Bad Science Has Consequences: Eugenics and Emma Wolverton’s Story

Incorrect and often dangerous scientific conclusions can be produced and propagated in a number of ways.  Occasionally, the science is too complicated to be interpreted correctly by a simple method.  Occasionally, outright fraud is involved.  But probably the most common defect in the scientific method is associated with researchers whose preconceptions blind them to a proper interpretation of the data they have collected.  Scientists, like most other people, tend to find the results they set off looking for.

Carl Zimmer has produced a fascinating look into the history and current status of the science associated with heredity in She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity.  He devotes a chapter of his book to a description of early beliefs about genetic transmission of characteristics, and detailed how poorly understood concepts were used in developing eugenic policies.  The fear was that genetically “damaged” people would pass their faulty genes on to their children.  In the process, he relates the interesting history of Emma Wolverton and her family and the role it played in creating eugenic policies both in the US and abroad.

In 1888, S. Olin Garrison founded “The New Jersey Home for the Education and Care of Feebleminded Children.”  The name was changed to “The New Jersey Training School” in 1893. In 1911, the name was changed again to “The Training School at Vineland.”  The intent was to provide a home to children with learning or behavioral disabilities that would treat them more kindly than typical institutions and perhaps improve their capabilities in the process.  This noble intent would soon become perverted when the residents of the institution proved to be a useful data set for eugenicists worried about the “pollution” of the national population by “feebleminded” people breeding more “feebleminded” children. 

Zimmer tells us that the concept of being “feebleminded” might include those suffering from epilepsy, Down syndrome, and myriad other physical and behavioral disorders.  It was believed at the time that any of these disorders,  including socially unacceptable behaviors, were hereditary and could be passed on to children.

“Somehow, feeblemindedness could be both a medical disorder and the wages of sin, passed down from the sinners to their children.”

“Emma [Wolverton] belonged to a class of students who had no obvious symptoms but were still judged unfit for society.”

Emma was delivered to the school in 1897 when she was eight.  She was the child of a mother whose main skill seemed to be getting pregnant.  When the latest child was born, the father agreed to support her and the child, but not any children that weren’t his.  That meant Emma had to find a home.  In hope that the school would care for her, she was described as someone who had trouble getting along with other children at school.

Emma was accepted and treated like the other children.  They were taught whatever academic skills they could handle, given adequate playtime, and trained in manual skills as well.

“Girls like Emma were instructed in sewing, dressmaking, and woodworking, while the boys learned how to make shoes and rugs.  The administrators claimed that this labor prepared the students to someday earn a living.  But the school, like many asylums and prisons of the time, also depended on their work for their own income.  Between May 1897 and May 1898, the school’s records indicated, the students made 30 new three-piece suits, 92 pairs of overalls, 234 aprons, 107 new pairs of shoes, and 40 dressed dolls.  They washed 275,130 pieces of laundry.  They sold $8,160.81 of produce from the school farm, including 1,030 bushels of turnips, 158 baskets of cantaloupes, and 83,161 quarts of milk.  The fact that feebleminded children could do so much skilled labor was a paradox that never seems to have troubled the school’s administration.”

Henry Goddard had become a student of childhood education, believing that scientific methods could improve the process.  He viewed the Vineyard institution as the ideal place to study the minds of children, hoping that simpler minds would be easier to understand.  However, there were darker scientific currents swirling about simple-minded children.  When Goddard was appointed to be the school’s first head of research, he was given a mission statement by the administration that included the stemming of the growth of feeblemindedness within society.  The feebleminded must not be allowed to procreate.

Goddard initially believed that education methods could improve the lot of the feebleminded.  One of his contributions to the issue was to try to produce a method that would quantify the degree of feeblemindedness.  How can one detect improvement in a quantity that could not be measured?  He went to Europe searching for help on this matter and encountered the Simon-Binet test which was a series of questions that children could be given.  Based on how their answers compared to students in general, they could be given an effective grade level.  Despite warnings from French researchers that this was not an appropriate approach, Goddard brought it back home and tried it on the school’s students.

Children at the school were classified with specific labels according to their perceived mental capacities.  The lowest performers were referred to as “idiots.” Next came the “imbeciles,” and the highest performers among the feebleminded were the “morons,” a term invented by Goddard himself.  So, if one wishes to hurl an insult at another, the most appropriate term is now available for use.

When Goddard returned from Europe, he applied the Simon-Binet test to the children at the school and noted that the results reproduced the hierarchy of capabilities produced by the staff based on their observations.  Goddard concluded that a test of this kind was a valid tool for quantifying feeblemindedness.

