Who Killed The Constitution by Thomas E. Woods, Jr. and Kevin R. C. Gutzman - Excerpt

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WHO KILLED THE

CONSTITUTION?
The Federal Government vs. American Liberty
from World War I to Barack Obama
Thomas E. Woods Jr. and Kevin R. C. Gutzman
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Copyright © 2008 by Thomas E. Woods Jr. and Kevin R. C. Gutzman
All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the
Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
Three Rivers Press and the Tugboat design are registered trademarks of
Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in slightly different form in the United States by

Crown Forum, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random
House, Inc., New York, in 2008.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Woods, Thomas E.
Who killed the Constitution? : the federal government vs. American liberty from
World War I to Barack Obama / Thomas E. Woods Jr. and Kevin R. C. Gutzman.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Constitutional history—United States. 2. Executive power—
United States—History. 3. Legislative power—United States—History.
4. Political questions and judicial power—United States—History.
1. Gutzman, Kevin Raeder, 1963– II. Title.
KF4541.W66.2008
342.7302'9—dc22 2008007055
ISBN 978-0-307-40576-0
Printed in the United States of America
Design by Lauren Dong

–1___
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
0___
+1___ First Paperback Edition
www.ThreeRiversPress.com
To purchase a copy of
Who Killed the Constitution?

visit one of these online retailers:

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Contents
Introduction The Constitution Is Dead 1
Chapter 1 Congress Shall Make No Law (Unless It Really

Wants To): Woodrow Wilson and Freedom of
Speech 5
Chapter 2 Another “Great President” versus the

Constitution: Harry Truman Seizes the Steel
Mills 23
Chapter 3 The Third Rail of American Jurisprudence:

Brown v. Board of Education 41
Chapter 4 Discriminating to End . . . Discrimination:

The Forced Busing Fiascoes 55
Chapter 5 Roads to Nowhere 71
Chapter 6 The Great Gold Robbery of 1933 83
Chapter 7 The Court’s “Wall of Separation”: Banning

Prayer from Public Schools 103
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Chapter 8 The Power to Draft 119 ___ 0
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viii C o n t e n t s
Chapter 9 Do Americans Have a Constitutional Duty to

Suffer? The Case of Medical Marijuana 135
Chapter 10 From Chief Executive to Prince: The Presidency

and Foreign Policy 151
Chapter 11 The Phony Case for Presidential War Power 167
Chapter 12 The President Enforces the Law . . . Right? 185
Conclusion Can Anything Be Done? 199
Appendix: The Constitution of the United States 203

Notes 227
Acknowledgments 247
Index 249
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Introduction
The Constitution Is Dead
M
any Americans worry that the Constitution is dying.
Leading the chorus are those critics, mostly on the Right, in
whom the first initiatives of the Obama administration have
awakened a concern dormant for eight years. Their arguments recall
those made only yesterday by others, mostly from the Left, deplor-
ing the George W. Bush administration’s supposedly unprecedented
attacks on the Constitution.
We have bad news for both sets of critics: the Constitution is al-
ready dead. It died a long time ago.
To be sure, every politician claims to admire the Constitution,
and government officials must swear to uphold it. When they get
the oath wrong, they may even take it again. But what does their fi-
delity to the Constitution really amount to in practice?
Nothing.
Even those who bewail our present constitutional crisis miss the
much larger story. The assaults on the Constitution are not the work
of one branch of government, or of one party, and they did not
emerge overnight. Every branch of the federal government has
trampled on the Constitution, almost without interruption, for close ___–1
to a century. The crisis we face today is the culmination of decades of ___ 0
___+1
2 WHO KILLED THE CONSTITUTION?
offenses against the Constitution by Democrats and Republicans,

justices, presidents, and congresses alike, all of whom have essen-
tially rejected the idea that the Constitution possesses a fixed mean-
ing limiting the power of the U.S. government.
That idea was not a minor aspect of the Constitution; it was the
very purpose of the Constitution.
The Dirty Dozen
Nowadays, the Constitution is no obstacle to any conceivable federal

program. Would you like to have the federal government take over
the delivery of health care? No constitutional issue comes to mind.
Do you think the Department of the Treasury should pump three
trillion dollars into failed banks without taking a single vote in Con-
gress? No problem. Would you like federal agencies promiscuously
to mine everyone’s e-mail and telephone calls? Why not? As few as
ninety years ago, advocates of such novel federal initiatives would
have understood that they must be preceded by constitutional
amendments Not today. To most politicians (including judges) of
both parties, all that matters in evaluating a federal initiative is
whether it seems likely to raise the GDP, help resolve a social epi-
demic, or contribute to national security. If they consider it desir-
able, they do it. The change in administrations in January 2009 has
brought no change we can believe in on this score whatsoever.
Instead of constitutionality, federal officials rely on their noble
intentions. Yet noble intentions can never be the basis for judging
whether the federal government is taking proper constitutional ac-
tion. In fact, as this book will show, the government has often de-
formed our Constitution and insidiously subverted the rule of law
with precisely those actions that Americans have been taught to cel-
ebrate. The received wisdom is that seemingly unconstitutional ac-
–1___ tions in pursuit of laudable goals were heroic, and that they have
0___ brought tacit amendment in a constitution that otherwise would
+1___ have become outmoded.
The Constitution Is Dead 3
The received wisdom on America’s recent constitutional history

