"Great Americans" Blog

Nov. 29 interview on Impact 89FM

2011-12-16T11:08:00.000-05:00

HERE is an interview on Impact 89FM, MSU Student Radio, on Nov. 29, 2011.

Clever Review of "Radicals" in Lansing City Pulse

2011-11-27T15:23:00.001-05:00

HERE's a clever review of "Radicals in Their Own Time" by Lawrence Cosentino in this week's Lansing City Pulse.

http://www.lansingcitypulse.com/lansing/article-6658-lsradicalsrs-revisited.html.

August 19, 2011 Interview on WKAR Radio

2011-10-25T12:26:00.000-04:00

Click HERE for an interview on WKAR radio (aired August 19, 2011).

Interview on Viva La Feminista

2011-06-25T15:38:00.000-04:00

Click HERE for an interview on Viva la Feminista blog.

Women's History Month - Elizabeth Cady Stanton

2011-03-23T21:07:00.000-04:00

March is Women's History Month. Click HERE for a brief video introduction of 19th Century women's rights activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Michael Eric Dyson Show Interview

2011-02-24T10:21:00.002-05:00

Interviewed yesterday about Radicals in Their Own Time with Michael Eric Dyson, whose radio show airs on PBS stations in Seattle, Washington, Baltimore, Detroit and a number of other cities. It was nice to do a longer-format interview to explain the book in greater depth.

The interview is available HERE - it's the last 20 minutes of the hour long program.

Radio Interview Link - Grand Rapids NPR - Thurs Feb 3, around 10:20am

2011-02-02T18:07:00.004-05:00

[The archive link to this interview is available HERE.]

I will be interviewed about Radicals in Their Own Time tomorrow, Thursday Feb. 3 starting around 10:20am by Shelley Irwin from the NPR affiliate WGVU in Grand Rapids To listen, click HERE and then click on streaming live.

Vine Deloria Jr. - Native American Radical

2011-01-23T20:28:00.001-05:00

LAST TIME: W.E.B. Du Bois - Black Activist Radical

Sioux author, scholar and activist Vine Deloria Jr. is the fifth of five individuals profiled in Radicals in Their Own Time: Four Hundred Years of Struggle for Liberty and Equal Justice in America.

Deloria, whose views on government naturally came through his own tribal traditions, antagonized the establishment while shaking mainstream America out of its complacency with his provocative works exposing the American government’s systematic centuries-long oppression of Indian tribes. Beginning with Custer Died for Your Sins, his devastating 1969 critique of the United States Government and passionate call-to-action to a new generation of Native Americans, Deloria was a central figure in providing a unifying intellectual, political voice to Indians past, present and future in their battles for self-determination and reclaiming tribal heritage.

Deloria was blunt in his assessment of Christian orthodoxy’s deleterious effects throughout history: “From pope to pauper, Protestant to Catholic, Constantinople to the United States, the record is filled with atrocities, misunderstandings, persecutions, genocides, and oppressions so numerous as to bring fear into the hearts and minds of non-Christian peoples. Deloria was caustic in his criticism of America and other Western nations’ use of Christian orthodoxy to justify its expansionist goals: “At one time or another slavery, poverty, and treachery were all justified by Christianity as politically moral institutions of the state.” These harsh assessments offended a mainstream American establishment thoroughly suffused with Christian dogma.

In sum, Deloria spent his lifetime exposing the practices of a U.S. government that systematically reneged on its solemn promises to leave alone – to tolerate – Indian tribes with their native lands and traditions, and pointed the way forward for how that government should make amends for its egregious breaches of faith. As for his impact, Indian Law scholar Charles Wilkinson comments, “If you mark down the great figures of the American West in recent times, [Deloria] belongs there because of his role in reshaping Indian country…. I think in the last 100 years, he's been the most important person in Indian affairs, period.”

W.E.B. Du Bois - Black Activist Radical

2010-12-28T21:50:00.006-05:00

LAST TIME: Elizabeth Cady Stanton - Gender Wars Radical

Black radical historian, scholar and agitator-prophet W.E.B. Du Bois (who was born during Andrew Johnson's administration in 1868 and died shortly before Lyndon Johnson's presidency in 1963) is the fourth of five individuals profiled in Radicals in Their Own Time: Four Hundred Years of Struggle for Liberty and Equal Justice in America.

Like the other four radicals, Du Bois was committed to core Enlightenment principles and “had a towering sense of the Right and of the Just, a basic faith in reason, and a passionate commitment toward achieving the just through the use of reason,” explained Herbert Aptheker. He tirelessly challenged government to repudiate laws and practices that institutionalized white supremacist principles and thereby to accept – to tolerate – black people as equals under the law.

Perhaps not surprisingly, controversy followed Du Bois during his life and beyond, to the point where the United States government effectively disowned him during the last year of his life by denying the renewal of his passport while he was abroad in Ghana; and the town of his birth, Great Barrington, Massachusetts, only grudgingly, after a bitter 1969 struggle, established a memorial park at his boyhood home. Yet, Du Bois advanced a principled moral approach to race relations and society that pre-destined the end of Jim Crow and won the hearts and minds of his successors who carried on the Civil Rights Movement.

