I am talking about the various acts during say, the civil war, and world war 1. The ones that remove your ability to take political action that would help the enemy. It is often said that Americans fought for the right to free speech, but often that right was removed when Americans fought.
The right to free speech is not an absolute one but I do see your point. It isn’t just limited to wartime. Remember the HUAC and the horrors of tailgunner Joe?
If we care about keeping our laws off one another’s bodies so much, why the drug laws?
Eh, seriously, though, the U.S. government, and governments in general, are not renowned for consistency and absolute fairness.
In war time, it should be obvious. People will happily blab away military secrets, troop movements, sailing times, large concentrations of supplies being loaded onto what ships and any plans they know about.
Like in WW2 ‘loose lips sink ships’.
The press would happily inform the enemy of any invasion headed their way, right down to the amount of troops, the time of arrival, the point of arrival and weapons carried, if they could get away with it.
In the earlier wars, especially the Civil War, it was not so much the government(s) censoring speech as fanatical people on both sides.
In WW1, no one wanted any rabble rousers spreading dissent among the cannon fodder and general public. It has been done before by enemy plants and in WW2 actually managed to initiate a coal strike, which was not the wisest decision because Federal troops showed up and took over the mines for the vital coal.
People speaking out against a major war can be enemy sympathizers, influencing workers in war industries to do things like rig bombs not to detonate, rifles to fail, screw up shipments of supplies and leak vital information.
Your question needs to be rephrased as “Why wasn’t there more protest about limitations on Americans’ freedom of speech in past wars?”
Vietnam effectively ended the age of touching faith that our wartime leaders would tell us everything we needed to know.
For an interesting (if dated) look at how the U.S. military handled internal dissent, read Robert Sherrill’s “Military Justice Is To Justice As Military Music Is To Music”.
Sheesh, Spyder. They can also be conscientious objectors, pacifists, people who honestly believe their governments aims are politically misguided or immoral and for some reason think that being a citizen gives them some kind of right to say something about it, or maybe just folks who don’t particularly want to become cannon fodder.
Restricting speech as far as information about battle plans and troop location is one thing. But passing laws against as much a suggesting the war was not a good thing, and actively encouraging people to turn in their friends and neighbors for a stray word, as was done during WW1, is something else entirerly.
Jack, but everything we knew about the Gulf War we got from are wartime leaders.
Nonetheless, I do believe Americans care about free speech, and will fight for it, and will keep fighting for it, all of the many many times other Americans try to take it away.
Speech ain’t the only right that gets abridged during wartime. Remember what we “Freedom conscious” Americans did during World War II to those American citizens who happened to be of Japanese descent?
We also put cubans into concentration camps during the spanish american war:)
You sure about that, Asmodean? The Spanish put Cubans in reconcentrados before the war, but I’ve never heard of the U.S. using concentration camps until the Japanese-Americans in World War II. It would not have surprised me to learn of our having used concentration camps in the Philippine-American War (right after the Spanish-American War), but I’ve never heard of us having done so. Of course, we rounded up a lot of Indians and put them in reservations.
Not only is free speech abandoned in war, but it is also severely limited in the U.S. military.
Onceuponatime, I was supposedly fighting for “Freedom and The American Way” in Vietnam in the U.S. Army. I hung up a small poster (for you trivia buffs, obtained from Horseshit Magazine, Equine Publications, Hermosa Beach, CA) that said “Buy War Bonds, Burn A Baby” and showed a soldier-type person bayonetting an infant.
Sounds like free speech to me, but it resulted in a court martial, one I am very proud to have on my record, I might add.
As part of our G.I.Joe training, we were taught how to bayonet human beings of all ages and other useful killing skills. Somehow the irony was lost on the Army.
Yeah MEBuckner America liberated them from the concentration camps, then put them in American ones:)