is, unfortunately, almost entirely wrong. That is why we need a
sweeping reassessment that lays bare exactly who killed the Consti-
tution.
In this book we chronicle a dozen of the worst examples of the
federal government’s defiance of the Constitution—twelve actions
from the past century that, taken together, dealt the death blow to
the Constitution. This “dirty dozen” does not represent the federal
government’s only constitutional assaults, but the accounts here
illustrate exactly how congressmen, presidents, and judges have
flouted the Constitution.
Some of the cases we chronicle are well known and the subject of
heated debate, while others, no less important, are practically un-
known, overlooked in conventional histories. Some of our choices
will, on the surface, be familiar to readers, but the constitutional
problems they raise will be surprising because standard treatments
ignore them. Some of these assaults on the Constitution involve the
various branches of the federal government working together, con-
trary to simplistic accounts that pin the blame on individual actors.
And some have long gone unchallenged simply because it is consid-
ered taboo even to question certain acts of bygone federal officials.
For example, a couple of the cases we document involve the
highly charged subject of race. People who draw conclusions in that
area like the ones we have drawn in this book can be assured of
smears and character assassination, regardless of how strong their
constitutional arguments are. Since the reigning assumption is that
the Constitution does not really matter, the intentions of anyone
advancing such arguments are simply assumed to be bad, and their
reasoning is therefore ignored. Likewise, those critical of the Bush
administration’s constitutional theories will be accused of “aiding
the terrorists,” despite the constitutional merits. Rational discus-
sion of what the Constitution actually says is unusual in such an
environment—and that’s just the way the government likes it. Every ___–1
significant appeal to the Constitution, supposedly the fundamental ___ 0
law of the land, is a thought crime of one kind or another. But if we ___+1
are truly to confront a government that has gone off the constitu-
tional rails, we must not shy away from calling attention to abuses,
regardless of whom it offends.
Why the Constitution Matters
Why, some may wonder, should we care about the Constitution?

Libertarians, for instance, might legitimately ask: Isn’t “liberty” all
that matters, Constitution or no? Our answer is that while govern-
ment misdeeds may work in favor of liberty in the short run, there
can be no enduring freedom where government is not bound by
a constitution. “In questions of power, then,” Thomas Jefferson
warned, “let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him
down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.1
Otherwise, Jefferson feared, government would become arbi-
trary. He had seen even his good friend and fellow revolutionary
John Adams yield to the authoritarian impulse. He would trust no
one in power ever again. Jefferson knew that Rome’s republic fell
when its rulers began to ignore its constitution, and he worried that
the same fate would befall America. He feared a lawless empire be-
striding the world, a government contemptuous even of its citizens’
just claims, a basically republican system degenerating into tyranny.
His fears were well founded.
The U.S. Constitution has proven inadequate to the task of pre-
venting federal officials from behaving arbitrarily. Now that the re-
straining elements of the Constitution have been abandoned—now
that the government has, to borrow Jefferson’s metaphor, broken free
of its chains—what is left to tether federal officials? Only voters.
The plain truth is that today we are governed by little more than
simple prudence—government officials’ sense of what they can get
away with. This startling statement will seem to be a statement of
–1___ the obvious by the end of this book.
0___
+1___
1
Congress Shall Make No Law
(Unless It Really Wants To):
Woodrow Wilson and Freedom of Speech
T
o all appearances, Maryland’s Edwin Seidewitz led a suc-
cessful and contented life. He served as mayor of Annapolis from
1899 until 1901. He later became a successful florist in Baltimore,
and served as president of the local Rotary Club.
Then he made a mistake.
Not long after the U.S. government entered World War I in
April 1917, Seidewitz met some Germans at a hotel bar. They were
officers of German ships that had been unable to leave Baltimore
harbor since the outbreak of European hostilities in 1914. They
were commiserating about friends and family they longed to see, and
about their concern that they would be interned as enemy aliens in
the United States until war’s end.
Seidewitz felt sorry for the men and sat down for some beer with
them. Then, as a gesture of sympathy, he kissed one of them on the
forehead. And there was his mistake.
As soon as word got around town that Seidewitz had “kissed
a German,” his business dried up. He was thrown out of the Rotary
Club without being given a chance to defend himself. This once
prosperous and respected man found himself completely ruined, ___–1
practically overnight. ___ 0
___+1
Perhaps the return of peace might have reversed Seidewitz’s

