![disegni graziosissimi. La volta è ornata fantasticamente, e il
pavimento è in marmo di vario colore; questa profusione di marmi
prova la ricchezza mineralogica dell'isola. A rendere quest'edificio
simile ad un'Alhambra non manca nemmeno una fontana. Altre
stanze furono dal ricco marchese decorate in stile romano e
pompeiano e dimostrano l'abilità dei Siciliani nell'affresco,
imperocchè tutte le imitazioni di pitture antiche furono colà eseguite
unicamente da artisti nati e vissuti nell'isola.
II.
Due isole molto distanti fra loro, l'Inghilterra e la Sicilia furono ad
uno stesso tempo conquistate da una razza audace e avventuriera,
quella dei Normanni, che, dopo avervi per poco brillato, vi si spense.
Nell'una e nell'altra isola venne introdotto il governo feudale, con
baronie e maggioraschi, i quali durano ancor oggi[5]. In entrambe le
isole si formò una costituzione aristocratica, che si sviluppò possente
in Inghilterra e di cui rimangono ancora vestigia in Sicilia, ove più
presto si estinse.
Questa similitudine di destini fra le due isole è abbastanza singolare
e potrebbe servire a spiegare altri fatti storici avvenuti dopo la
Rivoluzione francese, fra i quali la costituzione introdotta dagli
Inglesi in Sicilia nel 1812.
La signoria dei Normanni in Sicilia fu di breve durata; brillò appena
un secolo e ne furono caratteri distintivi l'intelligenza, la costanza,
l'audacia quasi feroce, una politica vasta e intraprendente, una
grande vastità di disegni e di imprese. Tutto ciò soggiacque al
contatto della vita voluttuosa dei Saraceni, al clima, alla libidine
sfrenata delle partigianerie.
Nel 1038 Giorgio Maniace era stato invitato in Sicilia dall'Imperatore
greco per cacciarne i Saraceni. Egli si rivolse a Guaimaro perchè gli
concedesse una piccola schiera di Normanni che teneva al suo
servizio; Guaimaro gli mandò circa trecento uomini al comando di](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/916636-250616211347-392ffef4/85/Freedom-Of-Expression-Annotated-Edition-James-Magee-70-320.jpg)
Freedom Of Expression Annotated Edition James Magee
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- 7. Recent Titles in Major Issues in American History America and the World Jolyon P. Girard Immigration Issues Henry Bischoff Issues of War and Peace Nancy Gentile Ford Church-State Relations Francis Graham Lee Federalism Robert P. Sutton Issues of Westward Expansion Mitchel Roth
- 8. FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION James Magee Major Issues in American History Randall M. Miller, Series Editor GREENWOOD PRESS Westport, Connecticut • London
- 9. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Magee, James J. Freedom of expression / James Magee. p. cm.—(Major issues in American history, ISSN 1535-3192) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-313-3138^9 (alk. paper) 1. Freedom of speech—United States—History. I. Title. II. Series. KF4770.M34 2002 323.44'3'0973—dc21 2002021625 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2002 by James Magee All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2002021625 ISBN: 0-313-31384-9 ISSN: 1535-3192 First published in 2002 Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.greenwood.com Printed in the United States of America The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
- 10. ADVISORY BOARD Julia Kirk Blackwelder, Chair Department of History Texas A&M University Louisa B. Moffitt Marist School Atlanta, Georgia Marion Roydhouse Department of History Philadelphia College of Textiles and Sciences Carl Schulkin The Pembroke School Kansas City, Missouri Victor Taylor Sacred Heart Country Day School Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania
- 11. To the memory of my mother, Frances A. Magee, and to her great granddaughter, Lauren Elizabeth Magee
- 12. Contents Series Foreword by Randall M. Millix Preface xiii Chronology of Eventsvii 1. Historical Narrative 1 2. The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 19 3. The Abolitionist Movement 43 4. The Civil War 69 5. The Comstock Law 95 6. World War I and Its Aftermath 7. The Cold War and the "Red Menace" 8. The Civil Rights Movement 175 9. The Vietnam War 199 ix xvii 121 147
- 13. viii Contents 10. The Nazi March on Skokie 223 11. Political Correctness and Free Speech on Campus 245 12. The Internet 275 Selected Bibliograpy 311 Index 317
- 14. Series Foreword This series of books presents major issues in American history as they have developed since the Republic's inception to their present incarna- tion. The issues range across the spectrum of American experience and encompass political, economic, social, and cultural concerns. By focusing on the "major issues" in American history, the series emphasizes the importance of an issues-centered approach to teaching and thinking about America's past. Major Issues in American History thus reframes his- torical inquiry in terms of themes and problems rather than as mere chronology. In so doing, the series addresses the current, pressing need among educators and policymakers for case studies charting the devel- opment of major issues over time, so as to make it possible to approach such issues intelligently in our time. The series is premised on the belief that understanding America de- mands grasping the contentious nature of its past and applying that understanding to current issues in politics, law, government, society, and culture. If "America" was born, and remains, as an idea and an experi- ment, as so many thinkers and observers have argued, issues inevitably have shaped whatever that America was and is. In 1801, in his presi- dential inaugural, Thomas Jefferson reminded Americans that the great strength of the new nation resided in the broad consensus citizens shared as to the rightness and necessity of republican government and the Con- stitution. That consensus, Jefferson continued, made dissent possible and tolerable and, we might add, encouraged dissent and debate about crit- ical issues thereafter. Every generation of Americans has wrestled with
- 15. X Series Foreword such issues as defining and defending freedom(s), determining Amer- ica's place in the world, waging war and making peace, receiving and assimilating new peoples, balancing church and state, forming a "more perfect union," and pursuing "happiness." American identity(ies) and interest(s) are not fixed. A nation of many peoples on the move across space and up and down the socioeconomic ladder cannot have it so. A nation charged with ensuring that, in Lincoln's words, "government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth" cannot have it so. A nation whose heroes are not only soldiers and statesmen but also ex-slaves, women reformers, inventors, thinkers, and cowboys and Indians cannot have it so. Americans have never rested content locked into set molds in thinking and doing—not as long as dissent and difference are built into the character of a people that dates its birth to an American Revolution and annually celebrates that lineage. As such, Americans have been, and are, by heritage and habit an issues- oriented people. We are also a political people. Issues as varied as race relations, labor organizing, women's place in the work force, the practice of religious beliefs, immigration, westward movement, and environmental protec- tion have been, and remain, matters of public concern and debate and readily intrude into politics. A people committed to "rights" invariably argues for them, low voter turnout in recent elections notwithstanding. All the major issues in American history have involved political contro- versies as to their meaning and application. But the extent to which is- sues assume a political cast varies. As the public interest spread to virtually every aspect of life during the twentieth century—into boardrooms, ballparks, and evenbedrooms— the political compass enlarged with it. In time, every economic, social, and cultural issue of consequence in the United States has entered the public realm of debate and political engagement. Questions of rights— for example, to free speech, to freedom of religion, to equality before the law—and authority are political by nature. So, too, are questions about war and society, foreign policy, law and order, the delivery of public services, the control of the nation's borders, and access to and the uses of public land and resources. The books in Major Issues in American His tory take up just those issues. Thus, all the books in this series build political and public policy concerns into their basic framework. The format for the series speaks directly to the issues-oriented char- acter of the American people and the democratic polity and to the teach- ing of issues-centered history. The issues-centered approach to history views the past thematically. Such a history respects chronology but does not attempt to recite a single narrative or simple historical chronology of "facts." Rather, issues-centered history is problem-solving history. It organizes historical inquiry around a series of questions central to un-
- 16. Series Foreword XI derstanding the character and functions of American life, culture, ideas, politics, and institutions. Such questions invariably derive from current concerns that demand historical perspective. Whether determining the role of women and minorities and shaping public policy, or considering the "proper" relationship between church and state, or thinking about U.S. military obligations in the global context, to name several persistent issues, the teacher and student—indeed, responsible citizens every- where—must ask such questions as "How and why did the present cir- cumstance and interests come to be as they are?" and "What other choices as to policy and practice have there been?" so as to measure the dimensions and point the direction of the issue. History matters in that regard. Each book in the series focuses on a particular issue, with an eye to encouraging readers and users to consider how Americans at different times engaged the issue based on the particular values, interests, and political and social structures of the day. As such, each book is also necessarily events-based in that the key event that triggered public con- cern and debate about a major issue at a particular moment serves as the case study for the issue as it was understood and presented during that historical period. Each book offers a historical narrative overview of a major issue as it evolved; the narrative provides both the context for understanding the issue's place in the larger American experience and the touchstone for considering the ways Americans encountered and en- gaged the issue at different times. A timeline further establishes the chro- nology and place of the issue in American history. The core of each book is the series of ten to fifteen case studies of watershed events that defined the issue, arranged chronologically to make it possible to track the de- velopment of the issue closely over time. Each case study stands as a separate chapter. Each case study opens with a historical overview of the event and a discussion of the significant contemporary opposing views of the issue as occasioned by the event. A selection of four to nine critical primary documents (printed whole or in excerpts and introduced with brief headnotes) from the period under review presents differing points of view on the issue. In some volumes, each chapter also includes an annotated research guide of print and nonprint sources to guide fur- ther research and reflection on the event and the issue. Each volume in the series concludes with a general bibliography that provides ready reference to the key works on the subject at issue. Such an arrangement ensures that readers and users—students and teachers alike—will approach the major issues within a problem-solving framework. Indeed, the design of the series and each book in it demands that students and teachers understand that the crucial issues of American history have histories and that the significance of those issues might best be discovered and recovered by understanding how Americans at dif-
- 17. XII Series Foreword ferent times addressed them, shaped them, and bequeathed them to the next generation. Such a dialectic for each issue encourages a comparative perspective not only in seeing America's past but also, and perhaps even more so, in thinking about its present. Individually and collectively, the books in the Major Issues in American History series thereby demonstrate anew William Faulkner's dictum that the past is never past. Randall M. Miller Series Editor
- 18. Preface Freedom of expression is a "sacred right" of the American people, en- shrined in the Constitution, the highest law of the Republic. Justice Hugo L. Black of the U.S. Supreme Court insisted that the First Amendment was best served if only lawmakers and judges would follow its terms, written, he insisted, "in plain words, easily understood." The appeal of the language seems clear enough: "Congress shall make no l a w . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." Yet American history is filled with freedom of expression issues that plain words could never explain nor resolve. Very early in the life of the Republic, political lead- ers, many of whom, in fact, had helped to ratify the First Amendment, divided over the meaning of freedom of speech and press when the United States almost went to war against France in 1798. Its meaning was not entirely clear then, and it is not completely clear today. The realization of free expression in a free society often depends on a balance of competing social needs and interests. When tension and fear arise, free speech is endangered. During the 1830s, abolitionist literature was often suppressed as "incendiary" ex- pression designed to incite insurrection, and abolitionist presses were destroyed by angry mobs while local law enforcement looked the other way. The murder of antislavery advocate Elijah Lovejoy in 1837 defend- ing his press and the assassination of civil rights leaders more than a century later demonstrated the extent of violent opposition to what Jus- tice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., later called "the thought we hate." Freedom of expression also has facilitated triumphs for protesters seek-
- 19. XIV Preface ing political and social change. The unrelenting determination of zealous abolitionists eventually altered public opinion, at least outside the South, on the evil of slavery, although a bloody civil war was necessary to eliminate it from American life. In the 1950s and 1960s, symbolic protest by civil rights activists against unjust laws helped produce major legis- lation that finally gave meaning to constitutional rights neglected for nearly a century. Sometimes good intentions abridge free speech. Begin- ning in the late 1980s, American colleges and universities adopted codes of conduct to curb speech vilifying individuals or groups because of their race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or other attribute. Liberals who supported both free speech and respect for diversity divided over this issue. America's experience has shown that the strongest challenges to free speech rights have come in wartime—during the Civil War, during World War I, and even during the "Cold War." After the shocking and horrifying events of September 11, 2001, in New York City and Wash- ington, D.C., the United States government declared "war on terrorism." This challenging war, directed against both domestic and international but unfocused targets, will again test the allegiance of the nation, its leaders, and its courts to the constitutional principle of freedom of ex- pression. When a nation goes to war, mounting tensions and passions often make it difficult to distinguish legitimate dissent from disloyalty and even treason. In announcing America's resolve, President George W. Bush cautioned world audiences: "Either you are with us or you are against us." That message no doubt reverberated to draw domestic fault lines, too, pitting patriotism against legitimate dissent and, possibly, dis- loyalty. This process has already begun. The principal of Sissonville High School in Kanawha County, West Virginia, suspended a fifteen-year-old student for wearing T-shirts bearing anarchy symbols and messages op- posing the bombing of Afghanistan. Many students, parents, and other residents of the local community sided with the principal, but after the Associated Press distributed the story worldwide, the student, Katie Si- erra, became a cause celebre for proponents of free expression. Recounted in this book are eleven episodes in American history as seen through the lenses of freedom of expression. By looking closely at par- ticular instances when freedom of speech or press was challenged, it is possible to observe how First Amendment principles, sometimes battered but always resilient, grew in strength and breadth after each new storm. The book has been the work of many people. Professor Randall M. Miller of Saint Joseph's University was an indefatigable guide and source of new information every step of the way. His careful combing of several drafts and his helpful additions, suggestions, and general comments have made this a better book. Kevin Ohe, and his staff at Greenwood Press, particularly Betty C. Pessagno and Susan E. Badger, moved the
- 20. Preface xv book along with a combination of professionalism and flexibility. Many at the University of Delaware were supportive. Joseph A. Pika encour- aged this enterprise from the beginning and, as chairperson of my de- partment, helped in many ways to facilitate its timely completion. The Morris Library provided an invaluable research study where I could hide and work uninterruptedly. Mary McGlynn expertly typed some nearly illegible documents. Karen M. Krai of Information Technologies-User Services was indispensable and exceptionally patient in helping me for- mat the manuscript. Undergraduate students in my First Amendment courses helped to sharpen understanding of established free speech is- sues and to shed light on more obscure dimensions. Special thanks go to Katherine Lewis and Emily Russell. David J. M. Frederick mastered the art of locating documents and useful library and Internet sources, and he provided an incisive and bright mind to help me test ideas. My wife, Patricia, answered occasional questions of style and citation despite her busy schedule with her own book, teaching, and indispensable vol- unteer work for the Delaware Humane Association. I am grateful to all of them. However, I take full responsibility for any errors made in this book.
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- 22. Chronology of Events 1791 First Amendment is ratified. 1797 John Adams is inaugurated president of the United States. 1798 Congress enacts the Alien and Sedition Acts; James Mad- ison writes the Virginia Resolution. 1799 Thomas Jefferson pens the Kentucky Resolution. 1801 Sedition Act expires; Thomas Jefferson is inaugurated president of the United States. 1820 Missouri Compromise is enacted. 1821 Benjamin Lundy publishes the Genius of Universal Eman- cipation. 1831 William Lloyd Garrison publishes The Liberator; the Nat Turner slave rebellion in Virginia erupts. 1833 American Anti-Slavery Society is established. 1835 President Andrew Jackson delivers Message to Congress on the Post Office. 1836 Senator John C. Calhoun defends the Postal Bill; first Gag Rule of antislavery petitions appears in Congress.