Like the other four radicals profiled in the book, Du Bois thought organized religion had contributed to society's discriminatory practices, exclaiming, "it is the Churches which are the most discriminatory of all institutions!” Du Bois believed the true teachings of Jesus Christ were morally uplifting, but as he explained, “I have no particular affection for the Church. I think its record on the Negro problem has been shameful…. The church of John Pierpont Morgan [is] not the church of Jesus Christ.”

Part of what makes Du Bois and the other four profiled radicals such compelling figures is that they were ready to pay the price for their convictions - regardless of the consequences. For them, principle prevailed. Du Bois emphasized that one should never follow the path of Galileo Galilei, who renounced his life’s work of seeking scientific truth when threatened by the Catholic Church. “By that lie," Du Bois said, "civilization was halted, science was checked, and bigotry was more strongly enthroned on its crimson glory.”

NEXT TIME: Vine Deloria Jr. - Radical of the Native Rights Movement

Elizabeth Cady Stanton - Gender Wars Radical

2010-12-20T17:49:00.002-05:00

LAST TIME: Thomas Paine - Radical of the Revolution

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) is the third of five individuals profiled in Radicals in Their Own Time: Four Hundred Years of Liberty and Equal Justice in America.

Stanton was born during the United States's early decades, an era when women were considered to occupy a "separate sphere" of existence essentially limiting them to activities within the home. Groomed in her upbringing as daughter of a prominent judge in upstate New York to a conventional life as mother and homemaker, Stanton long endured mocking disdain from countless strangers and even her own father and husband for insisting that women were morally and legally entitled to equal treatment.

Yet with her lifetime of unflinching advocacy for women’s rights - including her two singular landmark creations, the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments for the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, and the Woman’s Bible in 1896 – Stanton did more than any single person to establish the framework for eventual gender legal equality in the United States (including the “right” to vote, gained some eighteen years after her death with the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920).

Like the other radicals profiled in the book (Roger Williams, Thomas Paine, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Vine Deloria Jr.), Elizabeth Cady Stanton believed that America's constitutional democracy requires a tolerant government. Specifically, Stanton demanded that government replace a legal regime imposing separate, inferior status on women with one that recognizes – or tolerates - the equal legal status of women.

Also like the others, Stanton too charged that clergy (or, more generally, organized religions) were responsible for much of society’s ills, especially for women. “I now see more clearly than ever, that the arch enemy to women’s freedom skulks behind the altar,” she ruminated in 1886. “No class of men have such power to pervert the religious sentiments and oppress mankind with gloomy superstitions through life and an undefined dread of the unknown after death.” But Stanton was convinced the clergy did not truly speak for the Almighty, reasoning, “I cannot believe that a God of law and order … could have sanctioned a social principle so calamitous in its consequences as investing in one-half the race the absolute control of all the rights of the other.”

To so baldly criticize mainstream Christian orthodoxy at the turn of the twentieth century was too radical even for most women’s rights activists - who distanced themselves from Stanton by issuing a formal censure at the 1896 NAWSA convention, and for decades after her death rendering her persona non grata, even while canonizing her longtime collaborator Susan B. Anthony.

NEXT TIME: W. E. B. Du Bois: Black Activist Radical

Thomas Paine - Radical of the Revolution

2010-12-16T11:04:00.003-05:00

LAST TIME: Roger Williams - America's First Radical

Thomas Paine (1737-1809) is the second person profiled in Radicals in Their Own Time: Four Hundred Years of Struggle for Liberty and Equal Justice in America (Cambridge 2011).

Paine, a corset staymaker’s son with a checkered past career, moved from England to the colonies in late 1774 at the relatively-advanced age of thirty-seven. Yet he made his presence felt almost immediately in America with the January 1776 publication of Common Sense, penning the words that provided “the January heat of 1776 that balanced the July light of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence,” and lending crucial moral support to the revolutionary cause in its darkest hours.

A key intellectual player in not one, but two, revolutions (American and French), Paine's flair for the written word was much-admired: Ben Franklin once said, “Others can rule, many can fight, but only Paine can write for us the English tongue”; and Thomas Jefferson, who for many years sent Paine manuscripts for criticism and correction, wrote him, “You must not be too much elated … when I tell you my belief that you are the only writer in America who can write better than your obliged and obedient servant - Thomas Jefferson.”

Like the other four radicals profiled in Radicals in Their Own Time (Roger Williams, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, W.E.B. Du Bois, Vine Deloria Jr.), Paine believed that governmental tolerance for the autonomy of all citizens is a fundamental, mandatory feature of American democracy. He explained the concept in the 1792 Rights of Man: “Natural rights are those which appertain to man in right of his existence. Of this kind are all the intellectual rights, or rights of the mind, and also all those rights of acting as an individual for his own comfort and happiness, which are not injurious to the natural rights of others.”