string of misfortunes. We shall never know. On August 24, 1918,
Edwin Seidewitz shot himself in the head.1
That was the kind of cultural climate in which the Espionage
Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 were passed. With these
restrictive acts, all three branches of the federal government colluded
against the Constitution in order to clamp down on Americans’
freedom to dissent from government policy.
Intimidation and Suppression
World War I was not the first time in American history that the fed-
eral government tried to muzzle its citizens. The year 1798 saw the
passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts, which were said to be neces-
sary in light of the Quasi War with France. Thomas Jefferson and
James Madison didn’t buy it: for them, these were obviously partisan
measures designed to intimidate and suppress the opposition party
(namely, theirs). Peel back all the patriotic rationales and that’s what
the legislation amounted to, as far as Jefferson and Madison were
concerned.
Then there were the constitutional problems: Jefferson argued
that the Sedition Act violated both the First Amendment (in its re-
strictions on speech) and the Tenth Amendment (since the states
never delegated to the federal government any power to criminalize
speech, such power remained with the states). When Jefferson took
office as president in 1801, not only did he release from jail all those
who had been imprisoned under the act, but he also tracked down
those who had paid fines for violating it, and repaid them with inter-
est. (Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes would later cite
Jefferson’s action as an admission by the federal government that the
Sedition Act had been wrong.) The Sedition Act of 1798 expired in
–1___ 1801, and for more than a century afterward the federal government
0___ had no anti-sedition law on the books.
+1___
Congress Shall Make No Law 7
That changed with the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition
Act of 1918.
“Curses” and “Bludgeons”
Although organized polling did not begin until the late 1930s, anec-
dotal evidence suggests that when the Great War broke out, the
American people did not want their country getting involved in the
senseless carnage across the Atlantic. Even the worst outrage Ger-
many perpetrated against the United States—the 1915 sinking of
the Lusitania, the famous British ocean liner, killing some 128
Americans on board—provoked very few calls for American inter-
vention in the war. By the time President Woodrow Wilson’s reelec-
tion campaign made it to the Midwest in 1916, the slogan “He kept
us out of war!” had become firmly attached to his candidacy. Then,
after the United States declared war, Joseph Tumulty, President
Wilson’s private secretary, expressed concern because “the people’s
‘righteous wrath’ seems not to have been aroused.”2 Senator Robert
La Follette of Wisconsin argued in an antiwar speech before Con-
gress in 1917 that the perceived need to pass restrictive legislation in
the first place proved that the general public did not support U.S.
entry into the war. In fact, in order to carry on the war successfully,
the U.S. government considered it necessary to criminalize opposi-
tion sentiment, conscript millions of men into the army, and launch
a propaganda campaign on behalf of the war that was unique in
American history.
With the United States finally in the war, the Wilson administra-
tion launched various efforts to promote the U.S. government’s view of
the conflict. The key figure in this important undertaking was George
Creel, the Missouri journalist and longtime Wilson partisan. Creel
headed the Committee on Public Information (CPI), which Wilson
established by executive order in 1917, and used every available instru- ___–1
ment of communication to carry out this propaganda mission. ___ 0
___+1
It worked. Throughout American culture Germans began to

be portrayed as subhuman savages. Journalists, the entertainment
industry, and even professional historians succumbed to the most
juvenile stereotyping and jingoism. Symphony orchestras refused
to perform works by German composers. Sauerkraut became
“liberty cabbage.” German shepherds were now “Alsatians.” Other
effects were more serious: Germans found themselves driven
from their jobs, frightened into changing their names, and even,
in rare cases, beaten or killed. In Iowa and South Dakota the Ger-
man language was altogether forbidden in public—with the
exception (in South Dakota) of funerals, for which people could
be issued special permits. Texas banned teaching the German
language.3
Volunteer enforcement organizations were founded, boasting
such names as the Sedition Slammers, the Terrible Threateners,
and the Boy Spies of America. The Literary Digest called upon its
readers to be on the lookout for sedition and to “clip and send to us
any editorial utterances they encounter which seem to them sedi-
tious or treasonable.”4 State and local councils of defense, out-
growths of a national Council of Defense that Congress had
created to coordinate the war effort, turned much of their atten-
tion to getting public opinion in line. In Missouri, some of the
local councils of defense used “Red, White, and Blue Cards” to
intimidate people into silence. According to the records of the
Missouri state council:
The person to whom the first warning card is sent, generally

