Forced to be free: what anti-TV crusades, the campaign against the "Ground Zero mosque," and Ayn Rand's "intellectual heir" have in common with the reform movements of the antebellum era.

• Author: Walker, Jesse

ACROSS EUROPE, high-minded debates about terrorism, assimilation, and the social effects of Islam have been devolving into disputes over the clothes the government will let people wear, as countries from Switzerland to the U.K. ponder bans on burqas and head scarves. Curiously, legislators and pundits on both sides of the Atlantic have tried to justify such dress codes with the language of liberty. A Spanish politician, for example, denounced the veil as a "degrading prison."

He was not referring merely to families that force women to cover themselves. In that case, the legislation would target the compulsion, not the clothes. The garments supposedly serve as prisons whether or not the wearer wants to don them. Removing them by force, it's implied, would be an act of liberation.

This paradoxical claim--that the exercise of liberty can be an impediment to freedom--has a long history in the U.S. as well as Europe, emerging in arguments over rights ranging from the freedom to drink to the freedom to follow the faith of your choice. The belief has many roots, but in the American context the most important source might be the antebellum reform era. From the early 19th century to the Civil War, reformers battled liquor, prostitution, Catholicism, and Sabbath breaking; they built prisons, asylums, and utopian communities; they both denounced and defended slavery. Some of their efforts extended the sphere of American freedom. Others merely presented restrictions on liberty as a revolt against servitude.

In the aftermath of the New Deal, historians typically treated the period as just another step in the progression of liberal reform. A typical example is Arthur Schlesinger Sr.'s The American As Reformer, published in 1951, with its closing declaration that Americans "have never regarded democracy as a finished product but something to keep on building." This sunny view would have come as a surprise to Catholic immigrants, the chief target of the Know-Nothings' illiberal crusade for "War to the hilt, on political Romanism." That sure looked like a reform movement: It was an effort to refashion society, advanced with the rhetoric of republican values, and its supporters often embraced more conventionally progressive movements of the reform period as well, such as the fight against slavery. Yet for Schlesinger the Know-Nothings were simply one of the "bigoted enemies" of change. He thus avoided the issue that another historian, Clifford Griffin, would later raise in The...