Emma first encountered Goddard at the age of seventeen.  She had been a model student, behaving herself, getting along with others, and being productive as a worker.

“She proved herself so capable that Johnstone [the school’s administrator] made her his housekeeper and later put his infant son in her care.”

Goddard gave her a series of questions to answer and immediately concluded that she was a moron—a sort of compliment.

Goddard was now a firm believer in the inheritability of “feeblemindedness.”  The children at the school could provide a wealth of data if he could examine their backgrounds and verify its transmission from parent to child.  He found a eugenics researcher with money to spend who would finance this research.  Associates were hired to go out and review the children’s families and report back their findings.  The data he was given concerning Emma’s heritage would provide the perfect example of what he was looking for.

The results produced by his associates often indicated that dysfunctional children can be produced by perfectly normal parents, but in enough of the cases he could see a causal relationship between the child and the parents that satisfied his expectations.  It never seemed to occur to anyone involved that poverty and a disrupted family life could impact mental and behavioral characteristics.

The report presented to Goddard on Emma Wolverton’s family contained the claim that a John Wolverton, a militiaman during the Revolutionary War, spent a night at a tavern during that period and fathered a son by an unknown feebleminded woman.  Wolverton moved on and married a respectable woman and sired a family that produced generations of upstanding and prominent people.  The feebleminded woman named her son John Wolverton.  This man was himself feebleminded and sired a succession people who where characterized as feebleminded and/or criminal.  This would be interpreted by Goddard as the perfect example of a controlled experiment in heredity and fueled his passion for a solution to the nation’s most compelling problem.

“Goddard Convinced himself the United States was sliding into a crisis of heredity.  ‘If civilization is to advance, our best people must replenish the earth,’ he said.  To Goddard, the best people in the United States were his fellow New Englanders, ‘the stock than which there is no better.’  But one by one, the great New England families were disappearing for lack of children.  Meanwhile, the feebleminded were multiplying at over twice the average rate, according to Goddard’s estimates.”

Goddard was not alone in being alarmed at the prospect of the nation being overrun by the feebleminded.  There were many who believed that institutionalizing or sterilizing the feebleminded was necessary in order to prevent them from any opportunity to reproduce.  And then there was a Dr. McKim who advanced a concept that must have seemed incredible even to other eugenicists at the time.

“….an American physician named W. D. McKim went so far as to call for ‘a gentle painless death.’  He envisioned the construction of gas chambers to kill ‘the very weak and the very vicious’.”

Goddard changed the name of the Wolvertons to the Kallikaks (a name formed from the Greek words for good and bad) and published the Wolverton history as The Kallikak Family in 1912.

“It gave a modern, Mendelian polish to old beliefs about feeblemindedness as a punishment for sin.  The Evening Star, a Washington, DC, newspaper, reprinted large excerpts from The Kallikak Family, accompanied by a shuddering commentary: ‘I doubt there is in all literature a more damning presentation of how one single sin can perpetuate itself in generations of untold misery and suffering, to the end of time’.”

“The book became a best seller, turning Goddard—a psychologist at a little-known backwoods institution—into one of the most famous scientists in the United States.”

People across the nation wanted Goddard’s intelligence tests to assist them in policy decisions.

“The New York City school system adopted them, administering them to all their students, and soon other school districts across the country followed suit.  The United States Public Health Service reached out as well.  They didn’t need his help to reach students.  Rather, they wanted to test the flood of immigrants arriving in the United States.”

Goddard sent his assistants to Ellis Island with an appropriate test to identify any feebleminded persons who should be prohibited from entering the country.

“Goddard’s staff kept careful records of the tests, which he analyzed back in Vineland.  The results stunned him: a huge proportion of the immigrants tested as feebleminded.  Goddard broke down the results by ethnic group: 79 percent of the Italians were feebleminded, 83 percent of Jews, 87 percent of Russians.”

One might think that a scientist would reevaluate his methods and search for a more reasonable result.  But that is not what a scientist inebriated on success and fame tends to do.  His numbers were deemed credible by the people who were lobbying for restricted immigration and they appreciated the ammunition with which to advance their agenda.

Goddard had enough confidence when the US entered the world war to warn the army “that it might risk losing the war by unwittingly drafting hundreds of thousands of morons.”  The army made the soldiers, 1,700,000 in all, available for testing using a Goddard-devised quiz.