takes it as a warning that they are being watched and immedi-
ately becomes very careful in their expressions. It has been
found necessary in only a few cases to send a blue card to any-
one and the red card has never been sent. The red card is
simply a statement from the Council of Defense that the
–1___ recipient will be reported immediately to the United States
0___ Secret Service.5
+1___
Oh.
The stories that come down to us from that period sound like
fiction. A movie about the American War for Independence called
The Spirit of ’76, which portrayed the British in an unflattering
light, got its makers in trouble with the law: since the United
States was now allied with Britain, such images could promote dis-
content in the American armed forces and interfere with recruit-
ment. They received a prison sentence of ten years.6 A Christian
minister in Vermont was sentenced to fifteen years for writing a
pamphlet, which he distributed to five people, arguing that Christ
had been a pacifist and that Christians should not participate in
war. A mob broke into a school in Marysville, Nebraska, looking
for any material about Germany or written in the German lan-
guage, and burned all of it, including German-language Bibles. A
man was arrested under the Minnesota Espionage Act for saying,
in reference to women who knitted socks intended for soldiers,
“No soldier ever sees these socks.” Michigan’s Clarence Nesbitt,
who purchased $1,500 in Liberty bonds, was tarred and feathered
by a group of men who thought he should have purchased $3,000
worth instead.7
Nesbitt’s fate was not unique. Walter Ferguson, an Oklahoma
farmer, vainly protested that he had purchased all the bonds he
could afford. Local war enthusiasts didn’t believe him and proceeded
to make his life miserable. “It would require a book to tell of the dev-
ilish ways in which he was hounded afterward,” Ferguson’s wife later
recalled. “Merchants refused to sell him groceries, women cut his
wife dead in church, neighbors set fire to his barn.”8
So many more such cases could be cited that the rest of this book
could easily be filled with them.
President Wilson had supposedly seen it all coming, and deeply
regretted this ugly deformation of the old America. He is alleged to
have said, “Once lead this people into war, and they’ll forget there
ever was such a thing as tolerance. To fight you must be brutal and ___–1
ruthless, and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very ___ 0
___+1
10 W H O K I L L E D T H E C O N S T I T U T I O N ?
fiber of our national life, infecting Congress, the courts, the police-
man on the beat, the man in the street.” Conformity, the president
went on, would become the only virtue, and any man who refused to
conform would pay the penalty.
For a long time scholars thoughtlessly accepted these words as
Wilson’s own. That could be because, as one of them says, Wilson
“bears the onus of moral responsibility for demanding intervention.
How much less onerous this is, however, when Wilson’s suffering
and sagacity receive emphasis. . . . Wilson seems so human, and his
plight so tragic, when his ‘mental agony,’ ‘turmoil,’ ‘horror of war,’
and ‘anguish’ are stressed.”9 But historians now doubt that Wilson
ever made those remarks.10 Wilson never had a particularly stellar
record as a civil libertarian, and the evidence that this aspect of war
especially troubled him is essentially nil.
Even before any restrictive legislation was passed, the govern-
ment was already pressuring people not to express certain opinions,
even certain facts. George Creel called on the press to refrain from
publishing any speculation relating to a possible peace, or regard-
ing any issues that divided the Allies. Newspaper editors generally
heeded his request, contacting Creel’s office to inquire about ques-
tionable cases. Creel was said to have told a State Department offi-
cial that he wanted “nothing whatever published in regard to cable
or mail censorship . . . The less said about any sort of censorship
the better. . . . It is desirable that no one should know just where the
censorship is working.”11
Teachers and professors, many of whom had spoken out against
war before its outbreak in 1914, either adopted the party line upon
their government’s entry into the conflict or allowed themselves to
be intimidated into silence. Those who spoke out were often pun-
ished. And “speaking out” did not necessarily mean denouncing
their government or its war effort. Professors were dismissed from
their jobs for questioning the true extent of German atrocities in
–1___ Belgium or even for suggesting that the various peoples involved
0___ in the war all had good and bad qualities. When Columbia Univer-
+1___
sity dismissed two professors—one for his ties to pacifist groups and
another for his public opposition to a variety of war measures—
some members of the faculty issued protests. Charles Beard re-
signed. “If we have to suppress everything we don’t like to hear,”
Beard charged, “this country is resting on a pretty wobbly basis. . . .
I was among the first to urge a declaration of war by the United
States, and I believe that we should now press forward with all our
might to a just conclusion. But thousands of my countrymen do not
share this view. Their opinions cannot be changed by curses or
bludgeons. Arguments addressed to their reason and understanding
are our best hope.”12
Such incidents ran from the chilling to the absurd. Professor
Willis Mason West was a member of the Committee on Public In-
formation, and yet even he was not above suspicion. Montana public
schools were ordered to stop using a history textbook West had
written because he was declared to have been insufficiently hostile in
his treatment of the Teutonic tribes prior to a.d. 812.13
“The Greatest Danger”
It was precisely this climate that the Espionage Act and the Sedi-
tion Act had either created or aggravated. The first of them was
passed in June 1917. Section 3, the relevant part of the legislation,
instructs:
Whoever, when the United States is at war, shall willfully make

or convey false reports or false statements with intent to inter-
fere with the operation or success of the military or naval forces
of the United States or to promote the success of its enemies
and whoever when the United States is at war, shall willfully
cause or attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny,
refusal of duty, in the military or naval forces of the United ___–1
States, or shall willfully obstruct the recruiting or enlistment ___ 0
___+1
service of the United States, to the injury of the service or

