Henry Steele Commager Quotes

With the Sedition and Espionage Acts … the "red hysteria" of the Twenties, the Alien Registration Act of 1940, the loyalty tests and purges of the mid-Forties, the establishment of un-American Activities Committees, intolerance received, as it were, the stamp of official approval. Loyalty was identified with conformity, and the American genius, which had been experimental and even rebellious, was required to conform to a pattern.

We do not protect freedom in order to indulge error. We protect freedom in order to discover truth.

Independence was an act of revolution; republicanism was something new under the sun; the federal system was a vast experimental laboratory. Physically Americans were pioneers; in the realm of social and economic institutions, too, their tradition has been one of pioneering. From the beginning, intellectual and spiritual diversity have been as characteristic of America as racial and linguistic. The most distinctively American philosophies have been transcendentalism — which is the philosophy of the Higher Law and pragmatism — which is the philosophy of experimentation and pluralism. These two principles are the very core of Americanism: the principle of the Higher Law, or of obedience to the dictates of conscience rather than of statutes, and the principle of pragmatism, or the rejection of a single good and of the notion of a finished universe. From the beginning Americans have known that there were new worlds to conquer, new truths to be discovered. Every effort to confine Americanism to a single pattern, to constrain it to a single formula, is disloyalty to everything that is valid in Americanism.

The greatest danger that threatens us is neither heterodox thought nor orthodox thought, but the absence of thought.

If the preservation of our freedom depends upon the courts then we are, indeed, lost, for in the long run neither courts nor Constitution can save us from our own errors, follies, or wickedness.

The search for subversives results in the intimidation of the independent, the original, the imaginative, and the experimental-minded… It discourages the discussion of controversial matters in the classroom, for such discussion may be reported, or misreported, and cause trouble.

A nation that silences or intimidates original minds is left only with unoriginal minds and cannot hope to hold its own in the competition of peace or of war.

The American people have a stake in the maintenance of the most thorough-going inquisition into American institutions. They have a stake in nonconformity, for they know that the American genius is nonconformist.

What is the new loyalty? It is, above all, conformity. It is the uncritical and unquestioning acceptance of America as it is — the political institutions, the social relationships, the economic practices. It rejects inquiry into the race question or socialized medicine, or public housing, or into the wisdom or validity of our foreign policy. It regards as particularly heinous any challenge to what is called "the system of private enterprise," identifying that system with Americanism. It abandons evolution, repudiates the once popular concept of progress, and regards America as a finished product, perfect and complete.

This approach emphasizes what was once familiar enough to all Americans—and what we are now in danger of forgetting—that government derives its power from men; that rights of life and liberty are inalienable; that these rights are not something that government graciously confers upon men, but things no government can take away from men.

If you are going to penalize disloyalty, you must first determine what loyalty is; if you are going to silence nonconformity, you must determine what conformity is—and to what it conforms.

The Bill of Rights was not written to protect governments from trouble. It was written precisely to give the people the constitutional means to cause trouble for governments they no longer trusted.

But if our democracy is to flourish it must have criticism, if our government is to function it must have dissent. Only totalitarian governments insist upon conformity and they—as we know—do so at their peril.

We must therefore look with grave misgivings upon the psychology of the ‘crusade’ or on the notion that we can make the world over in our own image either by persuasion or by coercion.

Freedom in not a luxury that we can indulge in when at last we have security and prosperity and enlightenment; it is, rather, antecedent to all of these, for without it we can have neither security nor prosperity nor enlightenment.