“….the average score of the soldiers was startingly low.  According to Goddard’s standards, 47 percent of the white soldiers and 89 percent of the blacks should be categorized as morons.  The average white soldier….had a mental age of thirteen years, just barely above the cutoff for feeblemindedness.  The majority of Americans, in other words, was feebleminded or close to it.”

Again, these unlikely results were taken as hard evidence of the rapid decline in the quality of the US citizenry caused by the influx and reproduction of lesser peoples.  Democracy itself was questioned as pundits considered a voting population dominated by morons.  Eugenicists continued to use Goddard’s test results to push for forced sterilization laws and restrictions on immigration.

This madness was not restricted to the United States.  In 1914 The Kallikak Family was published in Germany and became a hit there.  It supported the German eugenicists who had also been clamoring for elimination of the unfit via sterilization programs.  Hitler became aware of the Kallikaks and the lessons Goddard had propagated became Nazi dogma.

“When Adolph Hitler was imprisoned in 1924, he learned of the Kallikaks in a book he read about heredity.  Soon after, Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, in which he mimicked the language of American eugenicists, declaring that sterilization of defective people ‘is the most humane act of mankind’.”

“In 1933, the year Hitler seized power, a new German edition of The Kallikak Family was published.  In his introduction, the translator, Karl Wilker, made clear just how important Goddard’s work had been to the Nazis.”

“’Questions which were only cautiously touched upon by Henry Herbert Goddard at the time….have resulted in the law for the prevention of sick or ill offspring,’ Wilker wrote.  ‘Just how significant is the problem of genetic inheritance is, perhaps no example shows so clearly as the Kallikak family.”

“The Nazis used the Kallikaks as a teaching tool.”

The American Dr. McKim would see his “gentle painless death” in gas chambers put into action.  The Nazis would begin using fumes from automobile engines as an inexpensive means to kill various defectives.  Soon they would be using the same technique on Jews and other undesirable peoples before perfecting the technique at Auschwitz.

The realization of what the Nazis had been up to in Germany permanently cast American eugenics into a downward spiral.  But the damage had already been done.  Forced sterilization of defectives had become a common practice in a number of states.  Although the book went out of publication in 1939, it lived on in psychology texts which would suggest frightening prospects for students who may have come from families where disabilities existed.  Goddard’s work continued to fuel scientific racism.  Henry Garrett was a dedicated segregationist.  He claimed that “blacks were as intelligent on average as a white person after a lobotomy.”  As a former president of the American Psychological Association and a professor at Columbia University, he brought some credibility to these claims.  He wrote a textbook called General Psychology in 1955 that kept Goddard’s Kallikak claims alive for another decade or so. 

“The textbook would go through many editions, and students would still be looking at the Kallikak family in the 1960s.  In 1973, the year of his death, Garrett railed against the constitutional right to vote, complaining how ‘the vote of the feeble-minded person counts as much as that of an intelligent man’.”

Many people were never fooled by Goddard’s work and his description of the Kallikaks.  But it would take advances in learning that recognized the complexity of genetic inheritance to finally dispose of such simple-minded hypotheses.  Unfortunately, learned publications propagate knowledge much more slowly than those that play to popular fantasies.

In the 1980s a pair of genealogists decided to redo the tracking of Emma Wolverton’s family back in time.  They discovered that a terrible error had been made.  There were two John Wolvertons, but one was not the illegitimate son of the other via a feebleminded woman.  Instead they were second cousins with the same name.  Goddard’s great genetic experiment never happened.  Both extended Wolverton families produced their share of successful people.  Emma was just unfortunate enough to come from a line that fell on hard times for a few generations. 

Goddard’s associates tracked her family as far as was convenient.  When they were provided information that satisfied the picture they sought, they stopped looking—an example of sloppy science if there ever was one.

The consequences of their error were enormous.  Besides providing Nazis justifications for some of their more evil schemes, they promoted the Jim Crow laws of the American South, helped justify colonial powers in their domination of native populations, forced the unnecessary sterilization of thousands in our country, and fostered generations of anti-immigrant feelings.

We will never know whether Emma Wolverton deserved to be labeled a moron.  After growing too old for the Vineyard Training School she was shipped to the New Jersey State Institution for Feeble-Minded Women which happened to be in the same town.  She would spend her remaining days there, dying in 1978 at the age of 89.  Most descriptions of her over the years spoke of her as a seemingly normal person who was occasionally mistook for a staff member rather than an inmate.  After 80 years of incarceration, the institutions in which she lived had become home and she seemed content.

