Civil Liberties: the Citizens' Business

• DOI: 10.1177/106591295000300401
• Date: 01 December 1950
• Published date: 01 December 1950
• Author: Claudius O. Johnson
• Subject Matter: Articles

The Western
Political Quarterly
VOL. III
DECEMBER, 1950
No. 4
CIVIL LIBERTIES: THE CITIZENS’ BUSINESS
An Address by
PROFESSOR CLAUDIUS O. JOHNSON
Representative of the American Political Science Association
at the
Fourth Annual Meeting
of the Western Political Science Association
No man is an Iland, entire of it selfe; every man is a
peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod
bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well
as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy
friends or of thine owne were; any mans death dimin-
ishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde, And
therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.—John Donne.
HESE
QUAINT and beautiful words of the seventeenth century
~ Dean of St. Paul’s were chosen for this occasion because they are
as appropriate in relation to personal liberties as they are to human
life. If in some cloudburst of intolerance one man’s liberty is washed away,
the liberty of all the rest of us will suffer erosion. If an individual is
deprived of a right, yours and mine will be diminished. And therefore do
not say that only knaves and fools will feel the penalties of a repressive
statute; its tentacles reach for thee. &dquo;Familiarize yourself with the chains
of bondage,&dquo; said Lincoln, &dquo;and you are preparing your own limbs to
wear them.&dquo;
Our constitutions vouchsafe to us our civil liberties. However com,
plete the list may be, as the late Charles A. Beard observed, &dquo;the laws
which proclaim liberty do not assure it.&dquo; And Beard quotes Alexander
Hamilton who said: &dquo;Whatever fine declarations may be inserted in any
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502
constitution respecting it, must altogether depend upon public opinion and
on the general spirit of the people and of the government.&dquo; This states-
man might have said much more. He could have said that there never
would have been a single civil liberty guaranteed in any constitution but
for the fact that the people put it there.
Take the guaranty of religious liberty, for example. Who gave it
a place in our constitutions? One recalls people like Roger Williams and
his followers, whose leading tenet was that &dquo;no one should be bound to
worship or to maintain a worship against his own consent.&dquo; For this
heresy Williams was banished from Massachusetts Bay Colony. After
spending a winter of privation in the forests, he founded a colony at
Providence in which he applied, with some lapses, his conception of
religious liberty. Ann Hutchinson, &dquo;of ready wit and bold spirit,&dquo; &dquo;like
Roger Williams or worse,&dquo; to use the language of the exasperated Governor
Winthrop, was also voted the honor of banishment from Massachusetts,
after which she contributed her part toward establishing religious f ree-
dom in Rhode Island. John Bunyan writing in the Bedford jail. Ministers
of other dissident groups who, jailed in Virginia for preaching contrary to
law, continued their exhortations from their cells. Many others of equally
stout convictions and unconventional deportment-men and women who
paid the price of freedom of conscience-these are the heroes of inde-
pendent thought and deed to whom we owe our religious liberty.
Essentially the same story could be told of practically every liberty
we now enjoy. Nearly every clause of freedom written into our consti-
tutions has in it something of a biography of lonely mental pioneering,
moral courage, and physical suffering. For centuries gone by, men and
women of original mind and noble purpose have borne the ridicule of
their neighbors, heard the contumelious taunts of their opponents, some-
times experienced the loss of their estates, on occasion groaned on the rack
and rotted in dungeons, and in a few instances died gloriously on the
scaffold. Our liberties, then, do not have their origin in constitutions; they
have their origin in the people.
If liberties are born of the people, they are by the same token nurtured
and maintained by the people, a people ever watchful of encroachments
upon them. We
have become accustomed, perhaps too well accustomed,
to look to and depend upon the courts for the maintenance of our liberties.
True it is that the courts have made many decisions, thousands of them,
in which the preservation of human rights has been the main purpose.
The American Civil Liberties Union, in its report for 1949, gives favorable
notice to sixteen federal court decisions in civil liberties cases, and to
eleven state cases. If the American Civil Liberties Union rates as unfavor-
able to the maintenance of our liberties about twice as many decisions

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503
as it regards as favorable to them, we may ascribe that fact in part to
the unyielding standards of that watchful organization and in part to
judicial shortcomings. But surely not a year passes that some notable
decision of the Supreme Court of the United States does not proclaim
liberty in broad outlines and on occasion in noble language.
In Girouard v. United States (328 U. S. 61 [1946], the Court held
that a candidate for citizenship by naturalization need not give an affirm-
tive answer to the question: &dquo;Are you willing to take up arms in defense
of this country?&dquo; The majority of the Court took the position that the
oath administered to public officers imposed no such test and emphasized,
as did the minority of the justices in earlier cases, that some of the most
desirable and useful native-born citizens were opposed to bearing arms.
Many good people, some of them, perhaps too many of them, on
school boards once had the idea that the &dquo;stiff-arm&dquo; flag salute, enforced
by expulsion from school, would teach students to respect and love their
country. Compulsion has been known to inspire fear and hatred, but
never a healthy loyalty or any sort of affection. Nevertheless, the order
went out, and Jehovah’s little Witnesses refused to bow down, as they
saw it, to a &dquo;graven image.&dquo; The Supreme Court, upon second thought
to be sure, speaking in the noble language of Mr. Justice Jackson, held that
the compulsory salute was nothing less than a forced declaration contrary
to the religion of Jehova’s Witnesses and was thus contrary to the First
and Fourteenth Amendments (UU. Va. State Bd. of Educ. v. Barnette,
319 U. S. 624 [ 1943 ] ) .
For years &dquo;restrictive covenants&dquo;-arrangements under which parties
in a...