When it comes to our nation’s history, I’m a romantic. I can’t help it. I love learning more about it…one can never know it all. I don’t mean romantic in a simplistic my-country-right-or-wrong, love-it-or-leave-it sense. Far from it. I embrace it all, the great along with the despicable. For if one cannot bear hearing uncomfortable truths, they’re quite the shallow character.
When we read stories from our past, it’s natural to focus on acts of courage and triumph. That’s because we’d like our story, from our own to our nation’s, to be a heroically courageous tale. In very large part America’s is, but it’s also haunted by ghosts of ugliness: e.g., slavery, ethnic cleansing of native peoples, brutal labor exploitation, repression of civil rights. Our story can be likened to a blending process, not like a melting-pot in which disparate peoples form a monoculture, but instead a bubbling stew in which acts of heroic nobility were and are intermixed with ignoble ones.
Recent events made me think of a particularly dark period: the Palmer Raids, initiated by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer from 1919 to 1920 (a few historians posit earlier). It was an especially toxic stretch of time. Abroad the Bolsheviks had recently overthrown the czar and seized control of Russia. At home, the struggling labor movement was becoming increasingly restive in reaction to the brutality the tycoons of industry had rained down on workers. Fear that communism could spread here was rampant. Firebombs mailed to prominent leaders, including Palmer, inflamed the hysteria.
Palmer responded with revenge and fury. He launched raids across the nation. Thousands of innocent citizens were rounded up and incarcerated. Some were tortured simply for exercising their First Amendment rights. Immigrant groups lived in terror. Suspected “communist agitators” were deported en masse. Palmer likely felt invincible, but he wasn’t.
Palmer met his Waterloo when members of Congress, judges, and lawyers stood up and called him down for his blatant disregard for due process, the bedrock of the American judicial system. In response, he vociferously claimed that there would be an armed mass uprising on May Day 1920. When it didn’t occur, he lost his credibility, and his power waned. The tide ebbed, but it never completely receded. Hysteria would sweep back to shore from time to time.
The Palmer Raids were the first Red Scare. The second and most infamous was McCarthyism in the early 1950s. And here we are. Xenophobia is a dark side of our legacy.
Merriam-Webster defines due process twofold: 1: a course of formal proceedings (such as legal proceedings) carried out regularly and in accordance with established rules and principles, and 2: a judicial requirement that enacted laws may not contain provisions that result in the unfair, arbitrary, or unreasonable treatment of an individual.
The Fifth Amendment reads no person can “be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Section One of the Fourteenth Amendment, which nationalizes the Fifth, reads, “nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
In A Man for All Seasons, after Thomas More (sainted by the Catholic Church) tells his future son-in-law Will Roper in a terse exchange that he’d give the Devil the benefit of the law, Will retorts that he’d cut down every law in England to go after the Devil. In response, Thomas dissects Will’s reasoning.
“And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned on you, where would you hide, the laws all being flat?”
Thomas reminds Will about the country being thick with laws—not God’s but man’s—serves to protect everyone. He then asks Will if he could stand upright in the winds that blew if those laws were ignored or negated. In a reverential voice Thomas concludes, “Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of the law, for my own safety’s sake.”
Dismayingly, the laws did not protect him because King Henry VIII usurped them and ordered Thomas, who was once his chancellor and close confidant, beheaded.
America today is like England then: Thick with laws. But there is also a fundamental difference between us: We don’t have an all-powerful king. Instead, we have the Constitution with the right to due process enshrined in it to protect us from unchecked power. The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments make it clear that due process is guaranteed to all persons within its jurisdiction. No exceptions. Even for non-citizens. Otherwise, it’s not guaranteed for anyone.
Freedom-loving Americans not only grasp that but are also bound by and to it. They do so not just out of principle but for their own safety’s sake.