At one point she told one of the staff that she had named a cat she kept Henry, “for a dear, wonderful friend who wrote a book.  It’s the book that made me famous.”

2008: The Fed Saves the World Financial Order; 2018: Trump’s Assignment Is to Destroy It

Looking back ten years at what would be referred to as “The Great Recession,” it is easy to think of this event as somehow “minor” in comparison to the Great Depression of the 1930s.  Both involved greed, mismanagement, and the collapse of overinflated assets, but they differed dramatically in the financial environments in which events occurred.  The Great Depression unrolled on a timescale of years; that of the Great Recession, given a highly globalized financial community, required policy responses on the timescales of months-to-weeks, and even occasionally days.  Many believe that the crisis of 2008 was potentially more severe than that of the Great Recession, and it was only by the narrowest of margins that a far greater disaster was avoided.

Reviewing the events of ten years ago, when there truly were adults in the room, also provides an opportunity to make a comparison with the frightening situation we find ourselves in now.

Adam Tooze is a professor of history at Columbia University.  He provides a fresh look at the events that shook the financial world in 2008 to educate us on how catastrophe was averted.   His hope is to make us realize that it could happen again and the next time we may not be so fortunate.  He provided an excellent article in Foreign Affairs: The Forgotten History of the Financial Crisis: What the World Should Have Learned in 2008.

Tooze provides some perspective to justify the claim that the period of late 2008 produced “the worst financial crisis in global history.”

“Although more banks failed during the Depression, these failures were scattered between 1929 and 1933 and involved far smaller balance sheets. In 2008, both the scale and the speed of the implosion were breathtaking. According to data from the Bank for International Settlements, gross capital flows around the world plunged by 90 percent between 2007 and 2008.”

“As capital flows dried up, the crisis soon morphed into a crushing recession in the real economy. The ‘great trade collapse’ of 2008 was the most severe synchronized contraction in international trade ever recorded. Within nine months of their pre-crisis peak, in April 2008, global exports were down by 22 percent. (During the Great Depression, it took nearly two years for trade to slump by a similar amount.)”

According to Tooze, memories of the crisis and its consequences have dimmed.  In the US, it is the recklessness and criminality, both public and private, that is recalled.  In Europe, where the crisis was just as severe, “leaders are content to blame everything on the Americans.” 

The initiation of the problems was the fall in US housing prices that exposed the risky bundling of bad mortgages.  However, that was not sufficient to explain what followed.  That rapid loss of value had to be coupled with equally risky bank practices that allowed essentially a “run on banks” when credit suddenly dried up.

“What turned 2008 into the worst banking crisis in history was a new business model for banks. Traditionally, most banks had funded their operations through what is known as ‘retail’ banking, in which consumers lend money to banks in the form of deposits, which banks use to make loans. Beginning in the 1980s, however, banks across the world increasingly moved toward ‘wholesale’ banking, funding their operations through large, short-term loans from other financial institutions, such as other banks and money market funds. The motive for this shift was profit and competitive survival. Wholesale funding gave banks the ability to borrow much larger sums of money than they could in the retail market, allowing them to become more leveraged—and thus more exposed to risk—than ever before.”

This banking model had spread beyond the United States and was common in Europe, and to a lesser extent in Asia and Russia.  This tendency to increase the leverage on their assets was also coupled with the need to complete outstanding transactions in US dollars.  This was particularly a problem in Europe.  When financial markets were humming smoothly, gaining access to dollars was available in a number of ways.  However, when the collapse in asset values shocked markets to a standstill, these banks were in big trouble.

“But the real threat to the global economy was not just that banks in the United States, Europe, and, to some extent, Russia and Asia were becoming overleveraged; it was also that much of these banks’ short-term funding involved currency mismatches. In order to do business in the United States, non-U.S. banks needed dollars, which they obtained from wholesale markets through a variety of methods: borrowing unsecured cash from U.S. sources, issuing commercial paper (essentially short-term IOUs), and, crucially, using currency-swap markets to receive short-term dollar loans in exchange for their own local currencies, with a promise to “swap” the currencies back at the end of the loan term. In short, foreign banks were racking up sizable liabilities that had to be paid in dollars. If the money markets where they obtained these dollars ceased to function, many of the world’s banks would immediately be at risk of failure.”

The first indication that the problems in the US would spread globally arose when in August, 2007, the French bank PNB Paribus stopped transactions in some of its investment vehicles due to the US situation.  This bank was holding significant amounts of suspect mortgage assets and that indicated that the problem was much larger than just US financial institutions.  The British bank Northern Rock would soon become the first bank to face failure as uncertainty spread and shut down markets.