As for the role of society and government vis-à-vis those natural rights, Paine elaborated: “Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.” “Man did not enter into society to become worse than he was before, not to have fewer rights than he had before, but to have those rights better secured.” In other words, government, which is merely a useful tool devised to protect every person’s pre-existing natural rights, simply lacks authority to curtail these rights. Government, one might say, is Liberty’s servant.

Also like the other four profiled radicals, Paine too believed that religious orthodoxy had been a significant source of intolerance throughout history. He admired Jesus Christ the man, and the principles of tolerance, equality, humility and forgiveness he advocated. “[Jesus] was a virtuous and an amiable man,” Paine explained in the Age of Reason. “The morality that he preached and practiced was of the most benevolent kind.” Paine admired Christ's stubborn commitment to principle (recognizing, no doubt, some of himself in Christ’s own persecuted life experiences): “[Christ] preached also against the corruptions and avarice of the Jewish priests; and this brought upon him the hatred and vengeance of the whole order of priesthood,” Paine recalled. “The accusation which those priests brought against him was that of sedition and conspiracy against the Roman government, to which the Jews were then subject…. Jesus Christ [likely] had in contemplation the delivery of the Jewish nation from the bondage of the Romans.”

And for that, Paine explained, “this virtuous reformer and revolutionist lost his life.” One might accurately say Jesus Christ was himself a radical in his own time.

NEXT TIME: Elizabeth Cady Stanton - Gender Wars Radical

Roger Williams - America's First Radical

2010-11-30T20:27:00.001-05:00

LAST TIME: Americans Are Hungry to Believe Liberty and Equal Justice Will Ultimately Prevail

Roger Williams (1603-1683) is the first person profiled in Radicals in Their Own Time: Four Hundred Years of Struggle for Liberty and Equal Justice in America.

Williams moved from England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1631 at age twenty-eight to escape religious persecution and was was expelled from the Colony just four years later in 1635 for his nonconforming views on religious freedom and separation of church and state. Yet with his views favoring unconditional broad tolerance of the views and practices of all (believers and non-believers alike) - “I plead for impartiality and equal freedom, peace and safety to other consciences and assemblies, unto which the people may as freely go, and this according to each conscience, whatever conscience this conscience be” - he set the template for governmental tolerance of religion in the New World in his new state of Rhode Island, which made the guarantee of religious liberty a part of its fundamental law.

Williams believed government must tolerate the personal autonomy of all citizens on the reasoning that matters involving individual choice not affecting the rights of others are natural rights pre-dating government itself. Indeed, Williams believed the term “tolerance” is itself a misnomer, as it implies government has the authority in the first place to decide whether or not to recognize the right; whereas, the idea of pre-existing natural rights forecloses government interference - period.

When it came to matters of religious orthodoxy, Williams like the other four radicals profiled in the book (Thomas Paine, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, W.E.B. Du Bois, Vine Deloria Jr.) deeply objected to he elaborate superstitions and practices that arose around Christ’s teachings in the many centuries following his death, which variously punished, stigmatized, marginalized or victimized certain individuals or groups. He railed against the hypocrisy of religious wars: “The blood of so many hundred thousand souls of Protestants and Papists, spilt in the Wars of present and former Ages, for their respective Consciences, is not required nor accepted by Jesus Christ the Prince of Peace.”

In the end, for having “broached and divulged [such] diverse new and dangerous opinions against the authority of magistrates,” Williams was banished to the wilderness, where he founded his Rhode Island community dedicated to freedom of religion.

NEXT TIME: Roger Williams in England

Americans Are Hungry to Believe Liberty and Equal Justice Will Ultimately Prevail

2010-11-21T13:39:00.001-05:00

LAST TIME: America's Love of Fictional "Everyman" Underdogs

With its ringing assertion that certain unalienable natural rights (life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) exist beyond the reach of any manmade government - and, more radically, that the people have the right to abolish any government not observing those rights - the Declaration of Independence was a bold statement to the world. As Thomas Jefferson wrote on the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence just days before his death, “May [the Declaration] be to the world, what I believe it will be (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all), the signal of arousing men to burst the chains, under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings & security of self-government.”

It was Americans' ancestors who then crafted a Constitution establishing a governmental structure guaranteeing liberty and equal justice, thereby making America the first nation in the history of the world to break the bonds of feudalism. While the promises of the Declaration and Constitution have fallen far short in the execution, the mandate for a constitutionally-limited government dispensing equal justice is every American’s birthright. “It is the protection of the humblest individual against his own government; [his] bulwark against autocratic power, and against the impulses of an irresponsible majority,” Gaspar Bacon rhapsodized in 1928.

