Category Archives: Free Speech

Political Science

 

We were in the midst of text book adoption some years ago when an unexpected snag brought the process to a halt. 

The Social Studies Departments across our district were asked to pilot an array of textbooks for the Fall of 1994. Publishers had generously provided sample texts, and we spent hours previewing different titles, passing our preferences to our District Social Studies Coordinator.

Government teachers decided, unanimously, that they would replace their current text with the newer edition of the book they had used for some years. To a person, instructors agreed to readopt Magruders American Government; a trusty standard, and the hands-down favorite of most 12th grade teachers across the country. Our staff had ready-made units, lessons, speakers, ancillary materials,, film clips, debate resolutions, etc . . . only requiring the newer book with updated factual information. And their decision appeared to be resolved.

But in the last phase, presentation for final adoption, the Board of Trustees suddenly slammed on the brakes, visibly unhappy with the choice.

 Magruders, as a tradition, had placed a photo of the current first lady inside the first page of their textbook. The old copies may have still been of Mamie Eisenhower by the tattered condition of the old copies. But no longer. The inside photo of this new edition featured First Lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and board members, reactionaries to the core, lost their minds.

I taught AP American History at that same time, and thought nothing of reordering Thomas Bailey’s American Pageant, another classic. We had used this text for some time, but needed an updated edition, too. However, in light of the fiasco over Magruders, I too, found my text in the crosshairs.

Wearing an understanding, sympathetic expression the district coordinator said I had to prepare a defense of my book, too. And it wasn’t that I minded touting the virtues of the book, I liked Pageant a lot, but I did mind the time lost in preparing my classroom work. Plus, it was so annoying that we all had to jump for the Board because Mrs. Clinton had the audacity to be the new First Lady.

I supposed, fair was fair, if one book was attacked for fallacious reasons, attack the rest-a convenient diversion to camouflage the real aim of thought suppression.

The central thrust is that Trump era of intolerance had been in the making for quite some years. The irrational politics of 2016 was clearly hardening across the nation years earlier. From School Boards, to City Halls, to library districts, restriction of free thought was under assault. 

Nothing pisses off the far right more than a rational challenge from open-minded, articulate, and educated thinkers.

Gail Chumbley is a retired history educator, and author of the two-part memoir River of January, and River of January: Figure Eight.

gailchumbley@gmail.com

 

Lest We Forget

This new year begins with Americans caught in a moral quagmire. Traditional beliefs such as love of country and confidence in leadership seems to suffer from vast divisions. Our American experiment in self government has been turned on end, and what was once seen as threatening, is now open to a sliding scale of opinions. Our national values are, as sung in the musical Hamilton “Upside Down.”

I came into the world as the Cold War simmered between the US and the USSR. Khrushchev had replaced Stalin, and nuclear missiles rested uneasily, waiting for one wrong move from either side. America, caught up in the Red Scare convicted and executed suspected spies, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The House on UnAmerican Activities Committee, (HUAC) became the equivalent of political show trials, publicly ruining the reputations of citizens, suspected as secret Russian collaborators.

Real covert agent, Klaus Fuchs, stole nuclear secrets from the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. David Greenglass, a physicist, turned Russian agent, and brother of Ethel Rosenberg, worked also on the Manhattan Project. English MI6 agent, Kim Philby, worked for a time in the offices of the OSS, (later the CIA) only to defect to the USSR, with all he knew of American and British secrets. American Communist and union organizer Eugene Dennis, was sentenced to five years for his affiliation with the Kremlin. Soviet spy, Whittaker Chambers renounced his Russian allegiance and became the darling of the conservative right, naming State Department official Alger Hiss as a Russian operative.

Whether true or not, many other Americans were stained with suspicion of acting as Communist agents. Joe McCarthy made a name for himself as a Commie hunting Senator. Caught in the fear were playwright Arthur Miller, screen writer Dalton Trumbo, actor Larry Parks, stage actor, Zero Mostel, movie star, Sterling Hayden, who all found their careers in tatters. Refusing to name others, HUAC branded these unfriendly witnesses as“Fifth Amendment Communists.” These accusations, for many of the accused, never washed off.