“The first big bank to fail spectacularly was the British lender Northern Rock, in August and September 2007. It had no exposure to American subprime mortgages, but its funding model relied overwhelmingly on wholesale borrowing from around the world. What cut off Northern Rock’s access to funding was BNP Paribas’ August 9 announcement. This sent a signal to wholesale lenders that more banks were holding bad assets than anyone had previously understood. With the extent of the contagion unknown, wholesale lending ground to a halt. Five days later, Northern Rock informed British regulators that it would need assistance.”

Europe was in serious trouble.

“The Bank for International Settlements estimated that all told, by the end of 2007, European banks would have needed to raise somewhere between $1 trillion and $1.2 trillion in order to cover the gaps on their balance sheets between dollar assets and dollar funding.”

“By the fall of 2007, officials in the United States had begun to fear that European banks, in a frantic bid to earn dollars to pay their bills, would liquidate their dollar portfolios in a giant fire sale. And because these banks owned 29 percent of all nonconforming, high-risk mortgage-backed securities in the United States, this was not just a European problem. The nightmare scenario for the Americans was that European banks would dump their dollar holdings, driving the prices of mortgage-backed securities to rock bottom and forcing U.S. banks, which held even larger quantities of those securities, to recognize huge losses, thus triggering a bank run that would have overwhelmed the furious efforts of the U.S. authorities to restore stability.”

“It was this risk of simultaneous implosion on both sides of the Atlantic that made 2008 the most dangerous crisis ever witnessed.”

Authorities on both sides of the Atlantic struggled through 2008 trying to keep their financial institutions afloat.  The Fed provided several paths to cheap cash for US institutions and allowed other countries to participate.  The Fed was becoming the lender of last resort for much of the world.  Nevertheless, the actions taken thus far were insufficient to stave off failure by the European banks.

“As the crisis intensified, however, the Fed’s leaders found that simply providing the European banks with access to the Wall Street liquidity programs would not be enough. Their funding needs were too great, and they lacked sufficient high-quality collateral in New York. So Geithner and the New York Federal Reserve resorted to an indirect mechanism for providing them with dollars, repurposing a long-forgotten instrument known as a ‘liquidity swap line’.”

“Liquidity swap lines are contracts between two central banks, in this case, the Fed and a foreign central bank, to temporarily exchange currencies: the Fed provides its counterpart with a fixed amount of dollars and in return receives an equivalent amount of that bank’s local currency. (The foreign central bank also pays a margin of interest to the Fed.)”

Tooze identifies the implementation of these swap lines as a major source of stability for foreign banks as they struggled through the 2007-2008 period.

“The major beneficiaries of the swap lines were the central banks of Japan, Europe, and the major emerging-market countries, which could now take dollars from the Fed to pass on to their own struggling banks. The Fed introduced the liquidity swap lines in December 2007, and they were rapidly increased to a permissible limit of $620 billion. On October 13, 2008, they were uncapped, giving the major foreign central banks unlimited dollar drawing rights. By December 2008, the swap lines were the single largest outstanding item on the Fed’s balance sheet. The swap lines operated over various terms, ranging from overnight to three months. But if, for accounting purposes, they were standardized to a 28-day term, between December 2007 and August 2010, the Fed provided its Asian, European, and Latin American counterparts with just shy of $4.5 trillion in liquidity, of which the ECB alone took $2.5 trillion.”

“The world’s central banks effectively became offshore divisions of the Fed, conduits for whatever dollar liquidity the financial system required. The Fed, that is, made itself into a global lender of last resort.”

This activity by the Fed was knowable by those who wished to know, but it was not advertised.  The Fed had no interest in bragging about using US resources to bail out foreign banks, and foreign governments were more comfortable being quietly grateful.

“The liquidity swap lines wound down rapidly in 2009, as private credit markets began to recover. The full details of the liquidity programs were not disclosed until 2011, when the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the Fed to release the data to reporters from Bloomberg.”

“The result, however, is that the Fed’s actions to save the global financial system have largely been forgotten. An unprecedented intervention effectively disappeared down a memory hole.”

The world financial order survived the crisis because the Fed took the initiative to make it happen—and the Fed had the resources to make it happen.  It was motivated by the knowledge that it was in the best interests of the US to assume this responsibility.  Required was a sense of mutual trust and responsibility among nations for the efforts to succeed.  Tooze worries that now, ten years later, the world and the US have become quite different places.  Should such a crisis appear in the future, could there be another similar response?

