In its national convention this week, the American Legion, the nation's largest veterans organization, declared war on the First Amendment. According to Thomas P. Cadmus, national commander of the American Legion, "public protests against the war here at home while our young men and women are in harm’s way on the other side of the globe only provide aid and comfort to our enemies." Cadmus declared that the "American Legion will stand against anyone and any group that would demoralize our troops, or worse, endanger their lives" by exercising their constitutional right to dissent. Noting that we should not "repeat the mistakes of the past," Cadmus argued that Americans who would protest the War should "present their views in correspondence to their elected officials rather than by public media events guaranteed to be picked up and used as tools of encouragement by our enemies.“
This would be laughable, if it weren't so dangerous. It is a sorry testament to our knowledge of our own history that the American Legion knows nothing of the "mistakes of the past." It is apparently wholly ignorant of the Sedition Act of 1798, the closing of some 300 newspapers during the Civil War, the prosecution of more than 2,000 dissenters during World War I, the government's deportation of thousands of individuals during the Red Scare of 1919-1920, the evils of McCarthyism, or the FBI abuses during the Vietnam War. It is an old trick to equate dissent with providing "aid and comfort to our enemies." But it is a trick that flies in the face of everything the United States stands for. It is, simply, un-American.
For a full account of the "mistakes of the past," see Geoffrey R. Stone, Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism (W.W. Norton 2004) (Winner of the 2004 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for the Best Book in History, the 2004 Scribes Award for the Best Book in Law, the 2005 American Political Science Association's Kammerer Award for the Best Book in Political Science, and the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Award for the Best Book of 2004). (I apologize for self-advertising, but the action of the American Legion is just too good a hook to pass-up!)