The 1950’s were dangerous years for political nonconformists.

So it is no small wonder that many Americans of a certain age are flummoxed by the denial of Russian election hacking at the highest levels of our government. This new president has repeatedly demonstrated absolutely no concern for our democracy, for fear it undermines his legitimacy. In other words he is more worried about his own hide while the most direct and sinister Russian attack ever, has infected our elective process. And worse, his band of true believers gloss over the breach as well, buying into the propagandized term of “Fake News.” Is this president truly more important than the country and people he was elected to serve? Does he understand the prime objective of Russian apparatchiks is to undermine the United States of America?

As for the members of Congress who know more of this breach, and still enable this president- is protecting your party more important than saving our democracy? Are your partisan priorities more vital than the oaths you swore to uphold the Constitution? If the answer is a blind yes, then what was the point of the suffering of that earlier generation—the ruin of artists and free thinkers, the brutal crimes of the guilty? The 33,000 loyal Americans who died fighting Communism in Korea? Or the 58,000 boys who were killed fighting the pro-Communists in the jungles of Vietnam? Are these past sacrifices meaningless in light of current political expediency? Are you going to shout ‘fake news’ while giving away our sovereignty?

America has a vibrant, if not an often difficult history. We who love our country would like a future, as well.

*It wasn’t the Ukraine, either.

That Kid in Class

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This piece comes from a former student, Second Lieutenant. Cyrus Cappo, USA, West Point Class of 2017.
It is your right to be outraged, or offended, or annoyed by the anthem protests going on around the country today. And in these days of unprecedented access to the megaphone of social media it is your privilege to voice that outrage to estranged family members and friends from high school and coworkers and anyone else you happen to be Facebook friends with.
“It shows disrespect to the troops!” you might say through gritted teeth while furiously pounding on keys, your heart rate steadily increasing to unsafe levels about men who play sports silently and peacefully protesting their race’s treatment as second-class citizens and a President who reserves more fury for them than actual white supremacists and anti-semites. It would be your right to take such a bold and well-thought out stance, maybe even adding that this “the snowflakes have gone too far, I can’t even be safe from the tyranny of this PC culture watching a football game!”
But maybe, you my hypothetical example, could consider that standing for a flag that means many different things to many people isn’t actually what it takes to support your troops. And shockingly, neither is decorating for the Fourth of July, or sporting neat little patriotic bumper stickers and t-shirts, or even shaking a soldier’s hand to thank him or her for their service.
Bear with me, because I know this is a bit of a stretch, but just maybe supporting the troops means voting for politicians who don’t support never-ending wars without any clear objective, and that actually increase the rate of radicalization and terrorism at the low low cost of over 7000 American lives and the even lower cost of millions of middle eastern civilian lives, while simultaneously destabilizing multiple countries that allow for organizations like ISIS to gain power and a dictator like Assad to gas his own populace. That would be something I could be convinced to be outraged about. Maybe you could donate some of your time and money to organizations that are trying to prevent 22 veterans a day from killing themselves due to PTSD and the complete glut of financial and medical support that veterans receive, or if you own a business, you could even go out of your way to hire a veteran so they don’t become homeless as a thanks for their years of service. Maybe you could write a letter to a soldier who is deployed in the name of protecting, um, something something freedom, or send him or her a care package to make a day that could be their last a little less bleak.
But yikes, that would be hard and inconvenient and require some introspection and research and pure, unadulterated thought, and who has time for that, am I right? Much easier to voice outrage about football players exercising their right to protest, and using their platform of privilege to try and make the country a little bit more equal for all of us. Thank you for your tremendous sacrifice of not watching football this weekend, our country is better for it. Don’t forget to put the flag up and plan your cookout for Veterans Day, I look forward to seeing you the next time you shake my hand to thank me for my service.
Feel free to do any proofreading, this was written in bed and out of total frustration haha, I’m glad you liked it.
Cheers,
Cyrus

Idle Observations

Foreign oppression has, more than once, moved American policy makers at home to react with oppression. From the French Revolution to today, overseas upheavals frighten those in power enough, to prompt the same repression at home.

