system in the morning without being blown up."?¹¹ The conundrum intensifies when pundits like Jarrett Murphy in the Village Voice note that the security measures may be more form than substance: "Random searches are as much about the appearance of safety as safety itself."¹² Even more to the point, lifelong civil libertarians who condemn profiling may be tempted to acknowledge on some level that its value in the present context of terror might need to be re-considered. Paul Sperry, in a New York Times op-ed piece, cites the harsh reality: "Young Muslim men bombed the London tube, and young Muslim men attacked New York with planes in 2001….Unfortunately, this demographic group won't be profiled. Instead, the authorities will be stopping Girls Scouts and grannies…"¹³

Even as people worldwide, but particularly in metropolitan transit systems of countries fighting the insurgency in Iraq, consider the value of ceding liberties in exchange for security, a report surfaces that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has admitted that it is spending significant time and resources on monitoring groups like Greenpeace, the American Civil Liberties Union and United for Peace and Justice, the last a self-described "…coalition of more than 1,300 antiwar groups." An FBI memo reveals that Internet sites that advocated protests at the 2004 Republican Convention in New York City were considered of interest to counterterrorism entities.¹⁴ I feel this tension quite personally. As a former card-carrying member of the ACLU, and a verifiable protester with my younger child at that very Republican gathering in the Big Apple, I hold precious both the civil liberties of all Americans and the life of that same child as she commutes to work daily on New York City public transit. At the end of the day, if I were compelled to choose between the two, the "liberties" would be gone in a twinkling.

In some cases, now and in the past, the contention between devotion to country and freedom to speak has spilled over into the world of artists and writers. Witness New York Governor George E. Pataki's well-publicized warning to a cultural group with a history of "controversial artwork" typified by a current exhibit apparently "making light" of President Bush's 'Axis of Evil' phrase, that anything they display in their proposed site near Ground Zero must promise "an absolute guarantee" not to "…offend 9/11 families and pilgrims…". Reporter Patrick D. Healy describes the context as "…the nexus of art and politics, the First Amendment and the symbolism of the twin towers site." Pataki averred that, "…we will not tolerate anything on that site that denigrates America, denigrates New York or freedom, or denigrates the sacrifice or courage that the heroes showed on Sept. 11."¹⁵ We can ask whether this development echoes the governmental and civilian critiques of war questioners from Civil War Days, both World Wars, the Cold War and the Vietnam era and where the artist fits in the interdependent web of a nation's self-defense and the protection of individual freedom.