EVERY day in every way, things are getting worse and worse. They are, that is, in the angry eyes of those who disapprove of U.S. policy in Viet Nam. As they see it, the very expression of their dissent is getting more dangerous. So it was that to Senator J. William Fulbright, General Westmoreland's report to Congress signaled nothing less than an onslaught of official repression that might silence dissenters altogether by branding them traitors. Said he on the Senate floor: "This, I fear, is one of the last times that anybody will have the courage to say anything else about the war."
The continuing chorus of dissent makes such fears sound absurd. The fact is that never before has the U.S. been so tolerant of dissent—especially in wartime. And that fact is all the more impressive when measured against the country's history. For dissent has flourished in all U.S. wars except World War II, when Pearl Harbor unified the nation. One-third of colonial Americans openly supported Britain in the Revolution; New England almost seceded in the War of 1812; the Mexican-American War was loudly scorned by such Congressmen as Abe Lincoln. During the Civil War, Lincoln himself was so reviled that at one point only one Congressman backed his re-election as President. Korea became "Truman's war"—and Ike's path to the White House. In scoffing at Stephen Decatur's maxim, "Our country, right or wrong," G. K. Chesterton echoed many Americans: "It is like saying, 'My mother, drunk or sober.' "
There have been times, to be sure, when the U.S. majority has pilloried minority dissenters—to say nothing of abolitionists, suffragettes, Indians, Mormons, Irish Catholics, Chinese and Negroes. The U.S. was founded by fervent believers in free expression—who almost immediately ignored their own First Amendment. In 1798, Congress enacted the Alien and Sedition Acts empowering the Federalists to ruthlessly prosecute Republican editors for, among other things, criticizing the Government's undeclared naval war with France. Lincoln did not even consult Congress in 1861, when he suspended the right of habeas corpus for anyone his Government deemed disloyal. During World War I's anti-German hysteria, the 1918 Sedition Act prescribed 20 years' imprisonment for war dissenters. Superpatriots banned the teaching of German in 25 states, cheered sweeping federal raids on 60,000 "radicals" in 1920, and even put over Prohibition as a "war measure." In World War II, the Supreme Court itself approved the most drastic invasion of constitutional rights in history—the 1942 "relocation" in semi-concentration camps of 112,000 West Coast Japanese, two-thirds of them U.S. citizens by birth.
Painful Bind