So, when Americans are presented with anecdotal reminders of liberty, individual autonomy and equal justice triumphing over a rigid shepherd, it stirs something familiar from deep within themselves: a welling pride, a visceral longing, a sheer hope, that someone - maybe even oneself or loved ones – will have the courage to claim the full promise of Freedom bequeathed by their forebears. Americans are hungry to believe liberty and equal justice will ultimately prevail. The fictional characters identified in the last post, Dorothy of The Wizard of Oz in 1939, the Great Debaters in 2007, and even Yertle the Turtle in 1959, speak to this hunger, and stand – as do their real-life counterparts Roger Williams, Thomas Paine, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, W.E.B. Du Bois and Vine Deloria - as timeless American heroes for courageously challenging a powerful, often unjust and intolerant Establishment - and winning in the end.

NEXT TIME: Roger Williams

America's Love of Fictional "Everyman" Underdogs

2010-11-17T22:47:00.003-05:00

LAST TIME: Radicals Stood on Principle, Regardless of Consequences to Selves

Even while the American masses may be “disposed to suffer” death by a thousand cuts, as the Declaration of Independence suggests (see last post), at the same time the masses vicariously enjoy the exploits of the few who refuse to be intimidated. So, in any given holiday movie-going or summer reading season, it is possible to find fictional radical characters pushing back against overweening or unjust government. “Who are we to just lie there and do nothing?” asks fictionalized radical-James Farmer Jr., for example, in the 2007 movie The Great Debaters, during a debate about the morality of civil disobedience in response to Southern lynchings in the 1930s. “There is no Rule of Law in the Jim Crow South,” Farmer continues, “not when Negroes are denied housing, turned away from schools, and hospitals. And not when we are lynched. St. Augustine said, ‘An unjust law in no law at all,’ which means I have a right – even a duty – to resist, with violence or civil disobedience. You should pray I choose the latter.”

“Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,” the Wizard-government of Oz commands as he madly works the levers and wheels trying to maintain his grasp on power in one of the most popular movies of all time, The Wizard of Oz - while radical-Dorothy scolds him for his hubris and refuses to allow him to usurp her own autonomy or to mistreat her friends. Dorothy implicitly understands the Wizard is human, no better or worse than herself – and she demands the restoration of justice and tolerance to the Land of Oz.

Or, on the lighter side, Theodore (Dr. Seuss) Geisel’s radical-turtle Mack in Yertle the Turtle implicitly knows that King Yertle is not so special that he should be able to cruelly command all of the other turtles to stack themselves up merely so Yertle will have a better view from atop the stack - so he does something about it. Mack “did a plain little thing. He burped. And his burp shook the throne of the king! … And Yertle, the King of all Sala-ma-sond, Fell off his high throne and fell Plunk! In the Pond! And today the Great Yertle, that marvelous he, Is King of the Mud.” And best of all - “the turtles, of course … all the turtles are free. As turtles and, maybe, all creatures should be.”

There is good reason Americans today are so inspired by underdog stories of courageous individuals who take on an unjust Establishment and prevail – it is in their blood. It was their ancestors, after all, who against heavy odds declared and won independence from the mighty British Empire on the audacious principle that government serves only as liberty’s servant; and that the people may abolish any government that fails to do so. As the Declaration of Independence declares:

"We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed … with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of those Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles."

NEXT TIME: Americans' Hunger to Believe Liberty and Equal Justice Will Ultimately Prevail

Williams, Paine, Stanton, Du Bois, and Deloria Stood on Principle, Regardless of Consequences to Themselves

2010-11-15T16:48:00.001-05:00

LAST TIME: Radicals' View of Organized Religion as Source of Intolerance

Part of what makes Roger Williams, Thomas Paine, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, W.E.B. Du Bois and Vine Deloria, Jr. such compelling figures is that they were ready to pay the price for liberty and equal justice - regardless of the consequences. For them, principle prevailed. As Stanton’s collaborator Susan B. Anthony mused in 1873, “cautious, careful people always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world’s estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathy with despised and persecuted ideas and advocates, and bear the consequences.” One should never follow the path, Du Bois suggested, of Galileo Galilei, who renounced his life’s work seeking scientific truth when threatened by the Catholic Church. “By that lie, civilization was halted, science was checked, and bigotry was more strongly enthroned on its crimson glory.”

As oft-criticized, ridiculed, and even shunned by government and society as they were, Stanton, Du Bois and the others still lobbied, agitated, and generally made nuisances of themselves in their efforts to correct the injustices they encountered. They knew that behind the self-inflating posturing, “government” is no more than a collection of mere men and women cloaked in special clothing to serve a defined narrow purpose; and they demanded change to the existing order so that they – and we all – might one day see liberty and equal justice served.