of the United States, shall be punished by a fine of not more
than $10,000 or imprisonment for not more than twenty
years, or both.
The Espionage Act also gave the postmaster general the discre-
tionary authority to remove from the mails any material that he be-
lieved would hamper the war effort.
When Congress passed the legislation, its members did not
understand themselves to be approving an open-ended power to
prohibit a wide range of expression. Criticism of the war as such
was not being criminalized. In fact, the version of the bill that Con-
gress approved was more lenient than the original proposal, which
among other things would have authorized censorship of the press.
But this caveat does not exonerate Congress, since it should have
been obvious that a zealous executive could simply interpret the
legislation’s key phrases so as to allow the kind of censorship and
control that President Wilson had been disappointed to see missing
from the final version of the legislation. What, exactly, would con-
stitute an “attempt to cause insubordination”? What kind of activi-
ties would be viewed as tending to “obstruct the recruiting or
enlistment service of the United States”? Would a speech or article
against the war qualify as doing either of these things? It would
surely be difficult in practice to keep such phrases from reaching an
ever-wider range of activities, particularly in the hands of a crusad-
ing president.
The Sedition Act, passed the following year, was an amend-
ment to the Espionage Act that authorized precisely the press cen-
sorship that Congress left out of the first piece of legislation, and
criminalized still more activities. It imposed potentially heavy fines
and lengthy prison terms on anyone who should “willfully utter,
print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive
–1___ language about the form of government of the United States, or
0___ the military or naval forces of the United States, or the flag.” It also
+1___
gave the postmaster general even broader authority to intercept

and return mail. (Since the Sedition Act was passed so close to the
end of the war, the vast majority of convictions occurred under
the earlier, unamended Espionage Act of 1917.) One of the argu-
ments in favor of the Sedition Act was that if the federal govern-
ment punished war critics more severely and effectively, enraged
mobs would consider it less urgent to take the law into their own
hands—and there would thus be fewer lynchings and other acts of
summary justice.
Senator Joseph France of Maryland tried without success to in-
sert an amendment into the act to the effect that “nothing in this
act shall be construed as limiting the liberty or impairing the right
of any individual to publish or speak what is true, with good mo-
tives, and for justifiable ends.” Assistant Attorney General John
Lord O’Brian strongly opposed the amendment on the grounds
that it would make prosecuting people more difficult. It would be
especially challenging to prosecute clergy who favored pacifism,
since their appeals to the Bible would make it hard to show bad
motive. And that would not do, since according to O’Brian the
“greatest danger to the country, internally, to-day is the use of dif-
ferent sorts of seditious propaganda, particularly the false pacifist
propaganda.”14
The Courts Step In
Opponents of the Espionage and Sedition Acts had vainly warned

that “judges and jurors cannot reliably distinguish between ‘good’
and ‘evil’ intent in a wartime atmosphere of fear, suspicion, and pa-
triotic fervor.” Determining subjective intent is never an easy mat-
ter, but defendants are far less likely to receive the benefit of the
doubt from jurors and judges when they hold minority views that
the majority (including, by and large, the jurors and judges them- ___–1
selves) holds in contempt. Professor, lawyer, and civil libertarian ___ 0
___+1
Zechariah Chafee warned that freedom of speech is of particular

importance “in times of popular panic and indignation” and that “it
is precisely in those times that the protection of the jury proves
illusory.”15
The federal courts tended to interpret the Espionage Act (both
before and after its amendment by the Sedition Act) very broadly,
in line with the wishes of the executive branch, such that it wound
up criminalizing more behavior than Congress appears to have in-
tended. A few judges tried to be more lenient. For instance, George
Bourquin, a federal district judge in Montana, ruled in the 1918
case of Ves Hall, a man who on several occasions had made remarks
in public places that attracted the attention of the authorities.
Specifically, Hall was accused of violating the Espionage Act for ex-
pressing the hope that Germany would “whip” the United States
and claiming that the war was being waged for the benefit of “Wall
Street millionaires.” Judge Bourquin explained that in order for an
action to qualify in a legal sense as an “attempt” to do something, it
had to meet two essential criteria: it had to be intended to commit
a specific crime but to have failed in its execution, and it had to be
“of sufficient magnitude and proximity” to the accomplishment of
its goal that it would have had a reasonable expectation of succeed-
ing. Hall made his comments in a town of sixty people, sixty miles
from the nearest railway and hundreds of miles from any soldier.
That did not seem to Judge Bourquin to constitute an “attempt” in
any real sense, and he could find no proof that these scattered re-
marks proved any intent to interfere with the military.16 So he ac-
quitted Hall.
Faced with a statute such as the Espionage Act, Judge Bourquin
had recourse to important common-law principles. Although rarely
acknowledged in Espionage Act prosecutions, for an act to amount
to an “attempt” under the common law it had to “come dangerously
near to success,” be “sufficiently near completion to be of public con-
–1___ cern,” or be “very near to the accomplishment of the act.” Few judges
0___ brought such sobriety to these cases.17
+1___
Shaffer v. United States, a case that reached the U.S. Court of

