• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1608 0

and even openly gay officers—was more than a sop to demography. It was at least potentially a minor coup d’état within the police. The police entered the twentieth century as an army against crime and the criminal class; they took their norms and values in part from the respectable elites, in part from the macho, working-class white culture of which they were a part. A mere sprinkling of blacks and women here and there probably had little effect on the normative world of the police. Corruption and brutality remained, along with racism and a ragbag of social prejudices. But personnel changes in the seventies and eighties carried at least the promise of a more accountable, more heterogeneous force. Unfortunately, as the police got (somewhat) better, the criminals got worse; and this no doubt had a curdling effect on the norms and culture of the people in blue.

Political Crime

In one stretched-out sense, many or most crimes are political: they are conscious or unconscious acts of rebellion against the duly constituted order. A few crimes have deliberately political motives, although the crime itself is not what people usually call political. An occasional revolutionary or terrorist might want to blow up a government office, or rob a bank to pay for the expenses of terror. There has been less of this in the United States than in most countries—certainly less than the hysteria over “reds” or “anarchists” or “Wobblies” would suggest. On the whole, though, few crimes are meant to be deliberate attacks on the political or economic system, or on some piece of it, or on the rules and norms that undergird that system.

There is another kind of political crime. All governments, alas, seem tempted to make it a crime to be part of the opposition. In many societies, to criticize the government is to sign one’s own death warrant. The United States has a far better record than most countries at putting up with dissenters, but the record is far from perfect.

Wars and national crises are particularly bad times for freedom of speech and the right to protest. Toleration wears thin during emergencies ; civil liberties go out the window. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln’s record was hardly ideal. He suspended the writ of habeas corpus, and there was far too much military justice (or injustice).30 To a degree, this was understandable. After all, the Civil War was a massive rebellion: half the country consisted of traitors (from the northern standpoint), and the fighting raged on American soil. It was a uniquely dangerous war.

The first World War should have been much better. Yet in June 1917, Congress passed an elaborate Espionage Act; an amendment to the act, in 1918, outlawed sedition—it was a crime to “incite or attempt to incite” insubordination or disloyalty among soldiers and sailors; or to utter, print, or publish “any disloyal, profane, scurrilous or abusive language about the form of government of the United States; or the Constitution;” or to come out with any “language intended to incite, provoke, or encourage resistance to the United States or to promote the cause of its enemies.”31

The excuse was the war; and the war certainly legitimized a campaign against internal enemies. The statutes were, in a real sense, merely part of a longer campaign against radicals, especially the “Wobblies,” members of the Industrial Workers of the World.32 The first notable cases on freedom of speech before the U.S. Supreme Court grew out of the purge of leftists that followed passage of these laws. In Schenck v. United States (1919)33, Socialists had been tried for mailing circulars to men about to join the army. The circulars passionately argued that the draft violated the Constitution, and that the war was a conspiracy of capitalists and politicians. The defendants were charged under the Espionage Act and convicted. They appealed, and lost; as a consolation prize, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., enunciated one of the most famous phrases in Supreme Court history. Freedom of speech, he said, does not encompass “words ... used in such circumstances