- 23. xviii Chronology of Events 1837 Elijah Lovejoy is murdered in Alton, Illinois. 1844 Gag Rules are abolished in Congress. 1857 Supreme Court rules in Dred Scott v. Sandford. 1861 Abraham Lincoln is inaugurated president of the United States. 1861-1865 American Civil War is fought. 1862 Congress enacts the Treason Act. 1863 President Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation; Congress authorizes military draft and suspension of ha- beas corpus; Clement Vallandigham is arrested and tried by a military court. 1864 Lincoln administration shuts down the New York World and Journal of Commerce. 1865 President Lincoln is assassinated. 1866 Supreme Court rules in Ex parte Milligan. 1868 Fourteenth Amendment is ratified; Regina v. Hicklin es- tablishes legal definition of obscenity. 1870 Fifteenth Amendment is ratified. 1873 Comstock Act is enacted. 1878 There is a petition to Congress to repeal the Comstock Act. 1902 Free Speech League is founded. 1907 Supreme Court rules in Patterson v. Colorado. 1913 Woodrow Wilson is inaugurated president of the United States. 1915 Anthony Comstock dies; Supreme Court rules in Mutual Film Corporation v. Ohio Industrial Commission. 1917 Woodrow Wilson is inaugurated president of the United States for a second term; Committee on Public Informa- tion is created; Espionage Act passed; Senator Robert LaFollette delivers a speech in the Senate. 1917-1918 United States participates in World War I. 1918 Sedition Act is passed.
- 24. Chronology of Events xix 1919 Supreme Court rules in three cases—Debs v. United States, Schenck v. United States, and Abrams v. United States; first round of Palmer Raids takes place. 1920 Second round of Palmer Raids occurs; American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is founded. 1921 Sedition Act is repealed. 1925 Supreme Court rules in Gitlow v. New York. 1931 Supreme Court rules in Near v. Minnesota. 1934 Hollywood "Production Code" is established. 1938 Supreme Court rules in Lovell v. City of Griffin. 1939 Supreme Court rules in Schneider v. State (Town ofIrving- ton). 1940 Supreme Court rules in Cantwell v. Connecticut. 1941-1945 United States fights World War II. 1942 Supreme Court rules in Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire. 1943 Supreme Court rules in West Virginia State Board of Edu- cation v. Barnette. 1945 President Franklin D. Roosevelt dies; Harry S. Truman becomes president of the United States; House Un- American Activities Committee (HUAC) is permanently established. 1946 Congress passes the Atomic Energy Act. 1947 Loyalty Review Board is created by executive order; HUAC investigates Hollywood. 1950 Internal Security Act is passed. 1951 Supreme Court rules in Dennis v. United States. 1952 Supreme Court rules in Beauharnais v. Illinois. 1953 Dwight D. Eisenhower is inaugurated president of the United States. 1954 Communist Control Act is passed; Senator Joseph Mc- Carthy is censured by the Senate; Supreme Court rules in Brown v. Board of Education. 1955-1956 Bus boycott takes place in Montgomery, Alabama.
- 25. XX Chronology of Events 1956 Supreme Court rules in Gayle v. Browder. 1957 Southern Christian Leadership Conference is formed; Dwight D. Eisenhower is inaugurated president of the United States for second term; Supreme Court rules in Yates v. United States, Watkins v. United States, and Roth v. United States. 1958 Supreme Court rules in NAACP v. Alabama. 1959 Supreme Court rules in Barenblatt v. United States. 1960 "Sit-ins" and "freedom rides" begin; Student Non- Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) is formed. 1961 John F. Kennedy is inaugurated president of the United States. 1962 Fort Huron Statement ofthe Studentsfor a Democratic So is issued. 1963 Supreme Court rules in Edwards v. South Carolina; Mar Luther King, Jr., gives his "I Have a Dream" speech at Lincoln Memorial; President John F. Kennedy is assassi- nated; Lyndon Baines Johnson is sworn in as president of the United States. 1963-1964 Free Speech Movement begins on the University of Cal- ifornia at Berkeley. 1964 "Freedom Summer" takes place in Mississippi; Supreme Court rules in New York Times v. Sullivan; Civil Rights Act is passed; Tonkin Gulf Resolution is enacted; Lyndon Baines Johnson is elected president of the United States. 1965 First U.S. combat troops arrive in Vietnam; Voting Rights Act is passed; "Malcom X" is murdered. 1966 Supreme Court rules in Adderley v. Florida. 1967 Congress passes the Freedom of Information Act. 1968 Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy are as- sassinated; Supreme Court rules in United States v. O'Brien; President Johnson announces that he will no run for a second term. 1969 Richard M. Nixon is inaugurated president of the United States; Supreme Court rules in Tinker v. Des Moines Sch District; Supreme Court rules in Brandenburg v. Ohio; N tional Vietnam Moratorium takes place.
- 26. Chronology of Events XXI 1970 Report of the Presidential Commission on Campus Unre released. 1971 Supreme Court rules in Cohen v. California and Penta Papers Case. 1973 Miller v. California establishes modern legal definition o obscenity/pornography; Paris Peace Accords is signed. 1974 Congress amends and expands the Freedom of Infor- mation Act; President Richard Nixon resigns. 1976 Supreme Court rules in Greer v. Spock. 1977 American Nazis plan march on Skokie, Illinois; Supreme Court rules in National Socialist Party v. Skokie. 1978 Supreme Court declines to rule in Smith v. Collin and thus refuses to ban Skokie march. 1981 Ronald Reagan is inaugurated president of the United States. 1987 Ronald Reagan is inaugurated president of the United States for a second term. 1989 George H.W. Bush is inaugurated president of the United States; Supreme Court rules in Texas v. Johnson; Unive sity of Michigan hate speech code is invalidated. 1990 Stanford University hate speech code is implemented; Supreme Court rules in United States v. Eichman. 1992 Supreme Court rules in R.A.V. v. St. Paul. 1993 William J. Clinton is inaugurated president of the United States. 1995 Stanford University hate speech code is invalidated. 1996 Communications Decency Act (CDA) is passed; Child Pornography Prevention Act (CPPA) is passed. 1997 William J. Clinton is inaugurated president of the United States for a second term; Supreme Court rules in Reno v ACLU and invalidates CDA. 1998 Child Online Protection Act (COPA) is passed. 1999 Federal Court of Appeals invalidates CPPA. 2000 Federal Court of Appeals invalidates COPA; Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) is passed.
- 27. XXII Chronology of Events 2001 George W. Bush is inaugurated president of the United States; Supreme Court agrees to review constitutionality of COPA and CPPA; World Trade Center and Pentagon are attacked by international terrorists on September 11; Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Ap- propriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Ter- rorism (USA Patriot) Act is passed. United States launches war on international terrorism. 2002 Federal district court in Philadelphia rules on the consti- tutionality of CIPA; Supreme Court decides Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition.
- 28. 1 Historical Narrative Few nations have enjoyed the freedom of speech to which Americans are today accustomed, but speech in the United States has not always been as free or robust as it seems in the beginning of this new millen- nium. Ratified as part of the U.S. Constitution in 1791, the First Amend- ment proclaims that "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." The United States was the first mod- ern experiment with a free and open political regime where monarchs and emperors were forbidden to rule and in which freedom of speech was inscribed as fundamental law. The Founding Fathers who laimched this system in the late eighteenth century understood the connection be- tween free speech and representative government and the dangers at- tached to both. The First Amendment was written to restrict only the national government, not the states. Its framers recognized that free speech must have limits but also that mere inscription in the Constitution would not assure its protection, especially when political crises generate tension and fear. As a legal principle and as a fundamental feature of the American republic, freedom of speech has faced challenges but has adapted in accord with events in American history. It has weathered storms but has emerged after each more robust than before. Discovering and defining the boundaries of free speech began early. The rise of party politics, imanticipated and unwanted by the framers of the Constitution, in the 1790s tested stated First Amendment principles of freedom of speech and assembly. The new American government closed off free speech during a major public policy dispute by jailing and
- 29. 2 Freedom of Expression fining critics not too long after the ink had dried on the words of the First Amendment. The notorious Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 were passed during the administration of President John Adams when the United States engaged in an undeclared naval war against revolutionary France. The idea of a legitimate and loyal opposition had not yet devel- oped in America's new experiment in self-government, and therefore many in power equated criticism of government as disloyalty, especially in time of crisis or uncertainty. Proponents of the Alien and Sedition Acts harbored fears of subversion by revolutionaries from France and Ireland who were resident aliens in the United States. Emerging from the throes of one of the most bloody and convulsive revolutions in mod- ern history, France and the burgeoning Napoleonic wars threatened all of Europe. Adams and the Federalist Party sympathized with the British, enemies of France, and distrusted any opposition to their policies. Three of these four federal laws dealt with citizenship and deportation of aliens suspected of treason, though not much enforced. The fourth— the Sedition Act—took aim at domestic political opponents who made "false" criticisms of government or its leaders by threatening them with arrest and, if convicted, with fines reaching $2,000 and as much as two years in prison. The Federalist government prosecuted more than two dozen people, newspaper editors, private citizens, and at least one mem- ber of Congress—all of whom were supporters of Thomas Jefferson and his budding political party in opposition. In response to the Alien and Sedition Acts, James Madison, a disciple of Jefferson and "father of the Constitution," wrote the Virginia Reso- lution attacking the law's constitutionality, and fellow Virginian Jefferson furtively wrote a similar resolution under the auspices of the state of Kentucky. The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions asserted the power of individual states to "interpose" their view of the Constitution against questionable acts of the national government, thereby unilaterally "nul- lifying" an act of Congress. Today we resort to the judiciary, through judicial review, to interpret and enforce the Constitution, but in 1798- 1799, that practice was not yet established as one of the "checks and balances" on governmental power. Madison and Jefferson also knew that federal judges at the time were staunch Federalists appointed by Presi- dent George Washington or by President John Adams, and virtually all of them supported and enforced the sedition law. The Sedition Act cu- riously expired by its own terms on March 3, 1801, the last day of the presidential term of John Adams, but the episode generated important questions, not just about freedom of speech. Neither Virginia nor Ken- tucky attempted to "interpose" state authority to protect its citizens, but the doctrine of "interposition" claimed by Madison and Jefferson threat- ened the viability of the federal government by suggesting that state authority might disregard as unconstitutional any national law. The idea
- 30. Historical Narrative 3 lay fallow until the late 1820s when South Carolina, concerned about rising antislavery influence and high tariffs, invoked it to protect states' rights. In the 1790s it was unclear what freedom of speech actually meant in practice. The prevailing British view was expressed through England's towering voice on the law, Sir William Blackstone—namely, that free- dom of speech and press prohibited governmental "prior restraints" but that speakers or the press could subsequently be punished for what they had "freely" said or published. British law on "seditious libel" gave birth to American law with the important American addition that truth was a defense against libel. Many Americans naturally assumed that Black- stone's definition was infused in the First Amendment. If so, there was nothing unconstitutional about the Sedition Act, as it did not muzzle— though it certainly did punish—critics who made "false, scandalous" statements against the government with the intent of defaming it or bringing it into disrepute. After the political commotion had subsided and the Federalist Party had been soundly defeated in the elections of 1800, the right of the citizens of the Republic to criticize their government was no longer in doubt and became an irreducible component of free- dom of speech and press. This, at least, was a right of citizens vis-a-vis the federal government. State governments, not yet constrained by the First Amendment, were free to establish their own standards of free speech, and many well into the nineteenth century prohibited libelous speech, even speech critical of government. While no court ever formally declared the Sedition Act unconstitutional, history has judged the law invalid. When Jefferson assumed the office of president in 1801, he par- doned those convicted and repaid their fines. Freedom of speech issues continued in particular states where the pro- tection of the First Amendment did not reach but did not resurface in the national arena until the 1830s. Slavery was the cause of the new concern over First Amendment protections. It blighted the image of the Republic from its inception, but during the first three decades of the nineteenth century, slavery was not the heated and divisive political and moral issue that it soon became in the 1830s. Until 1831, opponents of slavery as an institution were generally unobtrusive and largely ineffec- tual, though they did achieve the gradual abolition of slavery in all the states above the Mason-Dixon Line by the early nineteenth century and with the exception of the state of Missouri had closed slavery off the vast territory above the 36° 30' line from the Mississippi River to the Pacific. Quakers and others morally or religiously troubled by slavery deployed what little power and persuasion they could summon to challenge the South's "peculiar institution." In the 1830s, however, firebrand abolition- ists demanding the immediate emancipation of the slaves burst onto the political stage and boldly pushed this divisive dispute to the front pages
- 31. 4 Freedom of Expression of the press and to the nation's capital. They assembled into abolition societies (modern-day interest groups)—locally, regionally, and nation- ally. They also published newspapers and pamphlets to attack slavery as immoral and sinful and blanketed the country with such works ap- pealing to slaveholders to give up the sin of slavery. Although frag- mented and disparate in organization, financing, and influence, the abolition movement grew into an irrepressible political contender and a formidable threat to the slave states, or so southerners came to believe. The antislavery mission was reinforced by the reigning intellectual cli- mate of the day—a blend of romanticism, idealism, and transcendental- ism promoting the view that human institutions should and could be reformed and even perfected. The immediate emancipation of slaves fol- lowed as a logical imperative. To the worried planter class of the South, termination of slavery meant an end to their way of life; indeed, slaveholders viewed any interference with slavery as tantamount to a spur to slave rebellion. The Denmark Vesey conspiracy in Charleston in 1822 and the bloody Nat Turner revolt in Virginia in 1831, among several incidents, confirmed such fears. South- ern states tolerated no opposition to slavery, at least within their own borders. By the mid-1830s slave states made publication of "inflamma- tory" or "incendiary" literature a capital crime if committed as a second offense (first convictions brought public whippings). The slaveholders fought abolition with state laws severely punishing speech critical of slavery, especially if it incited slaves to rebel (most slaves, of course, could not read). Political leaders and common citizens from the North— who found the abolitionists' preaching obnoxious and disruptive of both union and commerce with the South to the extent that such agitation might cause the emigration of freed slaves to the North—initially joined the proslavery forces to repress the abolitionist crusade. The southern and most northern delegations in Congress thwarted every effort to entreat the national government to debate a practice that abolitionists were certain was indefensible in a country committed to freedom and equality. The "second party system" that had stabilized politics was premised on keeping the divisive slavery issue out of poli- tics. Abolitionists cared little about party priorities and flooded the House of Representatives, and to a lesser extent the Senate, with "peti- tions" to restrict slavery. Between 1836 and 1844, both chambers either formally or informally adopted "Gag" rules to bar the subject of slavery from the political agenda, refusing even to having the petitions read and entered into the public record. At the behest of southern postmasters who complained of antislavery tracts flooding the mails, President An- drew Jackson urged Congress to cleanse the mails of "incendiary" lit- erature. Mailbags were the primary means of spreading the word, and this bill was designed to keep antislavery literature out of circulation. Its