Appeals, is a good example of how the judiciary typically inter-
preted the Espionage Act. The defendant’s crime involved shipping
copies of a book called The Finished Mystery through the mail.
Among the sentiments in that book that were said to violate the
Espionage Act was this: “If you say it is a war of defense against
wanton and intolerable aggression, I must reply that . . . it has yet
to be proved that Germany has any intention or desire of attacking
us. The war itself is wrong. Its prosecution will be a crime. There is
not a question raised, an issue involved, a cause at stake, which is
worth the life of one blue-jacket on the sea or one khaki-coat in the
trenches.” The Court of Appeals upheld the defendant’s conviction
on the grounds that although “disapproval of the war and the advo-
cacy of peace are not crimes under the Espionage Act,” the “natural
and probable tendency and effect of the words” was to undermine
support for the war. The courts had recourse to this “bad tendency”
test throughout the war, and it became the touchstone of countless
dubious convictions.18
It wasn’t until 1919—in other words, well after the war had
ended—that the sedition legislation was subjected to the scrutiny of
the Supreme Court. Three historic cases were heard that year:
Schenck v. United States, Abrams v. United States, and Debs v. United
States.
Schenck involved the general secretary of the Socialist Party in
Philadelphia. Charles T. Schenck, along with others in the party,
printed up some fifteen thousand anti-conscription leaflets with the
intent of mailing them to men who were being conscripted into the
army. (They got the men’s names from the newspapers, where lists of
men who had passed their physical examinations for the draft board
could be found.) The leaflet, which began “long live the consti-
tution,” denounced conscription as unconstitutional, a position
that Daniel Webster had advanced on the floor of Congress toward
the end of the War of 1812. It described a conscripted man as “little ___–1
better than a convict,” as he “is deprived of his liberty and of his ___ 0
___+1
right to think and act as a free man.” And it called upon people to
overturn the conscription law through the normal channels of gov-
ernment: “Join the Socialist Party in its campaign for the repeal of
the Conscription Act. Write to your congressman and tell him you
want the law repealed. Do not submit to intimidation. You have a
right to demand the repeal of any law. Exercise your rights of free
speech, peaceful assemblage and petitioning the government for a
redress of grievances.” The leaflet went on to urge, “If you do not as-
sert and support your rights, you are helping to ‘deny or disparage
rights’ which it is the solemn duty of all citizens and residents of
the United States to retain.” (The words “deny or disparage rights”
are based on the Ninth Amendment: “The enumeration in the Con-
stitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or dispar-
age others retained by the people.”)19
Only a portion of the fifteen thousand leaflets were actually
mailed, and anecdotal evidence suggests that relatively few people
actually received them. The envelopes and the handwriting on them
were distinctive enough that they could be identified with a reason-
able degree of certainty, and the postal inspector impounded 610
of them when he realized what they were. When the prosecution
called to the stand eleven men to whom the leaflets had been sent,
eight testified that they had never received them. Seven of those
eight saw the leaflet for the first time while on the witness stand;
the other had been handed an envelope containing one when he saw
the U.S. attorney several months earlier, though he had not opened
it. The men testified that the leaflet would not have persuaded them
to evade the draft. Of the three who did receive the leaflet, all of
them testified that they simply reported it to the authorities.20
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes delivered the opinion of the Court,
which found the defendants guilty of violating the Espionage
Act. “The question in every case,” Holmes explained, “is whether
the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a
–1___ nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring
0___ about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. It is
+1___
a question of proximity and degree. When a nation is at war many

things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to
its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men
fight and that no Court could regard them as protected by any con-
stitutional right.”21
The problems in the Court’s decision are legion, but consider
just a few. Justice Holmes’s “clear and present danger” standard,
which sounds rather strict, is apparently malleable enough to bring
about the criminalization of a wide variety of speech and action, for
nothing in the trial showed that the leaflet in question posed a
“clear and present danger” of producing any kind of “evils.” The
leaflet urged people to petition the government to overturn a law
that they, not to mention American statesmen from the past, be-
lieved to be unconstitutional—this is a “clear and present danger” to
the republic? We also read in Schenck that the First Amendment does
not actually mean what it certainly appears to mean, and that the ab-
solute prohibition on congressional abridgment of the freedom of
speech is not so absolute after all. It depends on the circumstances—
and the Supreme Court will of course be right there to tell us what
those circumstances are and when they exist.
Furthermore, it was in Schenck that Justice Holmes advanced his
famous argument about falsely shouting “fire” and creating a panic in
a crowded theater. Historian Richard Polenberg describes the
“shouting fire in a crowded theater” line as “the most brilliantly per-
suasive expression that ever came from Holmes’s pen.”22 No one,
Holmes said, would deny that the man who does such a thing de-
serves the punishment of the law. He concluded on the basis of this
example that free speech could not be an absolute or inalienable
right, but it could be curtailed in the interest of the common good—
as in his view it had been in the Espionage Act.
Justice Holmes’s analogy to shouts of “fire” in crowded theaters,
although superficially plausible, is completely invalid. Justice Hugo
Black understood this point. Writing more than four decades later, ___–1
he gently rebuked Justice Holmes for his famous statement: “That is ___ 0
___+1
a wonderful aphorism about shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater. But

