Voices of Freedom 120-147

Eugene V. Debs, Speech to the Jury (1918)

-The government charged over 2,000 individuals with violating the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act that outlaw spying with the draft or making false statements that may limit military success. -Eugene V. Debs is the leader of the Socialist Party convicted in 1918 under the Espionage Act for delivering an antiwar speech. -In his speech: he has only appeared in front of a jury this one time -There was nothing in his last speech that would warrant the charges set out in the indictment. -I, as a socialist, believe that real democracy is to have people live in a peaceable and orderly social system -He is opposed to current social system. I have never been guilty of the charges embraced by this indictment. You charge us with being disloyalists and traitors. I am not on trial here today there. There is a greater issue that is on trial. American Institutions are on trial before the american citizens.

Andre Siegfried on the New Society from the Atlantic Monthly (1928)

A frenchman who visited the US commented that American life has changed dramatically. A new mass civilization widespread acceptance of going into debt to purchase consumer goods had replaced the values of thrift and self-denial. Economy was sound (this was before the Great Depression). Americans seemed willing to sacrifice certain personal and political liberties in the name of economic efficiency and mass production. Europe has eagerly observed studied discussed America. And US has observed what they say about us. The dream of moving West as a pioneer has changed. Now is an era of organization. America is a huge factory of prodigious efficiency. From an economic point of view it is a sound country. From the point of view of society it is feared that the standardization may in the long run tend to lessen the intellectual and artistic value of the American society. Moral point of view- americans have a standard of living that is a sacred acquisition. Political point of view- it seems that the notion of efficiency in production is taking precedence on the notion of liberty. Mass production and mass civilization are the true characteristics of the new American Society.

Carrie Chapman Catt, Address to Congress on Woman's Suffrage (1917)

Carrie Chapman Catt is a campaigner for women who served as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association rom 1900-1904. She announced the support for the Wilson administration and American participation in WWI. Catt reasoned that taking part in the war effort, women would finally win the right to vote. Catt addressed Congress addressed Congress to support a constitutional amendment to enfranchise women. She says that Woman's Suffrage is inevitable. -Our nation is built on rebellion -taxes are paid by women so they should be represented (rather than refused) -denied the democracy of thousands of working women (like teachers) -woman's suffrage is inevitable -how and when will it be established - the leadership in the US compels the enfranchisement of its own women -women resent their lack of suffrage -to the supporters we are supportive -attention to those that neglect -women's suffrage is coming and will the congress help or hinder it?

W. E. B. Du Bois "Returning Soldiers" (1919)

Dubois wants blacks in the army, in WWI. He issues a searing indictment of american race relations and called for returning black soldiers to take up the struggle for racial justice. -America is a shameful land since it lynches. Lynching is a barbaric and nasty unparalleled in human history. the land that disfranchises its citizens and calls itself a democracy lies and know it lies. -It encourages ignorance. -Says america just wants negroes to be servants, dogs, whores, and monkeys. -American industry cheats americans, it cheats the labor, and confiscates our savings. -Constant insult and defamation of black people

Herbert HOover on the New Deal and Liberty

Even as Roosevelt invoked the work to uphold the New Deal "Liberty: - in the sense of freedom from powerful government- became the fighting slogan of his opponents. • Freedom meant unrestrained economic opportunity for the enterprising individual. • In on speech Hoover stated that his successor or endangering "fundamental American Liberties: • Roosevelt , he charged, was either operating out of sheer opportunism, with no coherent purpose of policy, or was conspiring to impose "European ideas" on the United States.

WWII and Mexican Americans (1945)

Founded in 1929- the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) campaigned for equal treatment for Americans of Latino descent and their full integration into American life. • Some half a million Mexican-Americans served in the armed forces during WWII, but Latinos continued to dace widespread discrimination. • An editorial in the LULAC newsletter soon after the war ended drew upon military service to condemn anti-Latino prejudice. • Its aggressive language reflected the rising demand for equal rights sparked by the war experience among man minority groups. -This is a newsletter that wants equal rights. -it is embarrassing that mexicans are discriminated against in restaurants and not allowed in certain places. Find all reasoning to hate mexicans false. Ignorance broods hate.