It is no stretch to say that without their efforts we would not enjoy the scope of freedoms we have today. They knew, along with the nation’s founders, that the natural tendency of government is “threatening, pushing and grasping; … too often in the end … destroy[ing] its benign victim.” Alexis de Tocqueville presciently recognized this threat in America as early as 1835, commenting: “The [democratic] sovereign … spreads a fine mesh of uniform, minute, and complex rules, through which not even the most original minds and most vigorous souls can poke their heads above the crowd…. Rather than tyrannize,” this subtle government power-grab “inhibits, represses, saps, stifles, and stultifies, and in the end reduces each nation to nothing but a flock of timid and industrious animals, with the government as its shepherd.” And the fact is, the flock rarely acts against the shepherd’s subtle abridgments, as the Declaration of Independence expressly recognizes. “All experience hath shown,” the Declaration observes, “that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”

NEXT TIME: America's Love of Fictional "Everyman" Underdogs

Radicals' View of Religious Orthodoxy as Source of Intolerance

2010-11-08T21:59:00.000-05:00

LAST TIME: What Governmental Tolerance is Not

The second common theme of Roger Williams's, Thomas Paine's, Elizabeth Cady Stanton's, W.E.B. Du Bois's, and Vine Deloria Jr.'s activism is that each argued religious orthodoxy (especially Christian orthodoxy) has been a significant source of intolerance throughout American history - just as it had been for many centuries previously in Europe. (The first common theme, again, was that each believed that governmental tolerance is a mandatory feature of America's constitutional democracy.)

Each admired Jesus Christ the man, and the principles of tolerance, equality, humility and forgiveness he advocated. “[Jesus] was a virtuous and an amiable man,” Thomas Paine explained in The Age of Reason. “The morality that he preached and practiced was of the most benevolent kind.” And, indeed, they admired his stubborn commitment to principle (recognizing, no doubt, some of themselves in Christ’s own life experiences): “[Christ] preached also against the corruptions and avarice of the Jewish priests; and this brought upon him the hatred and vengeance of the whole order of priesthood,” Paine recalled. “The accusation which those priests brought against him was that of sedition and conspiracy against the Roman government, to which the Jews were then subject…. Jesus Christ [likely] had in contemplation the delivery of the Jewish nation from the bondage of the Romans.” And for that, Paine explained, “this virtuous reformer and revolutionist lost his life.” One might accurately say Jesus Christ was himself a radical in his own time.

What Paine and the others objected to were the elaborate superstitions and practices that arose around Christ’s teachings in the many centuries following his death, which variously punished, stigmatized, marginalized or victimized certain individuals or groups. And for daring to challenge the church’s dogma – which has always been accepted essentially verbatim by the vast majority of Americans, with marginal variations depending on the particular Judeo-Christian flavor – all five, to varying degrees, were vilified.

Williams railed against the hypocrisy of religious wars: “The blood of so many hundred thousand souls of Protestants and Papists, spilt in the Wars of present and former Ages, for their respective Consciences, is not required nor accepted by Jesus Christ the Prince of Peace.” In the end, for having “broached and divulged [such] diverse new and dangerous opinions against the authority of magistrates,” Williams was banished to the wilderness (literally) from the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Paine said, “I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of,” explaining instead: “My own mind is my own church.” “All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish,” he added, “appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.” These are fighting words in a Christian country like America; and in 1888, approaching a century after his death, Paine was still being derided as “that dirty little atheist” by the likes of Theodore Roosevelt.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton too charged that the clergy were responsible for much of society’s ills, especially for women. “I now see more clearly than ever, that the arch enemy to women’s freedom skulks behind the altar,” she ruminated in 1886. “No class of men have such power to pervert the religious sentiments and oppress mankind with gloomy superstitions through life and an undefined dread of the unknown after death.” But Stanton was convinced the clergy did not truly speak for the Almighty, reasoning, “I cannot believe that a God of law and order … could have sanctioned a social principle so calamitous in its consequences as investing in one-half the race the absolute control of all the rights of the other.” To so baldly criticize mainstream Christian orthodoxy at the turn of the twentieth century was too radical even for most women’s rights activists - who distanced themselves from Stanton by issuing a formal censure at the 1896 NAWSA convention, and for decades after her death rendering her persona non grata, even while canonizing her longtime collaborator Susan B. Anthony.

While W.E.B. Du Bois believed the true teachings of Jesus were morally uplifting, he had “no particular affection for the Church. I think its record on the Negro problem has been shameful…. [T]he southern branch of the Church is a moral dead weight and the northern branch … never has had the moral courage to stand against it.” “The church of John Pierpont Morgan,” he stressed, “[is] not the church of Jesus Christ.” “Of course, it is the Churches which are the most discriminatory of all institutions!” The United States government sued Du Bois on trumped-up charges after his turn to the avowedly-atheist Communist nations of China and Russia, and then, as noted above, effectively disowned him in the final year of his life for his communist party membership.

Vine Deloria was blunt in his assessment of Christian orthodoxy’s deleterious effects throughout history: “From pope to pauper, Protestant to Catholic, Constantinople to the United States, the record is filled with atrocities, misunderstandings, persecutions, genocides, and oppressions so numerous as to bring fear into the hearts and minds of non-Christian peoples. Deloria was caustic in his criticism of America and other Western nations’ use of Christian orthodoxy to justify its expansionist goals: “At one time or another slavery, poverty, and treachery were all justified by Christianity as politically moral institutions of the state.” These harsh assessments antagonized many in a mainstream American establishment thoroughly suffused with Christian dogma.

