The Foreign Service Journal, September 2004

ed equal, and are endowed with rights that no government can take away from them, no matter where they live or what they believe. We have not fully lived up to that idea, but it has guided our nation for more than two centuries. My own great-grandfather, Ernest Winter, like the ancestors of many Journal readers, fought tyranny in his homeland at great risk to him- self before coming to this country. He was a national labor politician who escaped the Kaiser’s secret police by crossing the German border in a hay wagon under the threat of death. He was smuggled to England and then traveled to America, where he spent the rest of his life working for the downtrodden, alongside Samuel Gompers and other activists. In times of war, even democratic governments often pass laws they become ashamed of once the crisis has passed. In 1798, the United States almost went to war with France as xenophobia swept our country, leading to passage of the Enemy Alien Act and Alien and Sedition Acts per- mitting the president to arrest, imprison and deport “dangerous” immigrants on mere suspicion of “treasonable or secret machinations against the government.” If such a deportee returned, he could be imprisoned for as long as the presi- dent thought “the public safety may require.” Sounds like how we treat so- called “enemy combatants,” doesn’t it? And in an unsettling parallel with today’s Patriot Act, the Sedition Act made it unlawful to write, print, pub- lish or speak “false, scandalous and malicious” words about Congress or the executive branch — in direct vio- lation of the First Amendment guar- antee of freedom of expression. S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 21 S P E A K I N G O U T Any gap between our words and our deeds only weakens our ability to speak out on behalf of victims of oppression and police-state brutality around the world.