The Pittsburgh Press (May 4, 1941)
HAS ROOSEVELT STAMPED OUT FREE SPEECH?
By Oswald Garrison Villard
Mr. Roosevelt seems determined to break one precedent after another and so he has bitterly attacked a private American citizen and has likened him to the famous Copperhead leader in the Civil War, Clement Vallandigham, whom President Lincoln finally sent into the Confederacy in order to get rid of him.
I cannot recall any similar instance in our history unless one can compare it with Grover Clevelandâs denunciation of Eugene Debs at the time of the Pullman strike during that Presidentâs second term. But Debs was then the head of a militant labor organization and Mr. Cleveland charged him with holding up U.S. mails. Mr. Rooseveltâs unmeasured attack on Col. Lindbergh did not have that excuse.
The Colonel may be the most mistaken man in the United States; he may secretly desire the Germans to win â though I do not for a moment believe that â but if he does, he is still within his constitutional rights in expressing his views, at least until we get into the war and the Congress agrees to a censorship. So the President struck a deadly blow at free speech and the Constitution when he attacked the Colonel.
He took us a good step along the road to totalitarianism if thereby he intimidates other American citizens who are also in opposition to the Presidentâs war policy.
âLet George do itâ
What seems to me the more regrettable is that the attack was an unfair one. No citizen, not even if he be a Governor or United States Senator, can meet the President on equal terms and least of all a man in private life, for the President speaks with the authority of one of the four mightiest offices in the world. By reason of his holding that office, many citizens accept his say so without troubling to examine the facts or reason about them.
Americans are both extremely naive and extremely trusting and they are intellectually most ready to âlet George do it,â especially if George happens to be some high official. They are quite ready to have any official do their thinking if thereby they can save themselves the trouble of putting their minds to knotty political problems. This is one reason why we have the curious spectacle of the public receiving seriously the opinions on foreign affairs of some politician or businessman who is suddenly jumped into the job of Secretary of the Navy or War about which the newly-made great man also knows nothing.
So any official enters into a duel of words or opinions with a citizen with the odds in his favor; he has a couple more cards in his pack than the other fellow and so the contest can never be a fair or even one. Hence, to many Americans, President Rooseveltâs attack on Col. Lindbergh will seem both unsportsmanlike and an effort to muzzle those who are true to themselves and their consciences in opposing our being put into the war.
Few men will care to risk being denounced to the whole country by the President since they realize that millions will read his words and only a comparative handful will see their replies.
Getting sensitive
Let us now look at the Colonelâs offending. Is it not simply that he is opposing the course that the President wishes followed? Is it not true that if he had come out for war, for all-out aid to England, and had made a few speeches calling Hitler the names he deserves and advocating the use of convoys, the President would have been lauding him to the skies, calling him to active service as a reserve colonel in the Air Corps and giving him some very high position in the militarization of the United States?
The Colonel has done nothing else to merit the Presidentâs abuse but refuse to agree with him on the war policies. But we are a democracy, not a dictatorship as yet, and as long as free speech exists and the Constitution is in force, it is not only the right but the duty of the citizen to differ with the rulers of the country if he honestly thinks that his view as to what the country should do in a given case is the correct one and that the governmentâs policy leads only to destruction. That is the bottom rock democratic principle and when that goes, democracy goes, and the republic is in jeopardy.
Here I wish to add that I have never met Col. Lindbergh and that I willingly agree that he is by no means tactful and that in his what appears to me proper policy of opposing our going to war, he might have put his case better and not seemed to lean toward the Germans.
But even the President might have admitted the Colonelâs courage in standing by his beliefs when he had everything to gain by just keeping silent. The President is, however, unforgiving to his adversaries as his attempt to purge some of the Senators of his own party out of office for also opposing him, clearly showed. He is plainly getting very sensitive as he finds the country as a whole standing overwhelming against the war policy.
Churchillâs example
Sometimes I wonder if, under the terrible strain and stress of his job â a greater burden than any man should be called upon to bear â both his temper and judgment are not beginning to suffer. No man ought to shoulder the terrible burden of the Presidency for as long as the President had undertaken to carry it in such horrible times as these, with all the world crashing about us.
It seems to me that it must be nerves or uncertainty about the righteousness of their cause that makes the President and Secretary Ickes indulge in such abuse of their opponents. They ought to realize that they are not helping their cause by seeking to stifle opposition. They ought to thank God for it as a check upon their own feelings and their judgments and when they become so mad at criticism as to wish to silence their critics they ought to ask themselves whether high office has not begun to corrode and warp them from their Americanism.
At least they should remember that Winston Churchill has just asked for the creation of a loyal opposition in Parliament to oppose and criticize him and aid him in winning the war by so doing. There you have the really fine and just attitude, the true democratic position. Yet, Mr. Churchill and his countrymen have their faces to the wall and are in dire distress.