In short, all five of the profiled radicals lived implicitly by Christ’s uncompromising moral values of peace, goodwill, and forgiveness. All spoke their mind about the hypocrisies and abuses perpetuated in Christ’s name – and all, like Christ himself, were punished for speaking truth to power. The lesson? Challenge this most sacred of cows, Christian orthodoxy – and be prepared to pay a heavy price.

NEXT TIME: Radicals' Stands on Principle, Regardless of Consequences to Themselves

What Governmental Tolerance is Not

2010-11-06T10:53:00.002-04:00

LAST TIME: Governmental TOLERANCE as Core Principle of American Democracy - "Harm" Principle; Right to be "Let Alone"

It is worth noting what governmental tolerance is not. It is not a strict libertarian approach where government would have little or no role in all matters – as Thomas Paine said, “the Public Good is to be [government’s] object.” Government has vital, important functions. In exercising these functions, however, elective government acts legitimately only insofar as it respects the individual’s “right to be let alone.” All government activity must be guided by this test - if the elective government’s action abridges individual free-will on matters of natural private concern, presumptively it is not legitimate, and should be struck down by another branch of government - the judiciary. Outside of such freedom-depriving sorts of actions, however, elective government is free to enact policy as it will – whether of progressive, conservative, or any other description. This is where the people and their representatives exercise the will of the majority in a democratic society. In such cases judicial intervention is inappropriate, and an intervening court would raise legitimate countermajoritarian-difficulty concerns. Finally, at the same time, when judicial opinions fail to respect liberty/equal-justice interests, it is elective government’s responsibility to enact legislation to (among other things) guide the judiciary.

One last note on tolerance: as much as one may sing its praises, it is important not to view governmental tolerance as a panacea for all of society’s ills. As Professor Michael Walzer notes, “tolerance brings an end to persecution and fearfulness, but it is not a formula for social harmony. Newly tolerated groups [and individuals], insofar as they are really different, will often also be antagonistic, and they will seek political advantage.” The point is that in a governmental tolerance regime, the one thing those groups and individuals will not be able to do, even while seeking political advantage, is to enlist government assistance in denying the other groups and individuals from engaging in their preferred activities. Government, with rare exceptions, must tolerate them all.

NEXT TIME: Organized Religion as Source of Intolerance

Governmental TOLERANCE as Core Principle of American Democracy - "Harm" Principle; Right to be "Let Alone"

2010-10-31T20:09:00.001-04:00

LAST TIME: Governmental TOLERANCE of Individual Autonomy as Core Principle of American Democracy

Conceptually, the idea of governmental tolerance is easy - when it comes to matters of individual free-will causing no harm to others, government is not required to do anything; rather, it must simply stay out of the way and do nothing at all. The mid-nineteenth-century English philosopher John Stuart Mill aptly articulated the concept with his “harm principle”: “The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.” A century and a half earlier, John Locke, the great thinker of the European Enlightenment who was probably the most influential source of revolutionary American political thought (Thomas Jefferson, for example, considered Locke “[one of the three] greatest men that have ever lived, without any exception”), wrote: The care … of every man’s soul belongs unto himself, and is to be left unto himself.” To Locke, government acts properly in protecting individuals from fraudulent or physical harm; but acts improperly when it paternalistically regulates private choice. It must, in other words, tolerate individual free will.

The U.S. Supreme Court has also recognized this principle (albeit too infrequently). As Justice Louis Brandeis intoned in acknowledging the concept in a 1928 case: “The makers of our Constitution … conferred, as against the government, the right to be let alone - the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men. To protect that right, every unjustifiable intrusion by the government upon the privacy of the individual, whatever the means employed, must be deemed a violation.” Or, as a majority of the Supreme Court commented in 1943 in striking down a West Virginia law requiring schoolchildren to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what is orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.” And, in one of its finest moments, in a 2003 case striking down a Texas law punishing consenting adults for engaging in certain sexual behavior within their own homes,, the Supreme Court majority explained: “Freedom extends beyond spatial bounds. Liberty presumes an autonomy of self that includes freedom of thought, belief, expression, and certain intimate conduct.”

To Williams, Paine, Stanton, Du Bois and Deloria too, a tolerant government does not interfere – thereby allowing diverse viewpoints and practices the necessary breathing space they require in a free pluralistic society. Roger Williams believed government should stay separate from – that it should tolerate - all religious practices. Thomas Paine was committed to the common sense principle that government must not abridge – that it must tolerate – the individual rights of all people. Elizabeth Cady Stanton demanded that government replace a legal regime imposing separate, inferior status on women with one that recognizes – that tolerates - the equal legal status of women. W.E.B. Du Bois tirelessly challenged government to repudiate laws and practices that institutionalized white supremacist principles and thereby to accept – to tolerate – black people as equals under the law. And Vine Deloria Jr. spent his lifetime exposing the practices of a U.S. government that systematically reneged on its solemn promises to leave alone – to tolerate – Indian tribes with their native lands and traditions, and pointed the way forward for how that government should make amends for its egregious breaches of faith.