you do not have to shout ‘fire’ to get arrested. If a person creates a
disorder in a theater, they would get him there not because of what
he hollered but because he hollered. They would get him not be-
cause of any views he had but because they thought he did not have
any views that they wanted to hear there.”23
What we have here, in other words, is a property rights issue, not
a freedom-of-speech issue. When you patronize a theater you agree
to terms by which the theater owner allows you onto his property;
surely those terms include the understanding that you may not in-
terrupt the performance and disturb your fellow theatergoers. “We
have a system of property,” Justice Black explained, and that means
“a man does not have a right to do anything he wants anywhere he
wants to do it.” If you buy a theater ticket, you are not thereby enti-
tled to give a speech there. Likewise, although you have every right
to deliver a speech against the Supreme Court, you do not have the
right to do so in Justice Black’s home.24
As a simple matter of property rights, restrictions on shouting “fire”
in a crowded theater do not involve the suppression of free speech
at all. Yet it was on this flawed basis—we suppress shouts of “fire”
in crowded theaters, so we can also suppress antiwar publication—
that Justice Holmes justified federal criminalization of unflattering
comments about the U.S. government.
Still another problem with Justice Holmes’s reasoning has been
observed: even supposing that someone may be justly restrained
from falsely shouting “fire” in a crowded theater because of the riot
and commotion that would thereby ensue, what about someone who
accurately shouts “fire” in a crowded theater? Commotion will ensue
as in the first case, but doesn’t the alert regarding the fire outweigh
this concern? In other words, is it not possible that the truth that a
statement conveys might be sufficiently valuable to compensate for
any commotion it may cause?
–1___ A week later, Justice Holmes gave the opinion of the Court in
0___ the case of Debs v. United States. Perennial Socialist presidential can-
+1___
didate Eugene V. Debs had delivered a provocative speech in which

he claimed, among other things, that the capitalists were responsible
for the war fever, and that as usual the common man had never had
a chance to express his own preference for peace or war. For that of-
fense Debs had been sentenced to ten years in prison. Holmes up-
held Debs’s sentence.
Requests to free Debs that made their way to President Wilson’s
desk were denied. It was Wilson’s Republican successor, Warren G.
Harding, who finally freed the incarcerated folk hero. (Debs was in
prison during the 1920 elections but still received one million votes;
a campaign button featured the candidate’s face, around which were
written the words “For President: Convict No. 9653.”) Harding,
who is reviled by historians—unlike Wilson, the unassuming Har-
ding wasn’t a “great president”—remarked that the poor souls who
had been locked away for speeches they’d given or articles they’d
published never meant any harm. As for Debs, Harding said, “I want
him to eat his Christmas dinner with his wife.”25
United States v. Abrams, which was heard nine months later, was
one of the relatively few cases in which the defendants were accused
of violating the Sedition Act of 1918 rather than the unamended
Espionage Act of 1917. The defendants were a small group of
Russian radicals—“anarchists,” most of them called themselves,
along with one socialist—who objected to Wilson’s military inter-
vention in Russia. They composed some leaflets consisting of pre-
dictable boilerplate to the effect that the capitalists of the West were
seeking to choke the Bolshevik Revolution in its infancy, and they
demanded that all such intervention cease. The leaflets were not
pro-German, and in fact one of them observed, “We hate and de-
spise German militarism more than do your hypocritical tyrants.”26
A lower court had sentenced all five to prison time: three received
twenty years, another one fifteen, and another three.
Once again, defendants accused of offenses such as this were
subject to the “bad tendency” test, and as usual, they failed. Accord- ___–1
ing to the Court, the purpose of the Russian radicals was in fact to ___ 0
___+1
obstruct the successful prosecution of the American war effort against

Germany. Their intent was to turn people against the American
government in time of war, and so their punishment was upheld.
A famous study of civil liberties during World War I finds the sig-
nificance of this case in “an increasing tendency . . . to look, not so
much for overt acts, but for the bent of the defendant’s thinking.
Men’s minds were explored more fully to try to ferret out unpatriotic
thoughts and words.”27 That should speak for itself.
By the time the Abrams case reached the Court, Holmes’s views
had evolved from what they had been in Schenck. Historians note
that Holmes had been in correspondence with a number of promi-
nent figures who championed free speech, and believe he had been
persuaded by much of their argument. In Holmes’s Abrams dissent
there is a distinct shift in emphasis: the “clear and present danger”
test changes from an instrument for restricting speech into one for
protecting it, at least most of the time.28 In this case, said Holmes,
twenty-year sentences “have been imposed for the publishing of two
leaflets that I believe the defendants had as much right to publish as
the Government has to publish the Constitution of the United
States now vainly invoked by them.” He concluded, “I think that we
should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression
of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, un-
less they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the
lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is
required to save the country.”29 This was at least an improvement
over the “bad tendency” test. Justice Louis Brandeis joined Justice
Holmes in his dissent. The seven justices who constituted the ma-
jority, of course, did not.
The Forgotten Constitution
–1___ “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech,”