The Fight for Civil Liberties (1921)

Full protection of civil liberties, especially ones that have been violated during WWI. Civil liberties should apply equally to all Americans regardless of race. Free speech, free press, freedom of assemblage (meetings in public places), the right to strike, law enforcement (private police as well as public), Search and seizure(against the law for searching and arresting without warrants), the right to a fair trial, immigration, deportation, and passports, liberty in education, and race equality. Economic or political power is necessary to assert and maintain all rights.

Randolph Bourne, "Trans-National America" (1916)

Increased immigration heightened awareness of ethnic and racial difference and demanded Americanization. The creation of a more homogenous national culture. Americanization campaign intensified and Bourne argues. An unpleasant truth has come upon us that assimilation in this country was proceeding on lines very different from this we had marked out for it. Anglo-saxon was just the first immigrant. There is no distinctively american culture. It is apparently our lot rather to be a federation of cultures. Out american ideal can make no progress until we do away with this romantic gliding of the past.

Marcus Garvey on Africa for the Africans

Marcus Garvey was an immigrant from Jamaica. He points out that the war had inspired movements for national self-determination. Blacks should enjoy the same internationally recognized identity that is enjoyed by other peoples. The government deports harvey because of mail fraud. His movement helps racial pride and betrayal kindled in black communities during and after the war. -Oppression and hardships, and then we organized ourselves into an organization for the purpose of bettering our condition. -Our race grows into a mighty power whose influence is being felt though out the length and breadth of the world. -We have accomplished this unity through effort and pride. -We had to climb over obstacles for the greatness of our cause. -"Africa for the Africans"this is a determined cry to stop oppression. -There is now a mad rush among races everywhere towards national independence. -We want liberty, freedom, and democracy. -The more they remember the suffering of their forefathers the more they fight on. -Climb to the heights of liberty.

Norman Cousins Will Women Lose Their Jobs

Mass unemployment persuades many that women were taking the jobs that would otherwise go to men. Local prohibit the hiring of women whose husbands earned a living wage. It is discrimination against married women. there are some moral arguments about the working wife but it helps provide money for their family. at most not a lot of jobs could be passed off to men. Single women would lose their way to support themselves. shows an example of purging the industry from women. Most women are in domestics.

Meyer V. Nebraska and the Meaning of Liberty (1923)

Meyer was a parochial school teacher in Nebraska who violated the law that mandated that all instruction be in English. The state supreme court upheld his conviction and Meyer appealed to the US supreme court arguing that the law violated the 14th amendment guarantee of liberty to all citizens. The court rules that declared that Nebraska's law is unconstitutional.

A Critique of the Versailles Peace Conference (1919)

Poland and Czechoslovakia have Mao Zedong- a student activist & later a leader of a revolution penned two short pieces that reflected the widespread disappointment of the Treaty of Versailles. 1. Presided over the death of Germany. The Allies helped these countries in the name of "national self-determination". Poor Wilson 2. Wilson in Paris did not know what to do. He was surrounded by thieves by Clemenceau. One day a telegram read "president wilson has finally agreed with clemenceau's view that germany will not be admitted to the League of Nations. When i

Woodrow Wilson "A World Safe for Democracy"

President Wilson articulated a new vision of America's relationship to the rest of the world. It was the job of America to promote free markets and political democracy. His speech promises victory would lead to a new world order based on "peace and justice" among the self-governing peoples of the world. In the most celebrated sentence he declared the world must be safe for democracy. "Against selfish and autocratic power and to set up free and self-governed peoples of the world." "We have no quarrel with the german people, we just have sympathy and friendship." "Concert for peace can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic nations." "We are but one of the champions of rights of mankind." "We shall be satisfied when those rights have been made as secure as faith and the freedom of nations can make them."

