The Commercial Appeal

Trump attacks right to disagree with him

- Ellis Cose

As he tells it, President Donald Trump is fighting to deliver us from leftwing radicals out to destroy our history. That few if any such figures exist has not deterred him. Nor does it give him pause that destroying history, whatever that may mean, is not the same as protesting particular monuments. Most disturbing is not the illogic of the quest, but the presumptio­n that anyone who disagrees with Trump’s version of the past is an enemy of the state.

Such intoleranc­e in the presidency is much more dangerous, and un-american, than the threat Trump supposedly fights to contain. Also, Trump seems oblivious to the fact that the First Amendment is not designed to protect the president from people who disagree with him but to protect protesters against the repression of the state.

His speech at Mount Rushmore this past weekend, attacking those out to “overthrow the American Revolution,” reminds me of the rhetoric of World War I: rhetoric weaponized against tens of thousands of people guilty only of opposing the war and President Woodrow Wilson.

Trump’s language, with its reference to government agents assigned to protect us against a sinister campaign of destructio­n and indoctrina­tion, could have been lifted almost verbatim from the government’s anti-dissident playbook of over 100 years ago.

In September 1917, the Justice Department indicted 166 members of the Industrial Workers of the World for interferin­g with the war effort. The U.S. District Attorney in Chicago, who handled the case, claimed union leaders were promoting “the most vicious forms of sabotage, particular­ly in industries engaged in furnishing war munitions.” The government also alleged that the IWW had blown up ammunition factories, tried to foment armed resistance, and torched forests and lumber mills.

None of the ugly allegation­s was ever proven to be true. Most were never really addressed at trial.

Even so, the establishm­ent press blindly supported the government. As the marathon trial moved toward a conclusion, the New York Times published a wrap-up that read more like a prosecutio­n brief than a news report. It praised the judge, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, as “one of the most able judicial officers on the Federal Bench.” (The Times’ assessment notwithsta­nding, in 1921 the Supreme Court tossed out a conviction of – and 20-year sentence imposed on – anti-war congressma­n

Victor Berger because of bias Landis had exhibited at trial.)

The Times portrayed the IWW as a band of dangerous outlaws: “American Bolsheviki” under the Soviet boot, and “a revolution­ary society which has openly declared … that its purpose is unceasing warfare to exterminat­e the wage system and seize the industries of the nation.”

In such an agitated atmosphere, impartiali­ty was impossible. The entire IWW group (or what remained of it after various individual­s had disappeare­d or had their cases dismissed) was convicted. Union leader Bill Haywood and his 14 top lieutenant­s were sentenced to 20 years. Haywood escaped imprisonme­nt by fleeing the country, but numerous IWW members served hard time in federal confinement before President Warren Harding commuted their sentences in 1923.

By then the Red Scare was over, along with the practice of arresting thousands of people just for speaking out. Also, Americans were beginning to understand – thanks in part to the efforts of the recently founded American Civil Liberties Union – that the point of the First Amendment was to protect them against such abuse.

Few people are prepared to defend the notion of a mob tearing down any statue it happens to dislike. But Trump’s campaign goes much further than that. Protesters are not demanding “absolute allegiance” to anything. Nor are they attempting to “destroy the very civilizati­on that rescued billions from poverty, disease, violence, and hunger, and that lifted humanity to new heights of achievemen­t, discovery, and progress.”

Trump’s dishonest characteri­zation and vilification of people whose only crime is having inconvenie­nt opinions takes us uncomforta­bly close to the rhetoric that justified the worst excesses of the World War I era.

After weeks of defending monuments of Confederat­e war heroes, Trump has decided America needs a so-called statuary park honoring American heroes. Too timid, apparently, to commission new statues of Confederat­e officers, he proposes featuring such luminaries as Billy Graham, Martin Luther King Jr., Abraham Lincoln and the Wright brothers.

Never mind that no one is threatenin­g to pull down statues of Abraham Lincoln and the Wright brothers.

Never mind that a few more statues of such people would add nothing to anyone’s understand­ing of American history.

In truth, Trump is not out to defend history but to obscure it – and to crush those who would bring it to light – while replacing reality with his fairy tale version in which he somehow ends up the hero.

Ellis Cose, a member of USA TODAY’S Board of Contributo­rs, is the author of “Democracy, If We Can Keep It: The ACLU’S 100-Year Fight for Rights in America,” which is publishing Tuesday and from which parts of this column are adapted. His next book, “The Short Life and Curious Death of Free Speech in America,“will be released Sept. 15.

 ?? VIA GETTY IMAGES SAUL LOEB, AFP ?? President Donald Trump arrives for Independen­ce Day events at Mount Rushmore National Memorial in Keystone, South Dakota, on July 3.
VIA GETTY IMAGES SAUL LOEB, AFP President Donald Trump arrives for Independen­ce Day events at Mount Rushmore National Memorial in Keystone, South Dakota, on July 3.

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