0___ says the First Amendment. The enumerated powers of Congress,
+1___
given in Article I, Section 8, do not include a power to suppress

any kind of speech under any circumstances. According to Thomas
Jefferson, if any governmental body might possess a power to in-
terfere with free speech, it was the states.30 Whether the states
would be wise or warranted in exercising such a power is of course a
separate matter, but that is all the Constitution has to say about the
subject.
As usual, though, government officials did what they wanted to do.
___–1
___ 0
___+1
About the Authors
THOMAS E. WOODS JR. (A.B., Harvard, 1994; M.A., Columbia, 1996;

M.Phil., Columbia, 1997; Ph.D., Columbia, 2000) is senior fellow in Ameri-
can history at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. His seven other books include
the New York Times bestseller The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to American
History, 33 Questions About American History You’re Not Supposed to Ask, and
The Church Confronts Modernity: Catholic Intellectuals and the Progressive Era.
Woods won first place in the 2006 Templeton Enterprise Awards for The
Church and the Market: A Catholic Defense of the Free Economy. He is co-editor
of Exploring American History: From Colonial Times to 1877, an eleven-
volume encyclopedia. More information is available at his website,
ThomasEWoods.com.
KEVIN R. C. GUTZMAN (M.P.Aff., Texas, 1990; J.D., Texas, 1990; M.A.,

Virginia, 1994; Ph.D., Virginia, 1999) is associate professor of American
history at Western Connecticut State University. He is the author of the
New York Times bestseller The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to the Constitution,
Virginia’s American Revolution: From Dominion to Republic, 1776–1840, and
the essay “Lincoln as Jeffersonian: The Colonization Chimera,” in Lincoln
Emancipated: The President and the Politics of Race, edited by Brian Dirck.
Gutzman is also the editor of John Taylor of Caroline’s Tyranny Unmasked
and New Views of the Constitution of the United States of America. He appeared
as a featured expert in the documentary John Marshall: Citizen, Statesman, ___–1
Jurist. ___ 0
___+1
To purchase a copy of
Who Killed the Constitution?

visit one of these online retailers:

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qxp 4/22/09 6:02 PM Page iii

WHO KILLED THE

Thomas E. Woods Jr. and Kevin R. C. Gutzman

Copyright © 2008 by Thomas E. Woods Jr. and Kevin R. C. Gutzman

All rights reserved.

Originally published in hardcover in slightly different form in the United States by

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Printed in the United States of America

Design by Lauren Dong

Introduction The Constitution Is Dead 1

Chapter 1 Congress Shall Make No Law (Unless It Really

Chapter 2 Another “Great President” versus the

Chapter 3 The Third Rail of American Jurisprudence:

Chapter 4 Discriminating to End . . . Discrimination:

Chapter 5 Roads to Nowhere 71

Chapter 6 The Great Gold Robbery of 1933 83

Chapter 7 The Court’s “Wall of Separation”: Banning

Chapter 9 Do Americans Have a Constitutional Duty to

Chapter 10 From Chief Executive to Prince: The Presidency

Chapter 11 The Phony Case for Presidential War Power 167

Chapter 12 The President Enforces the Law . . . Right? 185

Conclusion Can Anything Be Done? 199

Appendix: The Constitution of the United States 203

2 WHO KILLED THE CONSTITUTION?

offenses against the Constitution by Democrats and Republicans,

The Dirty Dozen

Nowadays, the Constitution is no obstacle to any conceivable federal

The Constitution Is Dead 3

The received wisdom on America’s recent constitutional history

4 WHO KILLED THE CONSTITUTION?

Why the Constitution Matters

Why, some may wonder, should we care about the Constitution?

6 WHO KILLED THE CONSTITUTION?

Perhaps the return of peace might have reversed Seidewitz’s

Intimidation and Suppression

Congress Shall Make No Law 7

“Curses” and “Bludgeons”

8 WHO KILLED THE CONSTITUTION?

It worked. Throughout American culture Germans began to

The person to whom the first warning card is sent, generally

Congress Shall Make No Law 9

Congress Shall Make No Law 11

“The Greatest Danger”

Whoever, when the United States is at war, shall willfully make

service of the United States, to the injury of the service or

Congress Shall Make No Law 13

gave the postmaster general even broader authority to intercept

The Courts Step In

Opponents of the Espionage and Sedition Acts had vainly warned

Zechariah Chafee warned that freedom of speech is of particular

Congress Shall Make No Law 15

Shaffer v. United States, a case that reached the U.S. Court of

Congress Shall Make No Law 17

a question of proximity and degree. When a nation is at war many

a wonderful aphorism about shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater. But

Congress Shall Make No Law 19

didate Eugene V. Debs had delivered a provocative speech in which

obstruct the successful prosecution of the American war effort against

The Forgotten Constitution

–1___ “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech,”

Congress Shall Make No Law 21

given in Article I, Section 8, do not include a power to suppress