- 32. Historical Narrative 5 principal manager in the Senate was John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, among the most forceful and uncompromising public officials repre- senting the South in the nation's capital. The bill failed, but southern postmasters interdicted antislavery literature on their own account with the blessing of the postmaster general. The formally imposed Gag Rules lasted and were abandoned only after bitter debates in the Congress. At the state and local level, the federal principle of free speech did not protect abolitionists from mob violence. Their literature, when sent in bulk to southern destinations, was usually burned or thrown away by angry locals. In northern towns and cities, for most of the 1830s, whites opposed, for various reasons, to freeing slaves unleashed in lawless ways their hostility on abolitionists. The most famous incident occurred in Al- ton, Illinois, when Elijah Lovejoy—a minister and newspaper editor— was murdered defending his press in November 1837. Local mobs in- flamed by his editorials denouncing slavery had several times destroyed his printing press when he was in St. Louis and finally drove him from Missouri. After he settled in the free state of Illinois, opponents harassed him and his family, wrecked his press, and on the night of November 7 killed him as Lovejoy stood with his supporters guarding from vandals his recently arrived and final printing press. This tragic event made news across the free states and generated sympathy for the abolition move- ment, which capitalized on the demonstrated danger to civil liberties "the slave power" posed to northerners. After Lovejoy's death, abolition and freedom of speech and press became practically synonymous. As the nation approached the Civil War, the abolition movement hard- ened, and so did the South's resistance. The "slave power" issue had serious repercussions for civil liberties. States in which it existed, or ter- ritories where it might have spread, severely restricted free speech. Vis- itors to slave states from free states lost the right to criticize slavery and could be severely punished for doing so. In the 1850s, especially after John Brown's raid and the panic that ensued, slave states clamped down even more. The newly emerging Republican Party capitalized on this, particularly in the 1856 presidential election with its slogan on behalf of their candidate, John C. Fremont: "Free soil, free labor, free speech, free men, and Fremont." The boundaries of free speech and the ability of the political system to mend deep fissures were both dearly tested, but the slavery issue was nonnegotiable in the minds of both sides, and the po- litical process, more suited to compromise and reconciliation, was ulti- mately unable to resolve the problem. Abolition triumphed and so did free speech, but only after the American nation nearly drowned itself in blood. The Civil War suspended the normal operations of the political system, including provisions of the Constitution. In the early months of his pres- idency, Abraham Lincoln governed by executive fiat, though once in
- 33. 6 Freedom of Expression session, Congress endorsed an array of executive decisions made to force the seceded southern states back to what Lincoln had always maintained was an indestructible Union. Freedom of speech and press was con- strained by the necessities of war. Given the circumstances of a nation divided in civil war, and compared to the hysteria induced by World War I, speech and press during the Civil War were not so severely re- pressed. Edicts against aiding and abetting the enemy by publications or otherwise were decreed, and they cautioned many to keep still and sent more courageous critics to military prisons. In the North, Democratic newspapers critical of Lincoln's war policies competed with the pro-Union press of the abolitionist and radical Re- publicans. New York newspapers were of special concern to Lincoln's administration because stories and editorials printed in New York were frequently reprinted in newspapers elsewhere. Northern Democrats and newspapers against the war were denounced as "Copperheads" and of- ten targets of mob violence. After the Union's first major defeat at Bull Run in July 1861, Democratic newspapers of the North hurling invectives at the Union army or the Lincoln administration suffered the frustration of angry, pro-Union local mobs or disgruntled soldiers stationed nearby. The Lincoln administration reacted to publications that appeared to aid or comfort the enemy by denying postal privileges, which could cripple or even destroy a newspaper's business. Other measures included mili- tary orders to shut down the press by force or arrest and court-martial of incendiary critics who disrupted or discouraged recruitment of sol- diers and the "normal" mobilization of resources for war. Still, no gen- eral muzzling of the opposition press or speech occurred. The Lincoln administration approached the issue of "unfree speech" in wartime on a case-by-case basis. More important, political opposition to the Repub- lican administration went on unabated. Elections were held regularly, and Republicans defeated at the polls accepted the legitimacy of Dem- ocratic victory. Lincoln only occasionally directed the military to take action against a supposedly "treasonous" publication. This happened in 1864 when two New York newspapers—the World and the Journal of Commerce—on May 18 unwittingly published a forged document dressed as a presidential plea for 400,000 more troops. Incensed, Lincoln issued direct orders to his general overseeing New York to arrest the perpetrators and close down the two offending papers. After it was clear that the editors had been duped, they were freed and the newspapers returned to publishing. More pervasive was the administration's practice of tolerating military generals in the field issuing orders substantially restricting the range of permissible expression. With very few exceptions, Lincoln countenanced them all. The most controversial episode was the 1863 arrest and court- martial of the outspoken "Copperhead" critic Clement L. Vallandigham,
- 34. Historical Narrative 7 who sought the Democratic Party's nomination for governor of Ohio. At a rally Vallandigham expressed disloyal opinions, in violation of General Ambrose E. Burnside's orders, and was arrested and tried in a military court for disloyalty. The Ohioan appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, which rejected his case for lack of jurisdiction. In a related case, Ex parte Milligan (1866), the Court later ruled that the executive and it military had violated the Bill of Rights by prosecuting a civilian in an area where the civil courts had been functioning, but the ruling came after the Civil War had ended. The Milligan case held that the Constitution speaks with "one voice in times of both war and peace and served to reprimand the military under Lincoln's administration for its disregard of constitutional rights. The ruling also cast constitutional doubt on the Reconstruction Acts that deployed the Union army to oversee the rebuilding of the defeated Con- federate states. Constitutional confrontations were studiously avoided, however, as a cautious Court found ways to deny itself jurisdiction in cases bringing such issues to its attention. The Civil War amendments, especially the Fourteenth, planted the seeds of new, national rights against the states, though the Court was initially reluctant to use them to protect civil liberties. Later, in the twentieth century, the Court breathed new life into these provisions and effectively "nationalized" the most important provisions of the Bill of Rights, such as freedom of speech, to restrict the states. Like their abolitionist predecessors, other social reformers looked for new ways to perfect and purify postbellum America, and they found suitable causes. Many would soon discover, however, that a powerful crusade was in the making, authorized by law and directed at them and their followers. These "libertarian radicals" opposed the oppressive so- cial conformity enforced by both government and organized religion. Many were intellectual women who saw their place in the social hier- archy as little better than that of recently freed slaves. They had fought to abolish slavery and promote equality only to be bitterly disappointed when the "freedom amendments"—the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fif- teenth—closing the Civil War and expanding definitions of civil rights, voting rights, and the equal protection of the laws, had nothing to say about the rights of women. Fueling the free speech debate up to and through the Civil War were issues of national political significance—such as the Sedition Act of 1798, slavery, and the war itself. From 1873 until World War I, another issue became an obsession of a single, unrestrained man, Anthony Comstock, who loathed obscene and immoral books and magazines, which he be- lieved polluted the urban centers of America and threatened the welfare of the nation's youth. Hundreds of thousands of abolitionists had been unable for almost a decade between 1836 and 1844 to persuade Congress
- 35. 8 Freedom of Expression even to discuss the slavery issue, yet Comstock managed almost by him- self and virtually overnight to energize Congress to enact legislation in 1873 assigning carte blanche authority to purge the mails of "lewd," "indecent," "immoral," or "obscene" materials, which the law left un- defined. The majority of post-Civil War Americans reacted to obscenity in ways similar to their counterparts in Victorian England. Natural hu- man sexual urges and temptations competed with the proper Victorian attitude and demeanor that obscenity was to be rooted out wherever found. The new federal legislation charged the Post Office with this re- sponsibility, but at the urging of his contacts in the Senate, Comstock was commissioned as a special agent entrusted with the task of enforcing the law that contemporaries equated with his name. At age twenty-nine Comstock was chairman of New York's Society for the Suppression of Vice, and from 1873 until his death in 1915, he wielded censorial power unmatched in American history, through this society and his command of the postal service. The Comstock Law af- fected "obscene" and "immoral" publications and also the advertisement or sale through the mail of any materials, devices, or instructions per- taining to contraception and abortion. His absolute enforcement of the contraception ban stifled the birth control movement in America. Med- ical professionals were convicted, fined, and jailed for counseling women on ways to prevent pregnancy, and those who wrote manuals for inex- perienced newlyweds were convicted of federal crimes (one committed suicide rather than serve the jail sentence she received). Literature with a sexual content was subject to the uncertainties of the law and Comstock's uncertain willingness to tolerate erotic publications. Obscenity was unprotected expression, and its legal definition, which stood until 1957, perfectly accommodated Comstock's mission. Known as the Hicklin test and imported in the 1860s from Victorian England, i judged a publication, pictorial, or painting as obscene if the work, even in part, had a depraving influence on the most susceptible members of society. Material fit for adults but not for immature children was thus legally obscene and unprotected. For more than four decades postal agents followed Comstock's instruc- tions to suppress birth control literature and to protect the nation's ar- tistic and literary culture from the harmful influences of indecent and obscene materials. In an interview near the end of his life, Comstock bragged that he had convicted enough people to load a train equipped with sixty passenger cars, each holding sixty seats, and had destroyed 170 tons of what he called the "monstrous evil." In fairness to his reign of censorship, he did not aim his law very often at genuine works of literature with sexual content, though his zeal sometimes overwhelmed his judgment, as when he tried to shut down a play by the Irish play- wright George Bernard Shaw, who coined the term "Comstockery" to
- 36. Historical Narrative 9 ridicule American prudishness. Opposition to Comstock brought about a well-orchestrated but ultimately unsuccessful petition, in 1878, in Con- gress to repeal the law. In 1902 the Free Speech League, one of whose prominent leaders was the prolific free speech attorney Theodore Schroe- der, was established to confront Comstock and to protect the rights of political dissenters as well. Comstock died in 1915, but challenges to the law continued. Margaret Sanger was the most important pioneer in the American birth control movement, and she repeatedly challenged the Comstock Law, particularly as it pertained to abortion and birth control. Her persistence ultimately triumphed, as courts began in the 1930s lib- erally to interpret the law to protect patients and to save women's lives. In 1971, following the Supreme Court's discovery of a right of "marital privacy" in the Bill of Rights, Congress removed the proscriptions on contraception from the Comstock Law. The entry of the United States into World War I led to the greatest repression of speech and dissent that the country had yet witnessed. America entered the war almost three years after it had begun in Europe in August 1914. Although aware that American participation in the war was almost inevitable, President Woodrow Wilson nonetheless success- fully campaigned in 1916 for a second term on the slogan "He kept us out of war." But Wilson could not do so, and shortly after his second inauguration, Congress declared war on Germany and, with a barrage of legislation, entrusted to Wilson virtually complete authority to pros- ecute the war, galvanize public support, and severely punish dissent. The Committee on Public Information (CPI), headed up by George Creel, was established to encourage the mass media, including the embryonic film industry, to comply with governmental guidelines. Artists, journal- ists, and professional propagandists directed media campaigns to mold and maintain public support. But by casting America's involvement in the war as a "holy crusade," the Wilson administration invited repres- sion of counterviews. Also, the United States as an immigrant nation was not of one mind regarding the war. Fearing divisions at home, the Creel Commission, as the CPI was known, painted the enemy as evil incarnate in its "Hate the Hun" campaigns. The clear message was that "you are with us or against us"—no middle ground. The Espionage Act of 1917 targeted genuine issues of espionage and deliberate disclosure of military secrets, both crimes of treason. That law was amended by Congress with the Sedition Act of 1918, which punished expression crit- ical of the government or its political symbols with fines up to $10,000 and as many as twenty years in federal prison. The Army, Navy, and Post Office and Justice Departments were all deployed to intercept or suppress dangerous messages or expressions. More than 2,000 people were convicted in federal courts under these two laws. One case involved the prominent Socialist Party leader Eugene
- 37. 10 Freedom of Expression V. Debs, who on June 18, 1918, in Canton, Ohio, delivered a stirring public address to an audience of more than 1,200 in which he criticized and denounced America's participation in the war as a capitalist contri- vance to enrich the arms industry. Convicted of obstructing the war ef- fort under the Espionage Act, Debs was sentenced to ten years in prison. His conviction made him a martyr in the cause of socialism. In four presidential elections he had been the Socialist Party's presidential can- didate (in 1900, 1904, 1908, and 1912—in the latter, he received more than 900,000 votes—almost 6 percent of all votes cast). The party ran his name for a fifth time in 1920, and from his prison cell he received more than 900,000 votes. Several defendants appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States, which, in landmark cases raising First Amendment issues, upheld every criminal conviction it reviewed by ruling that the First Amend- ment did not protect "dangerous" expression. Prior to 1919, the Supreme Court had never specifically addressed the limits or dimensions of the First Amendment's speech and press clauses. Now it addressed the issue in the hothouse of national emergency that no doubt impelled organized efforts to protect free speech, most prominently in 1920 with the for- mation of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The principal instruments used by the ACLU were "test cases" to challenge govern- mental action or to defend in court the constitutional rights of victims of governmental abuse. The judiciary's foray into the uncharted field of First Amendment law yielded very little that survived in calmer times. Judges and courts a generation later cited the dissenting opinions of the World War I cases a if they were the rules of law. Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Louis D. Brandeis, though initially willing to uphold convictions of po- litical dissenters, wrote some of the greatest defenses of free speech and its relationship to democratic government. Both Holmes and Brandeis insisted that the First Amendment protected dissenting political speech up to the point where such speech presented a "clear and present dan- ger" that the government had the authority to prevent. The Court offi- cially made at least one rule that triumphed as precedent for the future when it held in Gitlow v. New York (1925) that freedom of speech was fundamental enough to be applied against states through the mysterious avenue of the Fourteenth Amendment's "due process clause." This mon- umental rule paradoxically arose from a case in which the Court meekly sustained state power to punish a socialist publication. The ugly consequences of a concerned nation deliberately whipped up by propaganda produced an assault on dissidents well after the war had ended. During the war anti-German sentiments were expressed in edi- torials across the country, and German immigrants and German- language newspapers were victims of a growing distrust of foreigners
- 38. Historical Narrative 11 that, by the time war had ended, boiled over into xenophobia bordering on hysteria. The Communist Party had engineered the Russian Revolu- tion, and A. Mitchell Palmer, President Wilson's attorney general in 1919-1920, was so certain that Communists in America were plotting a similar and imminent insurrection in the United States that he ordered a series of raids to round up dangerous immigrants and to ship them off to Russia. Hundreds were deported during the "Red Scare" that gripped the nation. Palmer and the government had reasons to be sus- picious and alert; he was, in fact, a target of bombings in Washington, and there were dangerous radicals prone to violence. But in retrospect, it is clear that the government overreacted and severely damaged con- stitutional rights. When no great Communist uprising occurred in May 1921, as Palmer and the witchhunters had portended, the Red Scare abated. Good times were returning to America as the "Roaring Twenties" began. Still, at the state and local level nativism and suppression of free speech continued, sometimes violently through extralegal organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan. Meanwhile, the Congress dealt with the sup- posed problem of unassimilated foreigners and "radicals" from abroad by passing the National Origins Act of the 1920s that severely limited immigration from southern, central, and eastern Europe. Despite the catastrophic Great Depression and World War II, freedom of speech in the 1930s and especially in the 1940s enjoyed a renaissance supervised by the Supreme Court whose members by 1943 were all ap- pointees of Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt. This was the era of the "preferred position" doctrine, which held that in the inevitable collision between speech rights and other important societal interests, courts must balance interests, but in the scales of justice, speech rights occupied a preferred place. But, in 1949, two of the Court's reliable free speech liberals suddenly died and were replaced by more cautious con- servatives. This unexpected shift came in the early stages of the pro- tracted "Cold War." American leaders after World War II were convinced that the Soviet Union, with a far less robust economy and much more limited technology, rapidly acquired atomic weapons only because of Communist spies and traitors. Another "Red Scare" was un- der way, but very different from the post-World War I experience. The first aimed mostly at immigrants; the Cold War Red Scare targeted sus- pects in all walks of American life. The enemy without supposedly ad- vanced in the struggle for world domination because of enemies within the United States. Several sensational "spy trials," such as that of the Rosenbergs in the early 1950s, lent credence to the idea that Communists had infiltrated American society. Membership in the Communist Party was circumscribed by law and then flatly outlawed, and current, former, and suspected members suf- fered criminal and social reprisals that they and many others thought