While pondering over that thought, a note appeared on talkingpointsmemo.com by John Judis: And Now for Something Completely Different: the Dollar Challenged.  He points out that the rather strange occurrence of a joint military exercise between Russia and China was also accompanied by some joint economic planning.

“While the country’s attention is riveted on Florence, Kavanaugh’s confirmation and Manafort’s plea deal, certain other developments around the world may in the end prove more significant. At a meeting earlier this month in Vladivostok, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping agreed to bypass the dollar and use their own currencies in commercial relations.”

That was not the only unusual financial planning taking place.

“This month, officials from France, Germany, and the UK have begun planning with China and Russia a special payments channel that would allow these countries to defy new American sanctions against any company doing business with Iran. This payment channel would bypass the American-dominated international banking system and the dollar.”

If the Europeans can bypass the US in Iranian transactions, they can bypass it in other situations if they wish.  Any effort putting the dollar at risk as the currency of choice in financial transactions brings with it extreme danger for the US.

“Much of American economic and global power rests on the universal use of the dollar as the settlements and reserve currency of choice. It allows the United States, among other things, to run huge trade and budget deficits and to impose crippling economic sanctions on other countries. If the American dollar became overnight a exotic national currency like Turkey’s Lira, then in order to balance its accounts and pay for its deficit, the U.S. would have to raise interest rates to attract foreign currencies, even if that meant crippling business and home finance.”

The impetus for this threat arises from the threatening and erratic moves Trump has made against both long-time allies and economic competitors.

“It’s happening largely in response to Trump’s Hobbesian diplomacy, which sees the U.S. engaged in a zero-sum battle against its longtime allies as well as against competitors like China and also by his fiscal policies that promise huge deficits in years ahead.”

Judis provides this insight from Taggert Murphy.

“Murphy says of the Chinese, Russian, and European efforts, ‘They are building the groundwork for the day when they can overthrow the hegemony of the US dollar. The day that happens is the day the American imperium ends’.”

Pundits who analyze Trump’s role in Putin’s master plan usually focus on short-term effects like disturbing the US national political scene and fiddling with election results.  Such activities do serve to distract and weaken the US and make it less capable of noticing and responding to any Russian power moves.  But what if Putin is after soft power, not hard power?  What if Trump’s true assignment is to so disrupt traditional alliances with the US that Europeans and others turn to Putin as a more reliable ally?  There is nothing he would like more than to eliminate the financial advantages of the US.  It is beginning to look like Trump has provided the groundwork to support such a move.

Politicizing the First Amendment

The First Amendment of the United States Constitution is incredibly brief considering the range of issues it is used to resolve.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

One might think that if our founders really wished to make freedom of speech an absolute right they would have expressed that intention more directly.

“Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech.”

But they didn’t.  They coupled that directive with four others.  The two pertaining to religion indicated that Congress could not force one group of people to abide by the religious beliefs of another group of people.  They also clearly wished that the press be free to serve the population by disseminating information important to the functioning of the nation.  Finally, the right of peaceful assembly was expressed as a means of protecting the people from governmental excesses.  All these directives deal with insuring that the proper functioning of our democracy could not be impaired by a tyrannical government.  Shouldn’t the reference to free speech also be interpreted in the same way?

The belief that freedom of speech is an absolute right produces a vastly different world than one that incorporates the notion that freedom of speech is associated with the proper functioning of a democracy.

Lincoln Kaplan provides a thought-provoking discussion of these issues in an American Scholar article: Stress Test for Free Speech.  He discusses issues related to social media and other recent developments as well, but here we will focus on the basic interpretation of the First Amendment.  Kaplan provides his perspective on “freedom of speech.”

“The public sphere is the center of free speech in American democracy. Intangible yet indispensable, it’s the forum where speech, building on other speech, sometimes even by assailing it, demonstrates the rewards of open debate, which the First Amendment safeguards as the foundation of public opinion and the basis for self-government.”

“The amendment has always functioned primarily to curb the power of government. It protects individuals against government infringement of elementary rights, such as the right to petition and the freedoms of religion, assembly, and the press, as well as speech.”

In other words, the purpose of the First Amendment was to protect our democracy by allowing the citizenry as a collective to express its will via the ballot and other measures.  What has occurred along with the rise of neoliberal economic ideas is that the focus of “free speech” has drifted from that of the collective participating in democracy to that of individuals expressing themselves.  And, of course, corporations gradually became individuals in the eyes of the courts.

