Civil liberties

The term civil liberties refers to individual rights guaranteed in the federal Constitution, particularly in the Bill of Rights, and often refers especially to First Amendment rights of speech, religion, the press, assembly, and petitioning the government. From 1929 to 1945, civil liberties issues sometimes involved efforts at censorship in such areas as movies, the news media, and literature, but they more often arose out of efforts to clamp down on radicalism and to protect national security. Despite challenges to civil liberties, the era also helped lay foundations for protecting and expanding civil liberties in the postwar era.

During the 1930s, government policies that raised worries about abridging First Amendment rights were largely responses to perceived threats from political groups on the far left and far right. In 1938, the House Committee on Un-American Activities was formed, and in 1939, Congress passed the Hatch Act, denying federal employment to anyone belonging to a revolutionary group. The loyalty board of the Civil Service Commission subsequently increased its investigations of the political backgrounds and beliefs of potential employees. Communists were often under surveillance and their literature was subject to confiscation, but the government also watched American Bundists and other pro-Nazi or proFascist groups.

The economic impact of the Great Depression also led to concerns about civil liberties. High unemployment levels and stiff competition for jobs, for example, led government officials to deport thousands of Mexican Americans, many of whom were U. S. citizens, in the Mexican Repatriation Program. The growth and increased activism of organized labor raised worries about civil liberties, for during previous times of labor conflict, government had often taken the side of management and disregarded the civil liberties of workers and their leaders. By the mid-1930s, however, workers had gained significant protection under the law to organize, bargain collectively, and conduct strikes, especially with the passage of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935.

With the U. S. entrance into World War II, some feared a renewal of the repressive governmental policies of World War I. The Smith Act of 1940 had authorized the deportation of any alien belonging to a “revolutionary” organization or expressing revolutionary sentiments, and it outlawed speech attempting to breed disloyalty in the military or advocating the overthrow of the government. But only two cases were brought under the Smith Act during the war, and fears of a repressive home front proved generally to be unfounded. Widespread popular support for the war effort and a dearth of outspoken protestors, as well as the memory of World War I excesses, helped prevent widespread violations of civil liberties.

Even the draft did not ignite extensive protest, as it had in World War I and would years later during the Vietnam War. Groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union, which championed civil liberties in a number of important episodes in the era, failed to protest the passage of the Selective Service Act of 1940, although it tried to ensure that the draft was implemented democratically. The act provided alternatives for conscientious objectors, and men who refused to participate in combat for religious reasons were offered noncombatant or civilian duties. However, those who objected for purely political reasons or for religious reasons deemed illegitimate were not excused, and more than 5,000 objectors were imprisoned over the course of the war.

But the World War II home eront did witness one of the most egregious violations of civil liberties in American history, the relocation of Japanese Americans, citizens and noncitizens alike, and their incarceration in internment camps. The Supreme Court let the relocation policy stand in the case of Korematsu v. United States. Unnaturalized German-American and Italian-American immigrants were also labeled enemy aliens and subjected to various regulations, but these did not involve violations of the civil liberties of citizens.

Further reading: Kermit L. Hall, ed., Civil Liberties in American History: Major Historical Interpretations (New York: Garland, 1987); Michael Linfield, Freedom under Fire: U. S. Civil Liberties in Times of War (Boston: South End Press, 1990).

—Pamela J. Lauer