- 39. 12 Freedom of Expression had vanished along with the first Red Scare. Communist Party leaders in the late 1940s and 1950s were imprisoned for advocating the violent overthrow of the government. Congressional committees investigated witnesses about their political associations and beliefs and those of their friends and fellow workers, actors, producers, artists, union organizers, teachers, and nearly anyone else. Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin claimed that the State Department and the military know- ingly harbored Communists in strategic positions in government. His colleagues in the Senate eventually censured him, but not before "Mc- Carthyism" raged for several years. Freedom of speech and association suffered heavy losses in the late 1940s through the end of the 1950s. The Supreme Court tended to side with governmental efforts to suppress Communist Party propaganda, as when in Dennis v. United States (1951) a majority of justices found little in the First Amendment to prevent the punishment of advocacy of the violent overthrow of government—a sta- ple of Communist dogma. Liberal justices, such as William O. Douglas and Hugo L. Black, registered strong dissenting opinions urging greater respect for the principles of the First Amendment. With very few excep- tions, such as Yates v. United States (1957) and Watkins v. United States (1957), political dissidents suspected of ties with the Communist Party throughout the 1950s received little judicial support, as the Court catered to the government's crusade against communism; and given the anti- Communist hysteria that gripped the nation during the Cold War, it is unlikely that even a judiciary fully stocked with champions of free speech could have prevented the assault on the free speech right of real or suspected dissidents that developed during this period. In the 1960s a more liberal Supreme Court replenished First Amendment law with doctrines and rules designed to protect, not weaken, the rights of polit- ical dissidents. Protecting suspected Communists was possible, however, because by the early 1960s the fervor of the anti-Communist crusade in American politics had largely dissipated. While the 1950s was a decade of judicial timidity and neglect on the free speech front, the Court was willing to confront and invalidate much official racial segregation in postwar America, a reality traceable in part to unfulfilled constitutional promises made after the Civil War. In 1954 in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case, the Court unanimously struck down the "separate but equal" doctrine that had undergirded state-mandated racial segregation in the South. But blacks did not wait on the Court to assert their constitutional rights. Seamstress Rosa Parks refused in December 1955 to surrender her seat reserved for whites on a Montgomery, Alabama, public bus. To some observers, this symbolic act of defiance began the civil rights movement that would fundamentally alter the status of blacks in American society. Courageous activists began a ten-year period of civil disobedience and
- 40. Historical Narrative 13 peaceful protest that challenged official segregation policies and private discrimination all over the South and that spread to attacks on discrim- ination in employment, education, and housing outside the South. Stu- dents conducted "sit-ins" at racially segregated lunch counters, libraries, and other "public" facilities. With little political power to effect the changes they sought, civil rights activists exercised the only power avail- able outside the courtroom: their right to petition and assemble to call attention to the wholesale failure of the Civil War amendments and the subsequent segregation and discrimination that signaled the vast racial inequality in the United States. National press attention was eventually ignited when white southerners retaliated with murders, beatings, the burning of busses, and other mob violence. State and local governments in the South also reacted with arrests and criminal convictions for vari- ous violations of law and clamped down on free speech and freedom of assembly. Civil rights protests raised new questions as to whether the First Amendment protected marching in the streets or near a state capital building, sit-ins, and even civil disobedience. Did the First Amendment protect libel—false publications defaming someone? A police commis- sioner in Alabama sued the New York Times for defamation of characte after the newspaper had run an advertisement in 1960 bearing some factual errors but critical of the city's handling of racial demonstrations in Montgomery. A local jury awarded the commissioner $500,000 in damages even though the ad made no mention of him. The Supreme Court had consistently held that the First Amendment did not protect libel at all, but when the New York Times appealed to the Court, all nin justices reversed the libel judgment in the watershed decision of New York Times v. Sullivan (1964). As activists on behalf of black Americans became more militant in the mid- to late 1960s, and after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which killed Jim Crow laws and promised to protect blacks, and others, in their civil and political rights, the movement began to lose the support of the American people who thought that the nation had done enough to secure liberty for all citizens. In 1968 disturbing domestic turmoil rocked America as the civil rights movement unraveled and mingled with growing protests over the es- calated war in Vietnam. National leaders Martin Luther King, Jr., and Senator Robert F. Kennedy were both assassinated in the spring of 1968. Race riots erupted in urban centers all over the country. The Democratic Party's divisive convention in Chicago in 1968 coincided with demon- strators and police clashing in bloody confrontations in the city's streets—broadcast on TV to the entire nation. The "breakdown in law and order," not the Vietnam War itself, became the major issue of the 1968 presidential election.
- 41. 14 Freedom of Expression The antiwar movement picked up where the civil rights movement had left off, raising a host of free speech issues arising from more pro- tests, demonstrations, and symbolic conduct such as wearing black arm- bands, burning draft cards, invoking images of the American flag, and publicly using the "F-word" to denounce the draft, and from efforts by the Nixon administration to enjoin the New York Times and Washingto Post from publishing what became known as the Pentagon Papers. On balance, the Supreme Court supported freedom of speech during this era, though the justices grew increasingly less likely to do so midway through the presidency of Republican Richard M. Nixon. He had cam- paigned in 1968 on a pledge to restore "law and order" and to stop the war, and in his first term alone he filled nearly half the Court's mem- bership with four new conservative justices, substantially affecting the ideological balance on the Court. He also brought the war to an end before he himself was forced to resign from office under a welter of evidence of illegal spying, sabotage, break-ins, conspiracy, lying, destruc- tion of justice, and other abuses of office. The deception and deceit in prosecuting the Vietnam War, during the presidencies of both Lyndon Baines Johnson and Nixon, combined with the Nixon administration's secrecy and illegalities that culminated in the Watergate scandal, substantially weakened public confidence in Ameri- can government. To many Americans, the affairs of state had been re- duced to deceit and deception, as David Wise recounted in his aptly titled book The Politics of Lying (1973). The free speech legacy of th Vietnam War was mixed. In 1967, in accord with complaints about the public's "right to know," Congress had passed the Freedom of Infor- mation Act requiring governmental agencies to disclose unclassified pub- lic documents. In 1974 Congress, by amendment, expanded the reach of this law. The Nixon administration's paranoia, manifest, for example, in the famous "enemies list," about opponents and an unfriendly press, ironically helped launch a new genre of investigative reporting, as seen in Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's bestseller All the President's Me, reporting that helped bring down the Nixon presidency. However, the more conservative Court that emerged after Nixon's four appointments was less willing to support press claims such as a reporter's privilege to withhold, even from a grand jury, confidential notes gathered to produce news stories. The Gitlow case (1925), in which the Court upheld Benjamin Gitlow' conviction for publishing the Left Wing Manifesto, left one lasting doctri nal legacy: that states are bound by federal free speech standards. Many cases that came to the Court involved state restrictions of speech rights, and several years after the Vietnam War had ended, the limits of free speech were tested again by expression so offensive that even liberals divided on whether it was worthy of constitutional protection.
- 42. Historical Narrative 15 In 1977, the National Socialist Party of America, a neo-Nazi hate group, planned to march on Adolf Hitler's birthday (April 20), in full Nazi uniform and regalia, in the village of Skokie, Illinois, a place tar- geted specifically because it was home to thousands of Jews who had survived the Holocaust. The purpose of the march was to incite a hostile reaction and garner media attention. After city officials had unsuccess- fully sought a court order to stop the march, they enacted three regu- lations to prevent the Nazis from hurling hateful messages at the residents of Skokie. Frank Collin, the organizer of the march, recruited the country's premier defender of individual rights, the ACLU, whose lawyers convinced federal courts that the Skokie ordinances violated the First Amendment. The ACLU suffered tens of thousands of protest res- ignations nationwide, as debate over free speech raged in newspapers, magazines, and journals, at cocktail parties, and in classrooms across the country. Some proponents of free speech insist that government cannot be trusted to define permissible expression, a view reinforced by judicial doctrine requiring governmental regulations affecting free expression to be "content neutral." Thus, if civil rights and antiwar demonstrators de- serve constitutional protection, so do Nazis despite what many regard as their obnoxious, offensive, or hateful beliefs. This principle produced two judicial First Amendment decisions, Texas v. Johnson (1989) an United States v. Eichman (1990), denying state and federal government the authority to punish flag burning as offensive behavior. Yet courts have always held that pornography, however difficult to define, is "un- protected speech" because it is patently offensive and unworthy of con- stitutional protection. Could one say the same about the Nazis' message to Skokie's residents? Other exceptions are "fighting words," words or epithets that might provoke a fight or words that insult and degrade. The Nazis selected Skokie to insult and abuse Jewish residents by using what many call "hate speech." Some theorists assert that free speech is indispensable to individ- ual self-fulfillment and autonomy, that a person has a right of self- expression, whether through feminist, racist, artistic, or even incompre- hensible ideas—however distasteful or inappropriate to someone else, and even in a place like Skokie. Someone may possess an "autonomous" right to express homophobic ideas, but on the same theory gays have the right autonomously to develop their personalities and to expect gov- ernment to protect them from homophobic assaults. The collision of "au- tonomy" interests is almost endless. Is verbal flirtation in the workplace freedom of speech or sexual harassment? When states set up "buffer zones" to protect women seeking abortions and doctors who provide them from antiabortion picketers, are the latter's rights of free speech abridged?
- 43. 16 Freedom of Expression Academics and others have heatedly debated the limits of speech re- duced to hate directed at victims of discrimination. In the 1980s and 1990s that debate intensified at colleges and universities, hundreds of which implemented "hate speech" codes forbidding particular kinds of speech, even the use of particular words, that might be harmful to spe- cially identified groups. Liberals remain divided in their support for these measures because two fundamental principles of contemporary lib- eralism have collided. Freedom to believe and say what one thinks con- flicts with the expectation that people should be treated equally and fairly and that none should be demeaned, even by words, because of one's race, ethnic background, religion, sex, sexual orientation, weight, height, and so forth. This tension has turned liberals against each other. Those who emphasize freedom to speak oppose these codes; others who emphasize the dignity of all groups endorse them. Conservatives criti- cized speech codes as "political correctness," a form of brainwashing or regimentation by liberals who, during the Republican era of Ronald Rea- gan and George Bush, had lost their influence in Washington. When challenged in court, these codes were almost everywhere invalidated, but the debate continues today. Technology continually refashions the meaning of free speech because it affects the quantity, quality, and speed of communication, as well as the nature and size of the audience. The appearance of the printing press in the fifteenth century was a momentous event in history, prior to which ideas spread via the limited means of human voices or painstakingly produced handwritten documents. As print media expanded, so did lit- eracy rates. When motion pictures came along, courts at first refused to treat them as free expression. Radio and television revolutionized the capacity to reach a wider general public. Instantaneous digital, satellite, and laser transmission of information today assures that virtually noth- ing escapes the attention of the media. And the audience has become global. On September 11, 2001, a world community of eyewitnesses watched in disbelief as the twin skyscrapers of New York's World Trade Center collapsed into millions of tons of smoldering steel and molten debris that entombed thousands of American and international victims of horrifying terrorist attacks. The information revolution spawned the Internet and its most familiar component, the World Wide Web, that accelerated globalization and built the framework of a new "e-commerce." All technological advances in history that have magnified expression have brought both good and evil. The Internet augmented and empowered the voice of the average citizen, but it also created venues for peddlers of sexually explicit images and hate speech, and it provides a means of instantaneous and anony- mous exchange of information among international terrorists. Estab- lished law was not suited to manage the contents or structures of
- 44. Historical Narrative 17 "cyberspace," and novel and awkward challenges confronted existing regulations that raced to keep pace with the faster changes of a new medium. In the final years of the twentieth century, government fought the same goblins and dragons of obscenity that Comstock, a century before, had suppressed but failed to conquer. Congress enacted laws almost annually, mostly on behalf of children and conservatives groups, to remove offensive sexual images and messages from the Internet. Just as quickly, however, these laws were challenged in court, and judges undid much of Congress's work, invoking the same but more seasoned principle that had inspired free speech advocates in the earliest days of the Republic to chastise government for passing the Sedition Act. On October 25, 2001, President George W. Bush signed into law the "USA Patriot Act," one provision of which permits federal and state government to "wiretap" the Internet through a software program called Carnivore, including tracking down anonymous users with fake identi- ties. This raises issues covered by the Fourth Amendment's protection against "unreasonable" searches and seizures, as no judicial warrant is needed by government to undertake this kind of surveillance. The law also implicates free speech because a loss of privacy might prompt In- ternet users to curb their online speech and because freedom of associ- ation can be invaded. This brief historical narrative has shown at least that the simple words of the First Amendment cannot explain the uneven progress of freedom of expression in the political development of the United States. Events and political movements have influenced the contours of free speech far more than the language of the Constitution or any doctrines announced by the Supreme Court. Technology, fear (for example, during World War I and the Cold War), public tolerance and acceptance, education, lead- ership, and the underlying political culture of the American nation: These have had more to do with how free speech fares in periods of disturbance, tension, or crisis than the sweeping terms of the First Amendment. As the United States wages what will be a long, if not indefinite, war against international terrorism, the nation's commitment to freedom of expression, especially the right to dissent, Thomas Jeffer- son's monument to the strength of the Republic, will be continually tested.
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- 46. 2 The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 Less than a decade as a new constitutional republic, the United States faced off against France, ostensibly an American ally, in a diplomatic crisis that included the real possibility of war. The French Revolution of 1789 and its tumultuous repercussions destroyed the "old regime" of monarchy and privileged aristocracy (King Louis XVI and his queen, Marie Antoinette, were beheaded) and displayed to the world one of the most violent revolutions in modern history. For most of the 1790s, France was in a state of revolutionary turmoil and instability and embarked upon a crusade to destroy monarchies in, and thus conquer, other parts of Europe. Soon war raged across Europe and on the oceans and threat- ened to spread to America. Desperate to avoid entanglements, the United States negotiated the Jay Treaty with Great Britain in 1794, which settled most outstanding differences between them but also made the French believe that the United States had betrayed its own revolution and aligned with the British in the "world war." Tension increased when in the summer of 1797 some 300 American ships were captured in the West Indies by privateers supported by the French revolutionary regime. Though no formal declaration of war took place, a "quasi war" was under way during which the U.S. Navy captured more than eighty French ships. At the close of the eighteenth century, President John Ad- ams and the Federalist Party controlled the government of the United States. Vice-President Thomas Jefferson, who together with his growing number of followers formed an alternative Jeffersonian party, led the political opposition.