Kaplan attributes the traditional interpretation of the amendment to Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis D. Brandeis.

“It regards free speech as an essential instrument of democracy and the test of speech’s health as the vitality of American governance.”

Recent conservative courts, particularly the Supreme Court under John Roberts, have overturned this principle and created its exact opposite.  Instead of supporting the workings of democracy as the expression of a collective will, Roberts and his political allies have elevated the right of individuals to express themselves over that of the collective.  This, in effect, limits what government as an expression of the collective can do.

“To the Court’s conservative majority, which has advanced the interests of big business more than any Court since the 1930s, free speech is about the individual rather than society, the speaker rather than the listener, and liberty rather than democracy. These choices are having deep and damaging consequences. The Court’s libertarian and antiregulatory bent, expanding the economic activity that the First Amendment covers, is shrinking what democracy can govern. The colossal mess that social media are helping to make of democracy requires the opposite, that the government have the reach to defend itself against them and steer them to serve rather than to undermine its interests, or fail.

With the recognition in the 1970s that businesses had First Amendment rights came the possibility for corporations to use those rights to their individual advantage and strike down expressions of collective needs and desires.  There are numerous examples of such political opportunism such as those related to corporate spending on political issues. 

“For the past decade, however, corporations have used the idea of commercial speech as a basis for sweeping claims about what the First Amendment entitles them to as speakers, and they have persuaded courts to strike down a broad range of well-founded regulations, from health warnings on cigarette packs to bans against pharmacies’ sale of prescription data for marketing.”

“These claims have been described by legal scholar Leslie Kendrick and others as ‘First Amendment opportunism’.” 

Kaplan includes a lesser known case as an illustration of how restrictive courts can be in protecting the individual (business) from the workings of democracy.

“A remarkable example is a 2013 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, called National Association of Manufacturers v. National Labor Relations Board. In a longtime practice, the board required private employers to post their employees’ rights at work for such matters as the right to join a union or to discuss their wages with other workers. The association challenged the requirement on grounds that it violated the free-speech rights of employers by compelling them to speak. The D.C. Circuit agreed.”

The First Amendment has become a bludgeon with which justices with conservative political views can impose those views on society as a whole; and in so doing bypass the processes of a democracy.

“Free-speech law is often treated as a body of immutable principles articulated in the First Amendment, available for all when their rights have been violated. In reality, that body of law is a set of mutable propositions argued about and applied by judges in ways that reflect contradictory views on political and legal values and, in the end, reflect the balance of power on the Supreme Court.”

“’More than any other modern Court,’ scholars Lee Epstein, Andrew D. Martin, and Kevin Quinn wrote in June, after analyzing 2,967 votes cast by justices voting in 338 free-speech cases over 65 Supreme Court terms from 1953 to 2017, ‘the Roberts Court has trained its sights on speech promoting conservative values.’ In the Janus case, the conservative cause was attacking unions. The liberal cause was supporting them. Why have today’s justices seemed to reverse the Warren Court (1953–69) pattern of liberals’ supporting speech and conservatives’ supporting regulation? Because of ‘the increase in conservative expression cases’: on the Warren, Burger, and Rehnquist courts, the justices picked by Republican presidents and by Democratic presidents supported conservative and liberal free-speech cases in close to the same percentages; ‘only the Roberts Court’s Ds and Rs are statistically different.’ Here, the Rs have supported conservative expression in 67.9 percent of the cases and liberal expression in only 23.8 percent. The Ds have supported conservative expression in 42.4 percent of the cases and liberal expression in 47.4 percent.”

Whether it is its attempts to disenfranchise voters, to allow the few to pollute the environment of the many, or to transfer wealth from the many with low incomes to the few with high incomes, the Republican Party and its judicial minions are determined to weaken the underpinnings of democracy in this country.

Remember that the next time you have an opportunity to vote.

The Democratic Party Needs a Compelling Societal Mission Statement

In the early 1960s, groups of both liberals and conservatives separately gathered to produce documents which would serve as guides for how to remake the political landscape to improve society in future years.  The liberals were concerned with making an active government more responsive to demands of the people.  The conservatives were focused on limiting the scope of government to only absolutely necessary functions such as defense, protection of property, and crime containment.  In 1960 the conservative product became known as the Sharon Statement.  The liberals, in 1962, produced the Port Huron Statement.  The liberals’ document ran to 64 pages; that of the conservatives required only one page.