Letter to Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins (1937)

Rekindle the hope among victims of the Great Depression. People wrote to secretary of labor frances perkins to describe the terrible and inhuman condition of workers in the sugar fields of Louisiana. -Cruel and terrible condition of the country of the sugar cane belt in Louisiana -no progress since slavery days. Gives a description of a typical day of a worker. their wages, Calling to the attention of how terrible it is and how the US needs to investigate. • 1930s people referred to downtrodden as "slaves of the depression", wrote poignant letters to federal officials describing the oppressive working conditions of those who retained their jobs and the difficulty of finding worked for the unemployed. • They wrote of the threat of starvation, the impossibility of obtaining medical care when ill, and addressed to Secretary of labor frances Perkins, described the "terrible and inhuman condition" of workers in the sugar fields of Louisiana.

Elsie Hill and Florence Kelley Debate the Equal Rights Amendment (1922)

The national woman's party whose protests helped secure passage of the nineteenth amendment now called for a new Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). With the ratification of the constitutional amendment barring states from discriminating in voting qualifications because of sex, the women's movement face a crossroad. • The National Woman's Party, whose militant protests during WWI had helped secure passage of the Nineteenth amendments, now called for a new Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) prohibiting all legal distinctions between the sexes. • Only in this way, its leaders insisted, could women fain full access to the economic, educational, and other opportunities of American society. • Many veterans of the movement to protect women workers feared that the ERA would wipe away their hard won gains as well as deny women alimony and child support in the event of divorce. • The result was a bitter split among feminists, illustrated in a debate in the pages of the liberal magazine, the Nation, in 1922. • Elise Hill, the daughter of a Connecticut congressman who had been arrested for picketing a the White House during Woodrow Wilson's presidency, represented the Women's Party. • Florence Kelly, the head of the national consumers' league and an architect of legislation limiting the hours of work for women , offered the traditional view that women needed special protection by the government. • The ERA dialed, and the debate would be repeated in the 1970s when it once again entered national politics. Hill- Wants the forms of subjection of women the purpose to which the national woman's party is dedicated removed. Kelley- Says that sex is a biological fact. all people revolve around sex.

Bartolomeo Vanzettie's Last Statement in Court 1927

Their trial took place in 1921. After 6 years of appeals the two men were sentenced to death in 1927. Vanzetti's last statement in court reaffirmed his innocence and suggested some of the reasons for the verdict. All my life i have never stolen and i have never killed and i have never spilled blood. Not only have i struggled hard against crimes but i have refused myself of what are considered the commodity and glories of life, the prides of a life of a good position because in my consideration it is right not to exploit man. I have struggled all my life to eliminate crimes, the crimes that the official law and the moral law condemns but also the crime that the moral law and the moral law sanction and sanctify. We were tried during a time whose character has now passed into history My conviction is that I have suffered for things that I am guilty of. I am suffering because I am a radical and indeed I am a radical. I have suffered because I was an italian. I would live again to do what I have done already.

Congress Debates Immigration 1921

There is a want for wholesale immigrations restriction. Congress debates to a proposal to limit immigration. This is from Congressman Parrish who was an advocate of imitation restriction against London who was a socialist and immigrant. Congress limits european immigration to 150,000 a year. *Parrish:* We should stop immigration entirely until such a time as we can amend our immigration laws and so write them that hereafter no one shall be admitted except he be in full sympathy with our constitution and laws willing to declare himself obedient to our flag of the country from which he came. Immigrants will fill the country with a foreign and unsympathetic element. it is time for us to act now and quickly. we must protect ourselves from the poisonous influence that are threatening the very foundation of the governments of europe. *London:* This bill is a continuation of the war upon humanity. So far we have made the world safe for hypocrisy and the united states incidentally unsafe for the Democratic party temporarily at least. The bill is really intended to pave the way for permanent exclusion. To prevent immigration means to cripple the united states.