NEXT TIME: What governmental tolerance is not

The Two Common Themes of Williams's, Paine's, Stanton's, Du Bois's and Deloria's Activism: Governmental TOLERANCE; Criticism of Organized Religion

2010-10-26T21:58:00.002-04:00

LAST TIME: Speaking Truth to Power (Williams, Paine, Stanton, Du Bois, Deloria)

In discussing Williams, Paine, Stanton, Du Bois and Deloria, Radicals in Their Own Time makes two important observations. First, each argued in essence that governmental tolerance for the autonomy of all citizens is a fundamental, mandatory feature of American democracy. Second, each believed that organized religion has been a major source of society’s ills (including American government’s regular intolerance of citizens’ autonomy), and all five endured serious negative repercussions for saying so.

Regarding the first, they believed government must tolerate the personal autonomy of all citizens on the reasoning that matters involving individual choice not affecting the rights of others are natural rights pre-dating government itself. Indeed, in this context Roger Williams believed the term “tolerance” is itself a misnomer, as it implies government has the authority in the first place to decide whether or not to recognize the right; whereas, the idea of pre-existing natural rights forecloses government interference - period.

Thomas Paine explained the concept in the 1792 Rights of Man: “Natural rights are those which appertain to man in right of his existence. Of this kind are all the intellectual rights, or rights of the mind, and also all those rights of acting as an individual for his own comfort and happiness, which are not injurious to the natural rights of others.” As for the role of society and government vis-à-vis those natural rights, Paine elaborated: “Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.” “Man did not enter into society to become worse than he was before, not to have fewer rights than he had before, but to have those rights better secured.” In other words, government, which is merely a useful tool devised to protect every person’s pre-existing natural rights, simply lacks authority to curtail these rights. Government, one might say, is Liberty’s servant.

It makes perfect sense that tolerance of natural rights would be a critical governmental attribute in a country formally dedicated to “free[ing] the individual from the oppressive misuse of power, [and] from the tyranny of the state,” in the words of renowned historian Bernard Bailyn. “No idea is more fundamental,” historian Eric Foner adds, “to Americans' sense of themselves as individuals and as a nation than ‘freedom’ or ‘liberty.’”

NEXT TIME: Governmental TOLERANCE of Individual Autonomy as Core Principle of American Democracy (cont'd)

Speaking Truth to Power - Roger Williams, Thomas Paine, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, W.E.B. Du Bois, Vine Deloria Jr.

2010-10-23T16:55:00.007-04:00

LAST TIME: Best of Times & Worst of Times for Liberty and Justice in America

Part of the reason this book's profiled radicals Roger Williams, Thomas Paine, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, W.E.B. Du Bois and Vine Deloria Jr. are less-celebrated than icons like Franklin, Washington and Jefferson is that each was, in a sense, too principled for his or her own good. They were controversial and impolitic. They spoke truth to power in ways irritating to authorities, and all were at times harshly critical of America. They were not approval-seeking, conflict-averse people; rather, they were agitators, and they did not shrink from offending others – not only their enemies but sometimes also their own friends – as they resolutely championed the natural rights of liberty and equal justice. There were no sacred cows for these five – including, for all, the particularly combustible topic of religious orthodoxy.

Roger Williams, who moved from England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1631 at age twenty-eight to escape religious persecution, was expelled from the Colony in 1635 for his nonconforming views on religious freedom and separation of church and state. Yet with his views favoring unconditional broad tolerance of the views and practices of all (believers and non-believers alike) - “I plead for impartiality and equal freedom, peace and safety to other consciences and assemblies, unto which the people may as freely go, and this according to each conscience, whatever conscience this conscience be” - he set the template for governmental tolerance of religion in the New World in his new state of Rhode Island, which made the guarantee of religious liberty a part of its fundamental law.

Thomas Paine, a corset staymaker’s son who moved from England to the colonies as a thirty-seven year-old in 1774, faced withering criticism from his more appeasement-minded colonial colleagues (such as John Adams) and charges of sedition in his home country of England. Yet with his flair for the written word (Ben Franklin once said, “Others can rule, many can fight, but only Paine can write for us the English tongue”; and Thomas Jefferson, who for many years sent Paine manuscripts for criticism and correction, wrote him, “You must not be too much elated … when I tell you my belief that you are the only writer in America who can write better than your obliged and obedient servant - Thomas Jefferson”), Paine was a key intellectual player in not one, but two, revolutions - penning in Common Sense the words that provided “the January heat of 1776 that balanced the July light of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence,” and lending crucial moral support to the revolutionary cause in its darkest hours.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, groomed in her upbringing as daughter of a prominent judge in upstate New York to a conventional life as mother and homemaker, long endured mocking disdain from countless strangers and even her own father and husband for insisting that women were morally and legally entitled to equal treatment. Yet with her lifetime of unflinching advocacy for women’s rights - including her two singular landmark creations, the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments for the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, and the Woman’s Bible in 1896 – Stanton did more than any single person to establish the framework for eventual gender legal equality in the United States (including the “right” to vote, gained some eighteen years after her death with the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920).