A liberal might view this vast difference in length as the liberal recognition that the world had complex problems requiring complex responses, while the conservatives used simplistic and naïve theories that predicted the problems would solve themselves without government intervention. 

Looking back over history with a fifty year plus vantage point, a liberal would be forced to conclude that the conservative approach had been more politically effective.  That one page with its simple message is still relevant today.  The 64 pages of policy approaches produced by the liberals might still have some relevance—were anyone to go back and read it.

Today, liberals continue to accumulate lists of policy proposals that generally make perfect sense when taken individually.  But when viewing them as a whole, they often seem responsive rather than innovative; trying to recover what has been lost, rather than a call to march in a new direction.  This assessment has always been troubling.  Why can’t the liberal cause produce a compelling one-page document that will stir the souls of the citizenry?

Tony Judt was a perceptive student of twentieth century history.  He assembled a collection of essays he wrote on that period in hope that the knowledge and lessons learned would not be ignored in the twenty-first century.  The essays were published as the book Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century.  Judt found the development of the great social democracies in Europe in the postwar years as one of humanity’s great accomplishments.  But he recognized that over time many of the social structures that had been created were being diminished as subsequent generations took over.  He viewed this with sadness, but also with an historian’s critical eye.  The last chapter in the book, The Social Question Redivivus, addresses this evolution of the social democratic states.  It consisted of an essay he wrote in 1997.  In 2008, when the book was published he inserted this comment on his 1997 product.

“I opted to discuss the new ‘social question’ of poverty, underemployment, and social exclusion and the failure of the political Left to reassess its response to these and other dilemmas of globalization.  Nothing that has happened in the intervening decade has led me to moderate my gloomy prognostications—quite the contrary.”

Although his text is directed at the Left in Europe, Judt was quite aware that the same failings existed in the United States.  He provides this historical perspective on where the Left found itself after its postwar successes.

“Since the late eighteenth century the Left in Europe, variously labeled, has been the bearer of a project.  Whether this project has been the march of progress, the preparation of revolution, or the cause of a class, it has always invoked the historical process, and history itself, on its behalf.  Since the decline of the industrial proletariat, and more precipitously with the end of the Soviet Union, the Left in the West has been shorn of its agent, its project, and even its story—the ‘master narrative’ within which all radical endeavors were ultimately couched, which made sense of their programs and explained away their setbacks.”

Judt describes the Blair era in the UK and the Clinton era in the US as examples of liberal responses made without any firm liberal conception of the future.

“Without a working class, without a long-term revolutionary objective, however benign and nonviolent in practice, without any particular reason to suppose that it will succeed or a transcendent basis for believing that it deserves to do so, social democracy today is just what its nineteenth century founders feared it would become if it ever abandoned its ideological presuppositions and class affiliation: the advanced wing of reforming market liberalism….”

Here he describes what seems to be the motivation for much liberal activity.

“Is the European left to be reduced to defending hard-won sectoral gains and glancing nervously and resentfully at a future it cannot understand and for which it has no prescription?

Judt provides this assessment of the Left’s problem.

“The real problem facing Europe’s Socialists (I use the term purely for its descriptive convenience, since it is now shorn of any ideological charge) is not their policy preferences, taken singly.  Job creation, a more ‘social’ Europe, public infrastructural investment, education reforms, and the like are laudable and uncontroversial.  But nothing binds these policies and proposals together into a common political or moral narrative.  The Left has no sense of what its own political success, if achieved, would mean; it has no articulated vision of a good, or even of a better, society.  In the absence of such a vision, to be on the left is simply to be in a state of permanent protest.  And the thing most protested against is the damage wrought by rapid change, to be on the left is to be a conservative.”

What Judt is saying is that before the Left gets into making a list of policy proposals, it had better generate the liberal equivalent of the conservatives’ Sharon Statement’

He finishes with a warning based on twentieth century experience.  If the Left is unsuccessful, things can go horribly wrong—as they have.

“Why are we so sure that the far political Right is behind us for good—or indeed the far Left?  The postwar social reforms in Europe were instituted in large measure as a barrier to the return of the sort of desperation and disaffection from which such extreme choices were thought to have arisen.  The partial unraveling of those social reforms, for whatever reason, is not risk-free.  As the great reformers of the nineteenth century well knew, the Social Question, if left unaddressed, does not just wither away.  It goes instead in search of more radical answers.”

 

The interested reader might find the following articles informative:

Liberals vs. Conservatives: Sixty Pages vs. One Page

Our Battle Scars