- 47. 20 Freedom of Expression Unlike the modern presidency in which the president and vice- president work as a team (or at least are elected together on the same political ticket), in the early years of the Republic the president and vice- president could be—and were, in the case of Adams and Jefferson— political rivals. Under the constitutionally established electoral process at that time, the president was the candidate receiving a majority of electoral votes in the Electoral College; the vice-president was the runner-up. In the presidential election of 1796, Adams obtained a ma- jority of electoral votes, and Jefferson came in second. The Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution, the development of a mature, compet- itive political party system, and custom have changed all this into the system we have today. The original process, which the Founding Fathers had designed without anticipating the rise of political parties, created strange political rivalries such as that between Jefferson and Adams and their respective burgeoning political parties: the Jeffersonian Republicans and the Federalists. The diplomatic crisis with France moved Federalists to pass a series of repressive laws in the early summer of 1798, known collectively as the "Alien and Sedition Acts." Three of these laws (the Alien Acts) dealt with issues pertaining to citizenship and the status and fate of aliens. The first (the Naturalization Act, passed on June 18, 1798) made aliens seeking citizenship reside for fourteen, instead of five, years before be- coming eligible. The Federalists clearly feared the growing immigrant population, including as many as 25,000 French resident aliens, who tended to side with Jefferson and his Republican critics of the Federalists. (In 1802, this law was repealed and the shorter residency requirement was reinstated.) The two controversial Alien Acts followed within the next two weeks. One authorized the president to deport aliens whom he (or his administrative assistants) deemed to be "dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States" during peacetime or who were suspected of "treasonable or secret machinations against the government." This law had a limited period of operation (by its own terms, it expired in June of 1800). The other, the Alien Enemies Act, which still exists as part of the modern president's emergency war powers, authorized during war- time the arrest, imprisonment, and deportation of any alien subject to an enemy power. If war with France had, in fact, occurred, French aliens residing in the United States would have been subject to arrest, impris- onment, or expulsion from the country. War, however, never officially was declared, and President Adams never invoked the Alien Act of June 25 to apprehend and deport any resident aliens. Nonetheless, laws like the Alien Acts, even though not applied directly to any individuals, threatened resident aliens; many fled in fear from the United States or simply hid from authorities. The fourth piece of legislation caused the most uproar and outrage,
- 48. The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 21 because it appeared, in the minds of many, to be politically motivated and a direct violation of the First Amendment. Federalists suspected Re- publicans of being irresponsible radicals bent on bringing to America the excesses of the French Revolution. Jeffersonian Republicans were enthu- siastic opponents of monarchy and aristocracy, which the French revo- lutionaries were determined to eradicate in Europe. Republicans, too, were suspicious of their Federalist opponents, whom they regarded as reactionaries eager to cultivate an aristocracy of privilege in the United States. Jefferson and James Madison were convinced that the Federalist majority in Congress was exploiting tensions with France to justify sup- pressing domestic opposition. They were not wholly wrong. Several Fed- eralists suspected that many of Jefferson's followers, and even Jefferson himself, were agents of the French government, and they sought ways to silence what they considered enemies of good government and the new Constitution. The Sedition Act ironically passed the Senate on the Fourth of July and was signed into national law on July 14 (Bastille Day—a major holiday when the French celebrate their Revolution). The law made it a crime to publish "any false, scandalous and malicious" writing against the government of the United States or any speech or writing intended to defame the government, to bring it into disrepute, or to arouse suspicions in the people that the government was acting unconstitutionally. Violations carried penalties of fines and/or impris- onment. More than two dozen men were charged and convicted under this law, and almost all of them were editors of newspapers supporting Jefferson and his Republican followers. They were arrested and prosecuted, and their newspapers were forced to close. One victim was a member of Congress (Matthew Lyon of Vermont), and another was Benjamin Frank- lin Bache, grandson of Benjamin Franklin, who edited the pro-Jefferson newspaper Aurora, published in Philadelphia (at that time the capital of the United States). Bache was actually arrested for seditious criticism even before the Sedition Act was passed (among several canards tosse at the Federalists, Bache described Adams as "blind, bald, toothless, and querulous," which was libelous in that Adams was not blind). Federal authorities apprehending Bache invoked the common law. The "common law" consisted of traditional case law, inherited largely from Britain, made by judges, and practiced exclusively in the states. Fuming at what they regarded as a brazen invasion of individual free- dom to criticize government, Jefferson and his followers publicly ques- tioned the constitutionality of the Alien and Sedition laws. The dividing line between Jeffersonian Republicans and the Federalists sharpened and hardened, and tempers flared. Jefferson and Madison privately drafted the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions protesting the Alien and Sedition Acts on the grounds that they violated First Amendment rights and sug-
- 49. 22 Freedom of Expression gested, but did not press for, that states might interdict such unconsti- tutional acts to protect their citizens. These "Resolves" generated a genuine national debate, not only in the Congress but among the citizenry. Public anger over the repressive Se- dition Act eventually grew to the extent that the fateful laws enacted to silence political opposition paradoxically contributed to the defeat of Ad- ams and his Federalists in the election of 1800. Adams hardly helped the Federalist cause when he found a way to settle the quasi war with France and showed that Federalist fears of imminent French invasion had been trumped up to justify a large increase in military and naval spending and vigorous prosecution of the Sedition Act. Once in office, President Jefferson pardoned those convicted under the Sedition Act who were still in prison, and the new Congress repaid all fines with interest. Congress- man Lyon won reelection to the House of Representatives from his prison cell. By its own terms, the Sedition law expired on March 3, 1801—the last day of Adams's term of office. The expiration date rein- forced suspicions that the Federalists had created the Sedition law just to silence their Republican opponents; if the Federalists lost the election in 1800, there would be no Sedition law to silence their criticism of their triumphant Republican opponents. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution proclaims in sweeping terms that "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." Thomas Jefferson was certain that the Sedition Act was "palpably in the teeth of the constitution," proving that the Federalists "mean to pay no respect to it."1 The amendment seems to guarantee in absolute terms that the people's right to speak would be unrestricted in the new constitutional regime launched in 1787. Yet the absolutist language of the "no law" portion of the amendment offers no clue as to the meaning of "the freedom of speech, or of the press" (as well as the other freedoms contained in the First Amendment, such as freedom of religion). These terms are not defined anywhere in the amendment, and for practical reasons the judiciary has never interpreted the amendment as supporting absolute rights—for example, no one would contend that perjury (lying under oath) is freedom of speech. Some critics of absolutism suggest that the absolutist language was em- ployed not for any libertarian purposes but only to establish rigorous boundaries around national authority. Since the amendment's terms are directed at Congress, the argument claims that this constitutional prin- ciple was structured solely to establish jurisdictional limits to the new national government—that the First Amendment had actually little to do with "liberty," as such, but principally with curtailing the reach of fed- eral power. In other words, in circumscribing the national lawmaking power, the First Amendment left the field of speech and press entirely
- 50. The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 23 to the various states to regulate. There is substantial evidence that Jef- ferson subscribed to this view. In hindsight, it might seem strange that the generation of political leaders who inscribed freedom of speech and press in the Constitution would very soon create a national law to jail political opponents who criticized government and its public officials. Neither the concept nor the reality of a loyal political opposition had yet taken root in the young republic. Political parties were only just beginning to develop, and there was little practical experience with the notion that there could be a po- litical opposition both loyal and yet expected to criticize those in power. The Federalists were the first leaders of the new republic, and as the first and only "party" in power since 1789, they did not accept the novel concept of a legitimate opposition. The opposing Jeffersonians hardly made it easy for the Federalists to see them as a loyal opposition. Aside from their sympathies and intrigues with a foreign power, the Jefferso- nians formed Democratic-Republican Societies, supported the Whiskey Rebellion, and resorted to a strident press to attack the Adams admin- istration. Perhaps political passions in 1798 were so inflamed by reports from France of the excesses of revolutionaries as to overtake the sound constitutional judgment of Federalist leaders. In defense of the Federalists, one can argue that the Sedition Act did not contravene the First Amendment if the original meaning of "freedom of speech" was identical to its legal meaning in Britain before the Amer- ican Revolution. The American legal system was a direct descendant of the "common-law" legal system of Britain, the mother country. The great eighteenth-century English legal writer Sir William Blackstone had con- cluded in his massive Commentaries on the Laws of England (1771) that freedom of speech and press meant only a right to speak or publish something at least once without being censored but that the speakers or publishers must suffer the consequences of their actions. If they abuse their right to speak, they can be punished. This meaning of freedom of speech and press was simply understood as a prohibition against "prior restraint." Blackstone's Commentaries were considered standard reading for aspiring lawyers, and therefore if Blackstone's view of free speech had been transferred to the First Amendment, it would have meant that the amendment prohibited only "prior restraints" on publication. If what speakers or publishers had to say were punishable by law, freedom of speech was not violated as long as they had a chance to air their views. The Sedition Act, therefore, did not violate this narrow version of free- dom of speech. One of America's most prominent constitutional historians, Leonard Levy concluded in a major study, The Legacy of Suppression (1960), tha while it is difficult to pinpoint the exact "original meaning" of freedom of speech or press, there is abundant evidence to support the very nar-
- 51. 24 Freedom of Expression row Blackstone conception of free speech. Moreover, seditious libel (ma- licious or false criticism of government or governmental officials—the kind of speech prohibited by the Sedition Act) was a common-law crime, a legacy also of the British legal system into which the American legal system was born. In fact, the common law inherited by the American states from British rule did not allow truth as a defense in a prosecution for seditious libel (that is, criticism of government or its officials). And no explicit effort was ever made (either in the Constitutional Convention of 1787 or in the Bill of Rights) to modify or delete the common law of seditious libel. At least the Sedition Act of 1798 allowed defendants to demonstrate that their criticism was truthful. Therefore, a case can be made that the Sedition Act of 1798 was at least consistent with the British tradition of freedom of expression, and presumably the First Amend- ment, even if that law had been politically motivated by Federalists to silence Jefferson and the opposition. Moreover, the Sedition Act punished only false statements leaving "truth" as a defense, unlike the British common-law crime of seditious libel. Truth was established as a legal defense in the American colonies in 1735, when a jury in New York acquitted John Peter Zenger who published a local newspaper in which he "scandalized" the governor and his administration. Zenger's lawyer, Andrew G. Hamilton of Philadel- phia, insisted, over initial objections by the judge, that seditious libel did not exist if the published statements were true. The judge ultimately allowed the jury to decide if Zenger's published statements produced an "ill opinion" of the government. The jury acquitted Zenger, and the case set a general precedent that truth was a defense in a common-law pros- ecution for seditious libel. The era of the Alien and Sedition Acts produced some positive results for the development of freedom of speech and "government by the peo- ple." The machinations of the Federalists (and the vigorous efforts of the Federalist-appointed judiciary) to fine and jail political opponents were short-lived; their party suffered a humiliating electoral defeat in both houses of Congress in the election of 1800. Jefferson won the presidency but only after some thirty-five ballots in the House of Representatives (dominated by outgoing Federalists who tried to block his election). Ad- ams had received sixty-five electoral votes, Jefferson received seventy- three, and Aaron Burr (whom Republican electors in the Electoral College expected would become vice-president) also received seventy- three. Since no candidate had a clear majority of electoral votes, the Con- stitution requires the House of Representatives to determine the winner—with each state having one vote. After attempting to block Jefferson for thirty-five ballots, Alexander Hamilton (who knew Adams had no chance) persuaded some Federalists that Burr would be worse than Jefferson, and thus the latter won the presidency with a substantial
- 52. The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 25 margin (ten to four) in the House of Representatives (with each state delegation casting one vote). Free speech was strengthened and so was democracy. Indeed, these two traditions were now permanently sewn together and the lesson learned was that free speech is essential to self-government. While se- ditious libel continued in the states, the "reign of witches," as Jefferson described this era of national suppression, faded away eventually, and so too did the Federalist Party. Before leaving office the Federalists man- aged to create scores of new judicial posts that Adams filled with good Federalists. The emerging judiciary of unelected and life-appointed Fed- eralists would become one of Jefferson's nemeses. In fact, the new Con- gress controlled by Jeffersonians impeached (though did not convict) a sitting Supreme Court justice (Samuel Chase) who had vigorously en- forced the Sedition Act against Jefferson's followers. The regime of the new Republic survived and was strengthened by the painful lesson in self-government. In his first inaugural address, President Thomas Jefferson alluded several times to the centrality of free speech in an aspiring democracy. He said: "We are all republicans—we are all federalists. If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its re- publican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it."2 The idea of a loyal opposition was realized. The peaceful transfer of political authority from one political party to its opponent, from the Adams administration to the Jefferson adminis- tration, in 1801 was a sign that democratic government was in the mak- ing. NOTES 1. Letter to James Madison, June 7, 1798, in James Morton Smith, ed., The Republic of Letters: The Correspondence between Jefferson and Madison (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995), 2: 1056^1057. 2. Paul Leicester Ford, ed., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1897), 8:3.