Henry A Wallace on The Century of the Common Man (1942)

VP Henry Wallace, Wallace outlines a different postwar vision. Wallace predicts that the war would usher in a center of the common man. Luce and Wallace both invoked the idea of freedom. A new conception of America's role in the world. The "march of freedom" would be marked by international cooperation, not any single power's rule. • Government's acting to "humanize" capitalism and redistribute economic resources would eliminate hunger, illiteracy and poverty. • Luce and Wallace both invoked the idea of freedom. • Luce offered a confident vision of worldwide free enterprise, while Wallace anticipated a global New Deal. • But they had one thing in common- a new conception of American's role in the world, tied to continue international involvement, the promise of economic abundance, and the idea that the American experience should serve as a model for all other nations.

John A fitch on the Great Steel Strike (1919)

Workers engage in strikes all over America. The steel strike was the greatest of labor uprising. Centered in Pittsburgh and Chicago. It was mostly immigrant workers in demands for union recognition, higher wages, and an eight-hour workday. -It is not just a case with foreigners against americans. Americans and foreigners are standing firm together. -In pittsburgh there are superior economic conditions. -A majority of strikers are foreigners. -since 1909 unionism has not been permitted at any steel corporation mill and in most of them there is no collective bargaining of any sort. They are standing up and fighting for american standards and are doing it lawfully and with amazing patience while the constituted authorities are harassing them on every side. They talked about a great speech made at a strikers meeting by a Pole. An immigrants speech made an example of.

FA HAYEK THE ROAD TO SERFDOM 1944

a previously obscure austrian-born economist offered a vigorous argument that economic planning endangered freedom. Hayek claims that even the best-intentioned government efforts to direct the economy posed a threat to individual liberty. He condemned western political and intellectual leaders for abandoning the traditional liberal idea of limited government in favor of an illusory definition of freedom as government action to plan the economy and redistribute resources to the less fortunate. Hayek offers a new intellectual justification for opponents of active government. In equating fascism, socialism, and the new deal and identifying economic planning with a loss of freedom he helped lay the foundation for the rise of modern conservatism and a revival of laissez-faire economic thought. -We had been moving away from basic ideas that Western civilization has been built. -The subtle change in meaning to which the word freedom was subjected in order that this argument should sound plausible is important. Freedom is another name for power or wealth. The demand for the new freedom was thus only another name for the old demand for an equal distribution of wealth. The world is used in a different sense by the two groups few people have noticed that and still fear asked themselves whether the two kinds of freedom promised could really be combined.

John Steinbeck The Harvest Gypsies 1936

steinbeck newspaper article based on the interviews with the migrant workers. Talks about how migrants are needed and they are hated. We should see where these people are, where they come from and the routes of their wanderings. There is a doubt in the middle west that makes the lands destroyed. "When they need us they call us migrants and when we've picked their crop we're bums and we got to get out."

WEB DU BOIS A NEGRO NATION WITHIN A NATION (1935)

• African Americans were hit hardest by the depression. • Half of the families in Harlem received public assistance during the 1930s. • Many New Deal Programs were either administered in an extremely discriminatory manner or, like Social Security, excluded most blacks from benefits at the insistence of white supremacist southern representatives who controlled key committees in congress. • Bois abandoned his earlier goal of racial integration as unrealistic for the foreseeable future. • He said that blacks must recognize themselves as "a nation within a nation". • He called on blacks to organize for economic survival by building an independent, cooperative economy within their segregated communities and gain control of their own separate schools. • His shifting opinion showed that the Depression had propelled economic survival to the top of the black agenda and how, despite the social changes of the 1930s the goal of racial integration remained as remote as ever. -Opportunities for Negroes are limited. -Slavery, prostitution, theft of labor and goods have not killed them and cannot kill them. American Negro must plan for their economic future and social survival of their fellows in the firm belief that this means in a real sense of the survival of colored folk in the wold and the building of a full humanity instead of a petty white tyranny.