Controversy followed black radical historian, scholar and agitator-prophet W.E.B. Du Bois during his life and beyond, to the point where the government of his country of birth, America, effectively disowned him during the last year of his life by denying the renewal of his passport while he was abroad in Ghana; and the town of his birth, Great Barrington, Massachusetts, only grudgingly, after a bitter 1969 struggle, established a memorial park at his boyhood home. Yet Du Bois advanced a principled moral approach to race relations and society that pre-destined the end of Jim Crow and won the hearts and minds of his successors who carried on the Civil Rights Movement. Long committed to core Enlightenment principles, “Du Bois had a towering sense of the Right, of the Just,” explains Du Bois’s literary executor Herbert Apthelker, “[and] a basic faith in reason and a passionate commitment toward achieving the just through the use of reason.”

And Sioux author, scholar and activist Vine Deloria, whose views on government naturally came through his own tribal traditions, antagonized the establishment while shaking mainstream America out of its complacency with his provocative works exposing the American government’s systematic centuries-long oppression of Indian tribes. Beginning with Custer Died for Your Sins, his devastating 1969 critique of the United States Government and passionate call-to-action to a new generation of Native Americans, Deloria was a central figure in providing a unifying intellectual, political voice to Indians past, present and future in their battles for self-determination and reclaiming tribal heritage. As Indian Law scholar Charles Wilkinson comments, “If you mark down the great figures of the American West in recent times, [Deloria] belongs there because of his role in reshaping Indian country…. I think in the last 100 years, he's been the most important person in Indian affairs, period.”

NEXT TIME: Two Common Themes of Williams's, Paine's, Stanton's, Du Bois's, and Deloria's Activism

Best of Times and Worst of Times for Liberty and Equal Justice in America

2010-10-22T23:43:00.001-04:00

As discussed last time, it is the best of times and worst of times for freedom in America.

On one hand, America’s story is remarkable: a Nation, sprouting from the seeds of Enlightenment principles where “tolerance was a moral virtue, even a duty; no longer merely the prerogative of calculating monarchs, but a fundamental element of the ‘rights of man.’” For the first time in history a people - coming together toward the common goal of liberty and equal justice, and clearly cognizant of human nature’s split personality between good (freedom) and evil (tyranny and oppression) - created a government explicitly designed to resolve the tension in favor of freedom.

That is the myth, anyway. But all is not well in the land of milk and honey; for America’s constitutional structure has failed to thwart government’s moves to the darker side: its shameful history of slavery and apartheid; its past oppression of women; its systematic subjugation of Native Americans in violation of sacred treaty promises; its pervasive discrimination against immigrants and homosexuals; and, among other more recent repressions, its curtailments of civil liberties and inexcusable use of torture in the ill-considered “war on terror.” Consider also American geopolitics of the last hundred years: World War I Censorship (Congress’s and President Wilson’s 1917-1918 Espionage and Alien Acts imposing egregious punishments on political speech); World War II Nativism (the President’s authorizing the military to force 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of them American citizens, from their homes and to quarantine them in internment camps for nearly three years; Cold War McCarthyism (powerful committees of both the United States Senate and House of Representatives conducting modern-day witch-hunts of thousands of American citizens accused of having communist sympathies); and Millennial Cheneyism (the executive branch aggressively exceeding long-accepted constitutional limits on its power - even while operating in a system that separates powers in order to provide checks and balances on each co-equal branch).

In each case, prejudice, greed, and political expediency took hold before being beaten back – for the time being. It is a constant struggle. As much as America has accomplished in advancing humankind’s perpetual quest for greater Freedom, it has never completely lived up to its own promise, for whatever reason – whether because of bitter class wars (Howard Zinn), its economically-motivated Constitution (Charles Beard), or some combination of these or other factors.

Which viewpoint more accurately describes the true America - the mythic common-interest pursuit-of-equal-liberty view; the grittier class-warfare explanation; the more cynical economic-interest rationale; or something else altogether? The reality is that there are elements of accuracy in each. And it is useful to keep them all in mind: Lest we become swept-up in misty patriotic myth, we should recall America’s ignoble history of injustices and intolerance; or, conversely, lest we lose hope, we should remember that the myth and partial reality of America as beacon of freedom has for centuries truly inspired millions around the world. In the end, the goals represented in the positive myth are worth fighting for, both idealistically and practically, for they advance our individual and collective humanity – and offer a model of ambition, idealism and hope for future generations.

NEXT TIME: Radicals - Speaking Truth to Power