- 53. 26 Freedom of Expression DOCUMENTS 2.1. The Sedition Act of 1798 This was the first and only time in the eighteenth or nineteenth century that Congress made it a crime to criticize government. "Truth" was a defense, but the accuracy of "opinions" is very difficult to document. This fear often leads to self-censorship, which in turn weakens democratic self-government, though their strident publications attacking the Adams administrations por- tray the Jeffersonians as unusually bold and courageous critics. Significantly, too, in revealing its partisan purpose, Thomas Jef- ferson, the vice-president, was the only governmental officer not protected from seditious libel in the act. The 1798 law was writ- ten deliberately to expire on the last day of the presidency of John Adams, and ironically, it was signed into law on what is today Independence Day in France. What follows is the section making seditious libel a federal crime. An Act in addition to the act, entitled "An act for the punishment of certain crimes against the United States." ... SEC. 2. And be it further enacted, That if any person shall write, print, utter or publish, or shall cause or procure to be written, printed, uttered or published, or shall knowingly and willingly assist or aid in writing, printing, uttering or publishing any false, scandalous and malicious writ- ing or writings against the government of the United States, or either house of the Congress of the United States, or the President of the United States, with intent to defame the said government, or either house of the said Congress, or the said President, or to bring them, or either of them, into contempt or disrepute; or to excite against them, or either or any of them, the hatred of the good people of the United States, or to excite any unlawful combinations therein, for opposing or resisting any law of the United States, or any act of the President of the United States, done in pursuance of any such law, or of the powers in him vested by the con- stitution of the United States, or to resist, oppose, or defeat any such law or act, or to aid, encourage or abet any hostile designs of any foreign nation against the United States, their people or government, then such person, being thereof convicted before any court of the United States
- 54. The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 27 having jurisdiction thereof, shall be punished by a fine not exceeding two thousand dollars, and by imprisonment not exceeding two years. SEC. 3. And be it further enacted, and declared, That if any person shall be prosecuted under this act, for the writing or publishing any libel aforesaid, it shall be lawful for the defendant, upon the trial of the cause, to give in evidence in his defence, the truth of the matter contained in the publication charged as a libel. And the jury who shall try the cause, shall have a right to determine the law and the fact, under the direction of the court, as in other cases. SEC. 4. And be it further enacted, That this act shall continue and be in force until the third day of March, one thousand eight hundred and one, and no longer: Provided. That the expiration of the act shall not prevent or defeat a prosecution and punishment of any offence against the law, during the time it shall be in force. Source: Statutes at Large 1 (1798): 596-597. 2.2. The "Virginia Resolution" Both Jefferson and Madison agreed that Congress had no pow to enact either the Sedition Act or the Alien Acts, because suc power was, in their view, not delegated to the national govern ment and contrary to the First Amendment. Madison wrote the Virginia Resolution in December 1798 expressing the sentimen of the Virginia state legislature in a document to be submitted to Congress. The resolution held that sovereign states could " terpose" their legal judgment on the constitutionality of federal laws. RESOLVED,... That this Assembly doth explicitly and peremptorily declare, that it views the powers of the federal government, as resulting from the com- pact, to which the states are parties; as limited by the plain sense and intention of the instrument constituting the compact; as no further valid that they are authorized by the grants enumerated in that compact; and that in case of a deliberate, palpable, and dangerous exercise of other powers, not granted by the said compact, the states who are parties thereto, have the right, and are in duty bound, to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil, and for maintaining within their respective lim- its, the authorities, rights and liberties appertaining to them. That the General Assembly doth also express its deep regret, that a spirit has in sundry instances, been manifested by the federal govern-
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- 56. PALERMO (1855)
- 57. Palermo. (1855). I. La Sicilia fu il primo paese europeo ove sbarcarono i Saraceni dopo che la signoria araba ebbe allargati i suoi confini sui lidi settentrionali dell'Africa. Le loro prime scorrerie nell'isola risalgono al VII secolo: provenivano dall'Asia, in seguito dall'Africa, da Candia, dalla Spagna, come corsari, senza un fine prestabilito. Solo nell'827 iniziarono un piano regolare di conquista. Michele Amari, nella sua Storia dei Mussulmani in Sicilia, ricostruì dalle fonti originali, con fedeltà storica, le vicende dell'invasione araba. Egli si servì per ciò delle cronache di Giovanni Diacono di Napoli, dell'830, e delle cronache dettate dall'Anonimo Salernitano, della fine del x secolo; nonchè, presso i Bizantini, delle cronache di Costantino Porfirogenito e del suo continuatore, e presso gli Arabi, delle storie di Ibn-el-Athir Nowairi e di Ibn-Kaldum. Una rivoluzione militare era scoppiata in Sicilia, che mal sopportava il giogo bizantino; il duca Eufemio decise allora di strappare l'isola all'odiosa dominazione di Costantinopoli; ma le truppe non erano siciliane e ben presto passarono al partito bizantino, costringendo i ribelli a cercare scampo in Africa ed a gettarsi fra le braccia degli Aglabiti. Per odio e per desiderio di personale vendetta, Eufemio
- 58. divenne allora traditore della sua fede e della sua patria: fece in Kairewan la proposta a Ziadeth-Allah d'inviare nell'isola un esercito, perchè, con l'aiuto dei Siciliani insorti, la conquistasse. Nel suo atto Eufemio sperava anche di conseguire un sogno ambizioso: quello di divenire imperatore. Le opinioni in Kairewan erano discordi: gli uni protendevano per l'impresa, gli altri la ritenevano troppo arrischiata: Ased-ben-Forad, il cadì settuagenario della città, stimato da tutti per la sua sapienza, riuscì a persuadere i recalcitranti ed egli stesso volle assumere il comando della spedizione. Il 13 giugno dell'827, in un centinaio d'imbarcazioni, 10.000 fanti, composti di Arabi, Berberi, Saraceni fuggiti dalla Spagna, Persiani e sopra tutto Africani, salparono dal porto di Susa e quattro giorni dopo sbarcarono presso Mazzara e sconfissero in un sanguinoso scontro il duce Palata, mentre Ased, durante la mischia, seguendo l'esempio di Alì e di Maometto, stava in preghiere e recitava il capitolo la-Sin del Corano. Poscia i Saraceni mossero contro Siracusa e si accamparono, come narra lo storico arabo, in alcune grotte intorno alla città, cioè nelle famose latomie. Per un anno rimasero dinanzi alla città, dove i Greci, incoraggiati dalle promesse di soccorso fatte dal doge di Venezia Giustiniano Partecipazio, opposero gagliarda resistenza. I Saraceni furono decimati dalla peste, come era avvenuto a tutti gli eserciti che, nei tempi anteriori, avevan stretto d'assedio Siracusa, particolarmente ai Cartaginesi ed agli Ateniesi. Lo stesso Ased-ben- Forad vi perdette la vita, per malattia, nell'828. Si dovette eleggere un nuovo condottiero, che fu Mohamed-ibn-el-Gewari. Ma presto, ridotto a mal partito, come un tempo quello di Nicia, l'esercito saraceno dovette nella stessa direzione battere in ritirata, inseguito dai nemici. Guidati da Eufemio, gl'infedeli si arrestarono a Minoa e, rinforzati di nuove truppe, poterono impadronirsi di Agrigento. Panormo cadde
- 59. nell'831. Questa città veniva dai Maomettani chiamata Bulirma; più tardi prese il nome di Palermo. Ivi si stabilì Ibrahim-ibn-Abdallah-ibn- el Aglab, che fu il primo valì (governatore) della Sicilia. Sotto il suo successore anche Castrogiovanni, l'antica Ema, passò in potere dei Saraceni. Siracusa e Taormina continuarono a resistere, difendendosi con grande valore: di quel memorabile assedio rimangono documenti che attestano l'eroismo dei Siracusani ai tempi di Nicia e di Marcello. Tutti i viveri erano consumati; i miseri abitanti dovevano nutrirsi di ossa triturate e di cadaveri; essi speravano sempre negli aiuti dell'imperatore Basilio, che avea appunto inviato il suo ammiraglio Adriano con una flotta in soccorso della città. Per dimostrare il culto che ancora a quei tempi inspirava l'antica Siracusa, basta riportare la singolare tradizione la quale narra che, nel mentre Adriano se ne stava inoperoso sulle coste dell'Elide nel Peloponneso, vennero alcuni pastori ad annunziargli l'apparizione avuta nelle paludi di alcuni demoni, che avevan annunziata loro la caduta di Siracusa pel giorno appresso. I pastori vollero inoltre condurre l'ammiraglio sul luogo indicato, ed egli udì le voci che annunziavano la resa dell'eroica città. Così difatti avvenne: il 21 maggio 878 Siracusa dovette arrendersi; i Saraceni, entrati nella città, compirono gesta vandaliche, trucidarono gli abitanti, saccheggiarono le case, vi appiccarono poscia il fuoco, e largo bottino vi fecero, perchè il paese anche allora era un centro di grande commercio bizantino. Di quell'epoca esiste un prezioso documento, una lettera del monaco Teodosio all'arcidiacono Leone, nella quale egli descrive l'assedio e la sua prigionia, nonchè quella dell'arcivescovo. Dopo che la città fu presa e ne fu trucidata la maggior parte degli abitanti, i Saraceni trascinarono l'arcivescovo e l'autore della lettera a Palermo, davanti al grande emiro. Allorchè gl'infedeli comparvero dinanzi alla città col bottino raccolto, i loro correligionari andarono ad incontrarli, cantando inni di vittoria. Si sarebbe detto—scrive il monaco,—che colà si fosse dato appuntamento tutto il popolo d'Islam, da oriente a ponente, da settentrione a mezzogiorno. I prigionieri furono condotti
- 60. dinanzi all'emiro, che stava seduto a terra. E sembrava fiero del suo potere assoluto. Egli rimproverò all'arcivescovo il disprezzo che i cristiani nutrivano per Maometto, rimprovero a cui il degno sacerdote rispose con l'energia e la sincerità di un martire, così che gli valse, e valse al monaco suo compagno, il carcere. Di là quest'ultimo scrisse la lettera. Il 1o agosto del 901 anche Taormina si arrese e così l'intera Sicilia passò in potere della mezza luna maomettana ed ebbe, da quel momento, leggi mussulmane, lingua e costumi arabi. Quella Sicilia che aveva dato a Roma ben quattro papi (Agatone nel 679, Leone II nel 682, Sergio nel 687 e Stefano III nel 768), correva ormai il rischio di andare perduta per la cristianità, tanto più che gli Arabi non si comportavano da popolo fanatico, ma si sforzavano piuttosto d'indurre i Siciliani ad abbracciare la fede di Maometto. Narra Albufeda che Achmed, governatore dell'isola nel 959, portò seco in Africa trenta giovani della nobiltà siciliana e li costrinse ad abbracciare l'islamismo. Parecchie chiese e parecchi monasteri cristiani furono però distrutti, molte corporazioni religiose soppresse; altre ottennero la tolleranza mediante il pagamento di forti tributi, riuscendo così a sopravvivere anche sotto questa dominazione. Allorquando i Normanni discesero nell'isola, trovarono valido appoggio nei cristiani in Val Demone e nella Valle di Mazzara; a Palermo trovarono un vescovo greco, Nicodemo, che compiva il suo ufficio nella chiesa di S. Ciriaco. La signoria degli Arabi fu, secondo la natura di quel popolo, irrequieta e agitata: mentre la minacciavano la guerra con i Greci delle Calabrie e di Bisanzio, era travagliata all'interno dalle fazioni; più di una volta le ribellioni di Siracusa, di Agrigento, d'Imera, di Lentini, di Taormina ne minacciarono la sicurezza. Fino a che durò la dominazione degli Aglabiti di Kairewan, l'isola fu governata dai loro valì; ma quando, sui primi del x secolo, successero a quella dinastia i Fatimidi, e il califato di Tunisi fu riunito
- 61. a quello egiziano, la Sicilia divenne del pari egiziana, senza lotta sanguinosa fra gli antichi e i nuovi signori. La signoria dei Fatimidi fu l'epoca più fortunata della dominazione araba in Sicilia: l'isola fu elevata a dignità di emirato, indipendente dall'Egitto, e Palermo ne divenne la capitale. Primo emiro ne fu Hassan-ben-Alì, nel 948; e nel 969 l'emirato della sua stirpe divenne ereditario. La sapienza di Hassan non fu meno apprezzata della sua energia; egli seppe domare i varî partiti, restituire all'isola la tranquillità, ed incutere timore alle Calabrie ed all'intera Italia, Roma compresa. Invano contro di lui tentò una spedizione l'imperatore greco Costantino Porfirogineta; il suo esercito fu battuto, la sua flotta distrutta. Anche Abal-Kasem-Alì, successore di Hassan, diede da fare all'Italia con le sue scorrerie, e per poco lo stesso imperatore Ottone II non cadde nelle sue mani. Frattanto i continui bottini che gli Arabi portavano a Palermo, rendevano ricca la città; nuove continue schiere di arabi veniano a stabilirsi dall'Africa, e l'isola cominciò a rifiorire, come la Spagna era rifiorita sotto i Mori. I regni di Jussuf, dal 990 al 998, quello di Giaffar, al principio dell'xi secolo, e quello del suo successore Al-Achals furono del pari felici. Questo stato di cose durò circa ottant'anni, finchè le sollevazioni africane si estesero anche nell'isola e generarono la scissione del governo in tante piccole signorie, le quali portarono alla caduta finale della dominazione araba in Sicilia. L'ultimo emiro dell'intera isola fu Hassan-Samsan-Eddaula, contro il quale insorse il fratello Abu-Kaab: questi riuscì a cacciarlo in Egitto nel 1036. Cominciarono così a sorgere nelle varie città dei piccoli tirannelli arabi, ed altri, approfittando del movimento, ne vennero dall'Africa, per impadronirsi della signoria. L'imperatore Michele Paflagonio capì che era giunto il momento per la riconquista dell'isola e vi spedì il valoroso Giorgio Maniace con un esercito; ma questi non riuscì nell'intento e vi riuscirono invece, nel 1072, i Normanni.