Henry R Luce The American Century

• Even before the United States entered WWII, it had become clear that the nation would play a far more active role in international affairs than the past. • Most celebrated blueprints for the post world was written in 1941 by Henry Luce, the publisher of Life and Time Magazine. • In the American Century, Luce sought to mobilize the American people for both the coming war and an ear of postwar world leadership. • Americans, Luce's book insisted must embrace the role history had thrust upon them as the world's most powerful nation. • After the war, American power and American values would underpin a previously unimaginable prosperity- "the abundant life", Luce called it- produced by free economic enterprise. • Some saw the term "American Century" as a call not for future international cooperation, but for an American empire. The twentieth century is difficult and revolutionary. Peace cannot endure unless it prevails over a large part of the world. Justice will come near to losing all meaning in the minds of men unless justice can have approximately the same fundamental meanings in many lands and among many peoples.

Franklin D Roosevelt, Greater Security for the Average Man

• Fireside chats, Roosevelt used the new medium of radio to bring his message directly into American's living rooms, by passing the mostly pro-Republican press. • Roosevelt worked to reclaim the word "freedom" from conservatives, and made it a rallying cry for the New Deal. • Throughout the 1930s, he consistently liked freedom with economic security and identified economic inequality as its greatest enemy. • The older view of liberty served the needs only of "the privileged few". • He continued this argument during his campaign for reelection in 1936, when he triumphed with over 60 percent of the popular vote. -I do not want to think that it is the destiny of any american to remain permanently on relief rolls. we have avoided the theory that business should be taken per by an all-embracing government. We are moving toward a greater security for the average man than he has ever known before.

Franklin D Roosevelt on the Four Freedoms (1941)

• Freedom became a rallying cry and language of national unity during WWII • President Roosevelt outline to Congress hi vision of a future world order founded on the "essential human freedoms": freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. • The four freedoms became Roosevelt's favorite statement of Allied aims. • Freedom from dear meant not only a longing for peace but a more general desire for security in a world that appeared to be out of control. • Freedom of speech and religion scarcely required detailed explanation. • Freedom from want was the most controversial of the four • To FDR, it mean economic security; to his critics, the phrase conjured up images of socialism or of Americans living off the largesse of the government. FREEDOMS -speech and expression -second is freedom of religion -freedom of want which gives economic understandings ALL OVER THE WORLD

Frank H Hill on the Indian New Deal (1935)

• New Deal was one of the most radical shift in Indian Policy in the nation's history. • Under Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier, the administration launched an "Indian New Deal", which ended the policy of forced assimilation and allowed Indians unprecedented cultural autonomy. • It replaced boarding schools meant to eradicate the tribal heritage od Indian children with schools on reservations and dramatically increased spending on Indian Health. • Federal authorities once again recognized Indian rights to govern their own affairs. • The Indian New Deal was presented to the Navajo's the largest nation's tribe. • He stressed the benefits of the new policy for Indians, but did not mention that the Navajo strongly protested against a federal soil conservation program that required them to reduce their herds of livestock- an indication that their sovereignty was far from absolute.

Steel Workers Organizing Committee a New Declaration of Independence

• The most striking development of the mid-1930s was the mobilization of millions of workers in the mass production industries that had successfully resisted unionization. • The federal government now seemed to be on the side of labor, as reflected in the Wagner Act of 1935, which granted workers the legal right to form unions. • Labor leaders dissatisfied with the American Federation of Labor's policy of organizing workers along traditional craft lines called for the creation of unions that united all workers in a specific industry. • Steel Workers Organizing Committee, later the United Steelworkers of America. • On July 4, 1936, 4,000 steelworkers gathered at Homestead, Pennsylvania, the site in 1892 of one of the most bitter strikes in American history to claim their "inalienable rights" including the right to form a union. • Modeled on the Declaration of independence, their manifesto outlined the extreme tactics employers used to prevent unionizations. -there is control over hours wages and conditions, and the labors. Despotism(absolute power) of the Lords of Steel Company, Unions, spies, thugs, Companies heed no appeal Or Law: we have appealed to the government to protect us in our right to organize freely without interference from our employers. We are Americans! we shall exercise our inalienable rigths to organize a industrial union. We pledge our lives. Through this union we shall win higher wages, shorter hours, and a better standard of living. we shall win leisure.