For example:

Immediately after World War One, the US endured a period of destabilizing fear–America’s first Red Scare. The U.S., bitter over entering the Great War, grew intolerant of unorthodox political views and worked to silence dissent. Radicals, both homegrown and immigrants from Europe, felt the wrath of political crackdowns. Anarchists, such as emigres, Emma Goldman, and Alexander Berkman, found themselves on trial, then deported back to Russia, while a home grown Socialist, Eugene V. Debs ended up in prison. Scores of other political agitators were targeted by the Justice Department for printing radical views, and voicing public opposition.

Why the oppression?

The reaction began following the bloody 1917 Revolution in Russia. The murder of the last Romanov Tsar, with his family, paved the way for the world’s first Marxist-Leninist government, the USSR. Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, (Lenin) seized the reins of the Bolshevik Party, and abolished all political opposition, outlining the aims of this new workers utopia, to overturn Capitalism worldwide.

The response in the U.S. came quick and harsh. Labor organizers, the leftest union, The Wobblies, and any other radical group deemed un-American was quashed. The U.S. government viewed dissent as treason, and Congress shaped specific legislation to silence protest. First passed and signed into law came The Espionage Act, in 1917, shortly followed by the Sedition Act the next year. No public speech, publications, nor use of the U.S. Mail to criticize government policy would be tolerated. Period.

In two test cases, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of both laws. The majority ruled in the first case that nonconformists and draft-resistors presented a “clear and present danger” to the US. In the second opinion the Court ruled much the same, but this time with an important dissent. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, wrote, ” . . . the ultimate good desired is better reached by the free trade in ideas . . .”

Still, non-conformists and dissidents endured government suppression.

The courts, the government, and public opinion merged to outlaw what they feared–an all-powerful, biased social/economic system, much like the restraint simultaneously underway in the Soviet Union.

This was not over.

After Hitler’s death in April, 1945, and the ending of WWII in Europe, Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin kept his Red Army in East Germany and Eastern Europe, nixing a promised democratic Polish government in favor of his puppet Communist regime in Warsaw. And that was just for starters. A frightening Cold War ensued between the Soviets and the West, that by 1963 witnessed the construction of an actual partition, aka, an Iron Curtain. 

In America a political fever seethed, and Congress responded. Establishing HUAC, the House Un-American Activity Committee, to sniff out citizens who leaned to the left, ruining careers and lives in the process. This second Red Scare elevated the careers of Senator Joe McCarthy, and Congressman Richard Nixon.

This post originally intended to discuss the War on Terror. The objective to cast light on the American Taliban; those promoting God, Guns, and Gasoline. But now, with Russia up to its old tricks, all of us again, have a decision to make. Will Americans excuse Putin, grow complacent and emulate his corrupt oligarchy? That path is wide open, visited upon us via the former guy. He proudly rubbed shoulders with that murderer, and publicly praised Putin’s integrity. 

But, at this very moment, another, clearer choice stands before the American public. President Zelensky has conducted a master class on the real cost of freedom.  The Ukrainian people have lain down their lives to remind us we, are the original heirs of freedom.

In that spirit, this upheaval in the Ukraine is one we must emulate here at home. When Putin attacks Ukraine, he attacks us all. We are Americans, it’s time to take a stand for our liberty. This is not a drill.

Gail Chumbley is the author of “River of January,” and “River of January: Figure Eight.” Both titles are available on Kindle. Gail has authored two historic plays, “Clay,” concerning the life of Senator Henry Clay, and “Wolf By The Ears,” examining the foundation of American Slavery.

gailchumbley@gmail.com