- 62. Come abbiam detto, la dominazione degli Arabi in Sicilia fu assai diversa da quella dei Mori in Spagna; le due regioni, fra le più belle dell'Europa meridionale, furono conquistate dagli Arabi africani, ma in condizioni assai diverse: i Mori in Spagna distrussero un possente impero cristiano, che già possedeva i suoi buoni ordinamenti di governo e di amministrazione, ai quali dovettero sostituirne altri. La loro signoria, sorta dal califfato degli Ommiadi, assunse carattere regolare ed ortodosso di fronte a quello degli Abassidi d'Asia; il passaggio si compì con eroismo cavalleresco, a contatto della cristianità, che dovette nella lotta raddoppiare di energia. Ed infine, la Spagna era una vasta e ricca contrada. In Sicilia, invece, gli Arabi non ebbero da distruggere una grande potenza indigena, ma solo dovettero cacciare i Greci-bizantini indeboliti e quasi imbarbariti. La conquista per essi fu facile: trovarono delle città in piena decadenza e non dovettero lottare col cristianesimo, col quale piuttosto si confusero, ristretti essendo i confini dell'isola e non offrendo i suoi monti quel rifugio che avevano dato i Pirenei agli Spagnuoli. I Mori raggiunsero in breve in Spagna uno splendore che abbagliò l'intera Europa; illustrarono il loro regno con meravigliosi monumenti architettonici e con una cultura scientifica che fece epoca nella civiltà europea; e poterono così mantenersi per ben settecento anni nella terra conquistata. Gli Arabi in Sicilia invece non riusciron durante i duecento anni di dominazione ad uscire da loro stato caotico. Ad onta dell'opinione dei Siciliani d'oggi, i quali guardano con una certa compiacenza romantica il periodo della dominazione araba nell'isola, si può affermare che il regno dei grandi emiri di Sicilia non differì gran che dagli stati barbareschi d'Africa. I Saraceni, del resto, non erano affatto rozzi, nè barbari. Tutti presero parte alla cultura scientifica d'Oriente, sviluppatasi con grande rapidità. Anche la poesia, le arti, le scienze orientali piantarono le loro radici nell'antico suolo dorico di Sicilia. La storia moderna della letteratura dell'isola accolse anche gli Arabi-siculi nel catalogo de' suoi scrittori compilato dall'Amari. Ma noi regaleremmo assai volentieri tutti quei verseggiatori dai nomi ampollosi per
- 63. un'opera sola, la storia araba di Sicilia di Ibn-Kalta, che andò perduta; per questa rinunceremmo del pari al Divano di Ibn-Hamdis di Siracusa. I monumenti che soli rimangono della loro presenza in Sicilia, sono quelli dell'architettura Kairewan, la città donde pervennero, rinomata per la moschea fondata da Akbah nel VII secolo, e quale sede del califfato. Di là portarono gli Arabi il gusto della buona architettura, ma non costruirono nelle sicule contrade notevoli edifici come i Mori in Spagna. Nessuna traccia di qualche loro bella moschea rimane a Palermo, e lo stesso Alcazar, divenuto più tardi castello dei Normanni e degli Svevi, non conserva niente della parte dagli Arabi edificata. Palermo fra tutte le città si distinse per lusso e ricchezza, e divenne presto un centro voluttuoso, tutto orientale. Ivi e in altre città gli Arabi edificarono i loro mercati, le loro ville cinte di giardini. Nel periodo più florido della loro dominazione, sotto il governo di Hassan-ben-Alì e di Kasem, dei quali ci e stato tramandato che costruirono città e castelli, l'architettura moresca necessariamente si estese. Nessun contrasto doveva esser maggiore di quello offerto allora dallo stile grazioso e fantastico dell'Oriente con quello severo e maestoso dei tempi dorici in Sicilia. L'architettura moresca si mantenne anche nei periodi posteriori; fu, come la scrittura e la lingua araba, usata talvolta anche dai Normanni e dagli Svevi, e dalla fusione del tipo saraceno col tipo bizantino-romano nacque quello stile misto che prese il nome di arabo-normanno: dal che si può argomentare che i Saraceni in Sicilia dovettero elevare splendidi edifici. Ma il tempo ha distrutto tutti i palazzi degli emiri, la cui magnificenza produsse tanto stupore nel principe normanno Ruggero, e dei monumenti di architettura araba non rimangono più che la Cuba e la Zisa, due ville presso Palermo, costruite senza dubbio dai Saraceni, ma poi alterate grandemente e restaurate e in tempi posteriori ampliate. Le due ville stanno fuori della Porta Nuova, sulla strada che mette a Monreale. La Cuba (parola che in arabo significa arco o vòlta) è stata da parecchi anni adibita a caserma di cavalleria ed ha subito tali
- 64. rovine e alterazioni che ben poco ormai si riconosce dell'antica disposizione. All'esterno è un edificio quadrato, regolare, costruito con pietre ben lavorate, proporzionato e diviso da archi e da finestre, in parte finte e soltanto ornamentali, secondo l'usanza araba. Sulla cornice in cima all'edificio si scorge ancora un'iscrizione araba, indecifrabile. L'interno fu completamente devastato e trasformato; soltanto nella sala centrale, in origine molto probabilmente sormontata da una cupola, sono avanzi di pittura e bellissimi rabeschi di stucco. Boccaccio collocò in questo palazzo la scena della V novella della sesta giornata del suo Decamerone, e lo storico Fazello ne descrisse la magnificenza, riportando quello che ne avevano detto scrittori antichi, imperocchè a quel tempo—secolo XVI—il castello era già rovinato. Così egli ce lo descrive: «Unito al palazzo, fuori le mura della città verso ponente, trovasi un pomario di duemila passi di circonferenza, detto parco, ossia Circo reale. In questo giardino, rallegrato da acque perenni, crescono meravigliose specie di piante e qua e là si vedono cespugli di alloro e di mirto odoroso. Colà, dall'entrata all'uscita, si stendeva un lungo portico, con parecchi padiglioni aperti a forma circolare, adibiti per gli svaghi del re, uno dei quali tuttora rimane in buone condizioni, con nel mezzo una grande vasca fatta con pietre regolari e commesse con mirabile arte. La vasca esiste ancora, ma priva d'acqua e di pesci. In questo pomario sorgeva lo stupendo palazzo dei re saraceni, in un angolo del quale si tenevano raccolte fiere d'ogni sorta. Oggi tutto è rovinato; i giardini sono stati ridotti a vigne di privati e solo se ne giudica l'estensione dai muri di cinta in massima parte ancora in piedi. I Palermitani continuano ancora a dare a questo luogo l'antico nome saraceno di Cuba». Il palazzo nelle sue parti principali esiste ancor oggi, tale e quale ci fu descritto da Fazello, ed in particolare si possono ancor vedere le mura di cinta del giardino ed in questo gli avanzi dell'antica vasca.
- 65. La Zisa era una villa ancor più bella, più vasta. La famiglia spagnuola di Sandoval, di poi proprietaria, l'alterò grandemente con nuove costruzioni, ma la preservò anche in tal modo dalla sua completa rovina. Lo stile è lo stesso della villa Cuba; ha la forma ben proporzionata di un dado, semplice, costruita con pietre regolarmente lavorate, divisa in tre parti da cornici, archi e finestre. Guglielmo il Malo la fece restaurare e probabilmente anche l'ampliò, poichè non potrebbesi spiegare altrimenti l'asserzione di Romualdo da Salerno: che quel re cioè avesse fatto costruire un palazzo chiamato la Zisa. «In quel tempo—ha lasciato scritto Romualdo—re Guglielmo fece edificare presso Palermo un palazzo di meravigliosa architettura, cui diede nome Zisa e che circondò di ameni giardini e arricchì questi con appositi acquedotti, di grandi vasche in cui si allevavano dei pesci». La Zisa mantenne sempre il suo carattere arabo, nonostante che re Guglielmo vi facesse notevoli modificazioni. Il suo interno, interamente restaurato, contiene parecchie sale e appartamenti, che niente conservano del loro carattere arabo; soltanto il portico d'ingresso ha serbato un certo aspetto di antichità. Ivi, nel muro, sono nicchie ed archi sostenuti da colonne, fra le quali sgorga in una vasca di marmo una fonte, tappezzata di muschio e di piante rampicanti. L'arco superiore alla fonte è di stile arabo ed ha notevoli ornati e rabeschi originalissimi e fantastici. Gli affreschi e i mosaici, rappresentanti palme, ramoscelli d'olivo, pavoni e figure di arceri, sono di origine normanna, e normanna è pure l'iscrizione cufica sulla parete, riprodotta anche dall'orientalista Morso nella sua opera Palermo antica, nonchè dal de Sacy. La già nominata iscrizione, ora illeggibile, in cima al palazzo, è invece araba. La fonte dal portico sgorgava in una bella vasca, ancora esistente nel 1626, come ne fa parola il monaco bolognese Leandro Alberti nella sua descrizione dell'Italia e delle sue isole. La vasca era sita di fronte al portico, aveva forma regolare, lunga cinquanta passi ed era rivestita tutta di muratura. Nel mezzo vi sorgeva un grazioso e piccolo edificio, al quale si accedeva per mezzo di un ponticello di pietra, ed in cui esisteva una saletta a vòlta, lunga dodici passi e larga sei, con due finestre; di là, dice l'Alberti, si passava in una bella
- 66. stanza destinata alle donne, con tre finestre a duplice arco, sostenuto nel mezzo da una colonnetta di marmo. Parecchie scale portavano al piano superiore del palazzo, ove erano varie camere a vôlta, con colonne ed archi di stile arabo; e nell'interno c'era un cortile a porticato. Tutto quanto l'edificio era coronato di merli. Le sale, con le pareti rivestite di mosaici, coi pavimenti di marmo e di porfido nei colori più svariati, dovevano essere indubbiamente stupende. Ma l'Alberti trovò già la Zisa ridotta in tale stato di ruina da fargli esclamare melanconicamente: «In verità, io non credo possa esistere animo gentile che, dinanzi a quest'edificio già così bello e in parte ora caduto, in parte minacciante rovina, non provi un senso di profonda compassione». Quanto bella doveva essere questa villa ai tempi degli emiri, dei Normanni, di Federigo, sotto questo splendido cielo, in quelle notti serene di questa amena contrada che fa pompa, dal lido del mare ai piedi del monte, de' più deliziosi aranceti dai frutti d'oro!... Ho visto pochi panorami simili a quello che si gode dal tetto a foggia di terrazzo di questo castello; di là si scorgono tutti i dintorni di Palermo, dalla spiaggia ai monti, dintorni di una bellezza che la parola non sa, nè può descrivere. Basti dire che si abbraccia con lo sguardo tutta la Conca d'oro, co' suoi neri monti, maestosi e severi, tali da sembrar tagliati dallo scalpello greco, co' suoi giardini ricchi d'aranci, cosparsi di ville, con la sua città turrita e piena di cupole, col suo mare sempre meraviglioso, con la mole gigantesca e imponente da una parte del monte Pellegrino, dall'altra del capo Zafferano, che si protende in mare, co' suoi monti coronati di neve nel lontano orizzonte, perduti in una atmosfera pura, serena, tranquilla. Terra, mare, aria, luce, colà tutto ricorda l'Oriente. Nel fissare dal tetto della Zisa i giardini, vien fatto di attendere l'uscita delle belle odalische al suono di una mandola, e di un emiro dalla lunga barba, in caftano rosso e pantofole gialle. Là si prova quasi il desiderio di vivere secondo i precetti del Corano.
- 67. Non è errato credere che, specie ai tempi della dominazione spagnuola, il fanatismo religioso abbia cercato di distruggere l'antica dimora dei Saraceni. I principi normanni, invece, rimasero colpiti dallo splendore dei palagi e dei giardini arabi e l'imitarono nelle loro costruzioni. Ruggero pel primo edificò delle ville in quello stile, Favara Mimnermo ed altre, come ha lasciato scritto Ugo Falcando, contemporaneo degli ultimi principi normanni. Le fontane sopratutto furono da questi imitate e le vasche di foggia orientale; molte ne costruì difatti Federigo II, giovandosi della ricchezza d'acqua di cui Palermo godeva sin dai tempi più antichi. A prova della passione che gli Arabi dimostrarono nel costruire vasche, basta citare la descrizione che Leonardo Alberti fa di quella della Zisa, e la descrizione che l'ebreo Beniamino di Tudela, nella sua breve opera su Palermo, fa della vasca Albehira. Beniamino di Tudela venne in Sicilia nel 1172, ai tempi di Guglielmo il Buono, per visitarvi le corporazioni israelitiche, e così descrisse l'Albehira: «Nel centro della città sgorga la più copiosa delle fontane, quella circondata da mura cui gli Arabi diedero il nome di Albehira. Vi si mantengono pesci di varie specie e vi navigano le barche reali, ornate d'oro, d'argento ed elegantemente dipinte; il re con le sue dame vi si reca spesso per diletto. Nei giardini reali trovasi inoltre un castello, le cui pareti son rivestite d'oro e d'argento, e i pavimenti sono formati di marmi rarissimi; contiene statue d'ogni sorta. Non vidi mai altrove edifici paragonabili ai palagi di questa città». S'ignora ove sorgesse l'Albehira; Morso ha cercato di provare che Beniamino alludesse al così detto Mar Dolce, nome dato alle rovine arabe del castello di Favara, presso il pittoresco convento del Gesù, fuori le porte della città, sotto la grotta famosa per i suoi fossili. Queste rovine presero il nome di Mar Dolce perchè si trovavano di fronte ad una vasca; gli Arabi però le dicevano Case Djiafar. Fuori di Palermo esiste ancora una quarta villa o palazzo saraceno, quello di Ainsenin, dal popolo soprannominato Torre del Diavolo, le cui rovine giacciono nella pittoresca valle Guadagna, attraversata dall'Oreto e dominata dal monte Grifone.
- 68. Questi sono gli unici monumenti di costruzione saracena che, a ricordo della dominazione araba, rimangono in Palermo. Con l'invasione spagnuola scomparve la graziosa architettura orientale e cominciarono anche a venir meno ai tempi di Federigo II le tradizioni dell'islamismo, sopratutto allorquando, nel 1220, gli Arabi ancor rimasti nell'isola furono trasportati a Nocera nelle Puglie, avendo durante l'assenza di Federigo, guidati da Mirabet, tentato di riacquistare la loro indipendenza. D'allora in poi il linguaggio e i costumi arabi andarono perdendosi in Sicilia ed una nuova nazionalità, quella spagnuola, cercò di stabilirvisi, cominciando col cancellare ogni traccia dei predecessori. Nell'ultimo secolo, quando la scoperta di Pompei riaccese in tutta Italia lo studio dell'antichità, si prese a indagare pure con ardore le vicende della dominazione araba in Sicilia. Le iscrizioni esistenti nelle chiese e nei palazzi portarono allo studio della lingua araba ed in Palermo sorse anzi una cattedra speciale per l'insegnamento di questa. Ma la cosa non avvenne senza grottesca soperchieria, la quale valse a provare sino a qual segno ogni tradizione araba fosse scomparsa dall'isola in cui un tempo gli stessi re cristiani avevano parlato quella lingua. Il maltese Giuseppe Vella venne a Palermo e si spacciò per dotto orientalista, falsificando anche un codice contenente parecchie corrispondenze degli Arabi in Sicilia. L'abile falsario seppe ingannare tutta quanta l'Europa erudita, fintanto che, smascherato, venne rimosso dalla cattedra e imprigionato. Frattanto però presero a dedicarsi allo studio dell'arabo parecchi Siciliani, fra i quali Airoldi, Rosario e Morso, quest'ultimo in special modo, che successe al Vella nella cattedra e fu in relazione con i maggiori orientalisti, col Tichsen, col Silvestre, col Sacy, con l'Hammer e col Frahn, e molto si adoperò nell'interpretazione delle iscrizioni cufiche esistenti in Palermo. Ne risultarono opere veramente utili, come la Rerum Arabicarum quae ad historiam siculam spectant ampla collectio di Gregorio, pubblicata a Palermo nel 1790; le Notizie storiche dei Saraceni siciliani del Martorana, pubblicate del pari a Palermo, nel 1833; ed infine la Storia dei
- 69. Mussulmani in Sicilia, dovuta all'insigne Michele Amari, ma di cui furono editi soltanto i due primi volumi. Lo studio delle antichità arabe risvegliò anche l'amore per l'architettura saraceno-normanna, e divenne così generale, che molte botteghe della bella via Toledo di Palermo sono oggi ornate alla foggia araba e in stile arabo sono costruite molte ville di ricchi possidenti nella campagna. Il gusto corrotto dei palazzi e delle ville siciliane è noto a tutti per la sua straordinaria bizzarria. Mentre si avevano sott'occhio dei modelli graziosissimi e si avevano alle porte di Palermo la Cuba e la Zisa, mentre esistevano nella stessa città edifici dell'epoca normanna o posteriori, come, per esempio, il palazzo del tribunale, che insegnavano come anche in edifici grandiosi si potesse unire la semplicità all'armonia delle proporzioni ed alla sobrietà della decorazione, si preferì innalzare costruzioni di gusto esageratamente barocco, come la villa del principe di Palagonia, o ricorrere al gusto cinese, come nella regale villa della Favorita. In questi ultimi tempi veramente si è fatto ritorno allo stile arabo- normanno, e farà epoca fra le moderne costruzioni la villa Serra di Falco, innalzata a poca distanza dalla Zisa da quel duca che è altamente benemerito per lo studio delle antichità siciliane. I magnifici giardini di questa palazzina dànno l'illusione di rivivere ai tempi di Hassan. In Palermo, il marchese Forcella innalzò pure un bel palazzo di stile arabo-normanno, nel quale sono però alcune cose grottesche come in tutte le imitazioni di architettura passata. Questo palazzo sorge in piazza Teresa, presso la porta dei Greci; il proprietario vi spese ingenti somme e i lavori non ne sono peranco ultimati. All'esterno le finestre sono a doppio arco di sesto acuto, divise da una colonnetta, guarnite con vetri colorati. Le sale sono parecchie e ricche, in specie quelle centrali, di gusto tutt'altro che arabo, con le pareti rivestite di marmi e di pietre dure, preziosi quelli e queste, di vario colore, a
- 70. disegni graziosissimi. La volta è ornata fantasticamente, e il pavimento è in marmo di vario colore; questa profusione di marmi prova la ricchezza mineralogica dell'isola. A rendere quest'edificio simile ad un'Alhambra non manca nemmeno una fontana. Altre stanze furono dal ricco marchese decorate in stile romano e pompeiano e dimostrano l'abilità dei Siciliani nell'affresco, imperocchè tutte le imitazioni di pitture antiche furono colà eseguite unicamente da artisti nati e vissuti nell'isola. II. Due isole molto distanti fra loro, l'Inghilterra e la Sicilia furono ad uno stesso tempo conquistate da una razza audace e avventuriera, quella dei Normanni, che, dopo avervi per poco brillato, vi si spense. Nell'una e nell'altra isola venne introdotto il governo feudale, con baronie e maggioraschi, i quali durano ancor oggi[5]. In entrambe le isole si formò una costituzione aristocratica, che si sviluppò possente in Inghilterra e di cui rimangono ancora vestigia in Sicilia, ove più presto si estinse. Questa similitudine di destini fra le due isole è abbastanza singolare e potrebbe servire a spiegare altri fatti storici avvenuti dopo la Rivoluzione francese, fra i quali la costituzione introdotta dagli Inglesi in Sicilia nel 1812. La signoria dei Normanni in Sicilia fu di breve durata; brillò appena un secolo e ne furono caratteri distintivi l'intelligenza, la costanza, l'audacia quasi feroce, una politica vasta e intraprendente, una grande vastità di disegni e di imprese. Tutto ciò soggiacque al contatto della vita voluttuosa dei Saraceni, al clima, alla libidine sfrenata delle partigianerie. Nel 1038 Giorgio Maniace era stato invitato in Sicilia dall'Imperatore greco per cacciarne i Saraceni. Egli si rivolse a Guaimaro perchè gli concedesse una piccola schiera di Normanni che teneva al suo servizio; Guaimaro gli mandò circa trecento uomini al comando di
- 71. Guglielmo dal braccio di ferro, di Dragone e di Umfrido. Greci e Normanni si precipitarono sull'isola, posero in fuga gli Arabi, s'impadronirono di Messina, Siracusa e altre città; ma l'avidità del bottino portò fra loro la discordia; i Greci rapaci volevano tutto per sè; allora i Normanni, offesi, partirono, passarono in Italia e cercarono quivi qualche altro compenso. Sorpresero Melfi ed altri paesi delle Puglie, cominciarono per questa via a stabilire la propria indipendenza. Ma non appena i Greci seppero questo, abbandonarono la Sicilia per cacciarli dalle Puglie, ma non vi riuscirono, e le città da loro conquistate in breve tornarono in potere dei Saraceni. Trascorsero così varî anni senza speciali avvenimenti; i Normanni riaffermarono il loro prestigio nelle Puglie, Guglielmo ne divenne conte, più tardi Drogone ne ereditò i possessi, e Umfrido, dopo la morte di quest'ultimo, costrinse papa Leone IX a concedergli l'investitura della provincia. Novelle schiere vennero dalla Normandia, sotto il comando di Ruggero Guiscardo, il quale, dopo la morte di Umfrido, avvenuta nel 1056, si fece proclamare duca delle Puglie e delle Calabrie. Più tardi discese anche suo fratello minore, Roberto, per dividerne le sorti. I due valorosi fratelli nel 1060 occuparono Reggio ed una notte, Ruggero, accompagnato da soli sessanta soldati, mosse alla volta di Messina, per conoscere le condizioni del paese; attaccò audacemente sulla spiaggia i Saraceni, quindi s'imbarcò di nuovo e fece ritorno a Reggio. Poco dopo, la fortuna volle favorirlo ed egli si accinse seriamente all'arrischiata impresa. A lui si presentò l'emiro di Siracusa, Bencumen, scacciato dal fratello Belcamend, e lo informò delle lotte che travagliavano l'isola e lo persuase di tôrre agli Arabi il possesso della Sicilia. L'impresa non fu certo facile. I Saraceni opposero la più viva resistenza e nuove truppe vennero dall'Africa per respingere Ruggero, che, dopo una sanguinosa battaglia, si era impadronito di Messina. Roberto lo raggiunse allora a Castrogiovanni; l'esercito principale dei Saraceni fu posto in fuga, dopo di che i Normanni fecero ritorno nelle Calabrie per rafforzare le proprie file e prepararsi
- 72. ad una più seria lotta. Almocz, califfo d'Egitto, aveva frattanto spedito in Sicilia una flotta, la quale però fu dispersa da una tempesta e distrutta presso l'isola di Pantelleria. La fortuna aveva arriso agli arditi avventurieri, ma la discordia minacciò di rovinarli. Roberto Guiscardo cominciò ad avere invidia dei successi del fratello Ruggero, pretendendo il possesso di metà delle Calabrie e dell'intera Sicilia; l'altro non volle aderirvi e i due eroi ricorsero alle armi, e, senza curarsi dei Greci e dei Saraceni, nè della poca stabilità delle recenti conquiste, presero a straziarsi fra loro in una guerra feroce. Ruggero cadde nelle mani di suo fratello, che, però, cedendo all'influenza di quell'uomo straordinario, lo lasciò libero. Allora, riconciliati, i due fratelli si rivolsero verso la Sicilia e due volte si spinsero sino a Palermo, ma dovettero quindi far ritorno nelle Calabrie per sistemare la loro posizione in quel dominio. Soltanto nel 1071 poterono stringere di regolare assedio la capitale dell'isola. A quell'epoca Palermo era forse la città più popolosa d'Italia, senza dubbio la più florida, la più ricca: in essa era tutto lo splendore della vita orientale. Gli Arabi opposero fiera resistenza e narra la tradizione che, per dimostrare la loro fiducia nell'esito della lotta, essi non chiudessero neppure le porte della città e che un ardito cavaliere normanno l'attraversasse un giorno da solo, di galoppo, con la lancia in resta. Finalmente Roberto penetrò per la porta di mezzogiorno, mentre Ruggero entrava per quella di ponente. I Saraceni, ritiratisi nel centro della città, capitolarono, cedendo Palermo al fortunato vincitore, a condizione che fosse loro garantita salva la vita e libero l'esercizio del loro culto. Venti anni appresso i cristiani entrarono in Gerusalemme, conquistata pure a forza, e si portarono quali orde selvagge. I Normanni, invece, essi pure valorosi crociati, furono più clementi e risparmiarono Palermo maomettana. Presero possesso della splendida città senza versare sangue, senza commettere devastazioni, quali vincitori soddisfatti, che non avevano altro scopo che cacciare il nemico dalle sue voluttuose dimore per alloggiarvisi. Nessuno di quegli scoppi d'odio di cui diedero prova più tardi i cristiani contro i maomettani avvenne; i Saraceni furono lasciati liberi
- 73. di vivere come volevano e di esercitare la loro religione. Il cristianesimo, languente, riprese forza e in breve si sostituì all'islamismo, che soltanto sopravvisse, per quasi centocinquant'anni ancora, fra i monti. I Normanni furono per ragioni politiche tolleranti verso i Saraceni e vissero con questi in perfetto accordo; i conquistatori, in picciol numero, presto scomparvero quasi in mezzo alla popolazione saracena, che seppero guadagnare a sè, trattandola con dolcezza. Accettarono le arti e le scienze degli Arabi; nei loro edifici usarono lo stile arabo e la stessa corte cristiana prese un carattere arabo, circondandosi di guardie saracene, di eunuchi, ed adottando pure la foggia turca di vestire. Allorquando Mohamed-Ibn-Djobair di Valenza visitò la Sicilia, sullo scorcio del secolo XII, lodò re Guglielmo pel suo amore verso l'islamismo. «Il re—scrisse—legge e scrive l'arabo, e il suo harem è composto di donne mussulmane, e mussulmani sono i suoi paggi e i suoi eunuchi». Il visitatore trovò le donne di Palermo belle, voluttuose, vestite completamente alla turca, e nel vederle, nei giorni di festa, in chiesa, con abiti di seta gialla, con veli dai vivaci colori, con catenelle d'oro e grandi orecchini, dipinte e profumate come le femmine orientali, ricordò i versi del poeta: «In verità, quando si entra in un giorno di festa nella moschea, vi si trovano gazzelle ed antilopi». La lingua araba continuò ad essere insegnata, ed usata anche negli atti governativi; ed anche le iscrizioni arabe, visibili tuttora nei mosaici delle chiese cristiane, furono dai re e dai vescovi cristiani dettate. I Normanni in Sicilia trovarono la lingua greca degli antichi Elleni, dei Bizantini e la lingua latina degli antichi Romani; nella bocca del popolo il linguaggio volgare, che divenne poi l'italiano; ed infine, gli idiomi arabo ed ebraico, tutti contemporaneamente in uso e tutti usati nei diplomi, in sulle prime scritti in greco con la traduzione araba. Caduta Palermo, l'isola fu suddivisa: Roberto Guiscardo prese per sè la capitale e metà della Sicilia; Ruggero ebbe l'altra metà; al prode
- 74. nipote Serlo furon date grandi baronie e l'altro nipote Tancredi fu creato conte di Siracusa. Roberto prese il titolo di duca di Sicilia, Ruggero quello di conte. Ma l'isola non era ancora tutta soggiogata; Siracusa, difatti, si arrese solo nel 1088, Agrigento nel 1091, e più tardi anche Castrogiovanni, Noto e Butera. Fino al 1127 i ducati delle Puglie e di Sicilia si mantennero in questo stato di cose; ma nel 1127, estintosi il ramo di Roberto Guiscardo, il figlio di Ruggero ereditò pure gli Stati al di là del Faro. Fu questi Ruggero II, il principe più insigne della stirpe normanna. Suo padre, che valorosamente aveva conquistato la Sicilia, era morto nel 1011; gli era succeduto il figlio maggiore Simone per cinque anni; poi, ancora minorenne, sotto la tutela della madre Adelasia e dell'ammiraglio Giorgio Antiocheno, Ruggero era salito sul trono. Ruggero, possessore di tutte le virtù necessarie in un fondatore di dinastia, sollevò il regno normanno a grande splendore. Nel 1127 ereditò il ducato delle Puglie, come abbiamo detto, e ciò spaventò il papa, l'imperatore tedesco e quello bizantino; ma Ruggero combattè con fortuna contro tutti e tre, e poi contro i principi di Salerno, di Capua, di Napoli, di Avellino e costrinse il papa a concedergli l'investitura delle Puglie ed infine si cinse della corona reale. Non potè però far questo senza il consenso del Parlamento, dei baroni e dell'alto clero, poichè, seguendo l'usanza dei conquistatori normanni, per creare una nobiltà novella era stata stabilita una certa forma di costituzione aristocratica. Il Parlamento, convocato a Salerno, decretò al principe la corona regale, che gli fu solennemente posta in testa nella cattedrale di Palermo, il dì di Natale del 1130. Così sorse il regno delle Due Sicilie. Subito Ruggero si die' a ordinare la sua monarchia, in modo grandioso e sicuro: creò sette grandi ufficiali della corona, un connestabile, un grande ammiraglio, un cancelliere, un giudice, un ciambellano, un pronotario, un maresciallo, che formarono il suo consiglio. Si circondò di un cerimoniale orientale, affidò la custodia del palazzo ad eunuchi e a guardie saracene. Il suo regno trascorse fra continue lotte, in continua guerra; ma seppe tener fronte a tutti i
- 75. suoi nemici, interni ed esterni; ispirò vivo terrore nella stessa Costantinopoli all'imperatore greco, il quale non intendeva rinunziare a' suoi diritti sulla Sicilia; s'impadronì di Corinto, di Atene e di Tebe; portò dalla Grecia a Palermo molti operai abili nel filare e nel tessere la seta, contribuendo a propagarla così nell'Occidente, e da questi fece fabbricare il pallio famoso che vestirono più tardi gl'imperatori tedeschi nell'atto della loro incoronazione; conquistò poscia Malta, inviò centocinquanta bastimenti in Africa e punì quello stesso regno di Kairewan che aveva conquistato la Sicilia. Durante la sua signoria la potenza normanna raggiunse l'apogeo. Egli morì il 26 febbraio 1154, cinquantanovenne. Fu principe di grande prudenza, valore, giustizia e ingegno: fu bello di persona, disinvolto e distinto. Verso gli Arabi si dimostrò tollerante e tenne in gran conto la loro scienza e la loro arte. Fra gli altri, accolse onorevolmente alla sua corte Edris Edscheriff, esiliato dall'Africa, che gli costruì una sfera terrestre d'argento, sulla quale erano disegnate tutte le contrade allora note, con la loro denominazione in lingua araba, e scrisse una geografia nota generalmente sotto il nome di re Ruggero, un estratto della quale, la Geografia Nubiense, venne più volte stampata a Roma, a Parigi e per ultimo a Palermo nel 1790. Segno veramente espressivo del carattere di Ruggero era l'iscrizione incisa sulla lama della sua spada: Apulus et Calaber, Siculus mihi servit et Afer. Gli successe Guglielmo I, per le sue cattive qualità detto il Malo. Egli era l'unico figlio superstite a Ruggero, imperocchè gli altri quattro, Ruggero, Anfuso, Tancredi ed Enrico precedettero tutti il padre nella tomba. Fu sorprendente la rapida decadenza di una stirpe tanto forte e numerosa: in pochi anni si ridusse ad un unico discendente collaterale, ed insieme il Regno di Sicilia decadde rapidamente dall'altezza a cui Ruggero aveva saputo portarlo. Morto questi, si dovette riconoscere che tutta la forza del nuovo regno riposava esclusivamente nella sua persona. Sotto il governo di Guglielmo il Malo non tardò la Sicilia a ricadere in tali condizioni da ricordare gli emirati dei Saraceni, sotto l'influenza di un favorito del re,
- 76. avventuriero straniero al paese, il grande ammiraglio del regno Maione di Bari, il quale attentò alla corona. Non vi furono che congiure, rivoluzioni di palazzo, ribellioni di nobili, un caos ovunque. L'odioso re Guglielmo, dopo una vita travagliata, ma non senza qualche successo in guerra, morì nel 1166, in età di quarantacinque anni. Con suo figlio Guglielmo II, detto il Buono, salito sul trono a soli undici anni, si estinse la linea diretta della stirpe normanna. I primi anni del suo regno furono agitatissimi, a motivo delle contestazioni sulla tutela, delle ribellioni dei baroni e degli intrighi di corte. I Normanni avevano saputo magnificare e conquistare un regno, ma non se lo seppero mantenere. Non appena il clima ed il lusso orientale cominciarono ad infiacchire in essi la nordica forza, decaddero, ed infine il feudalismo e la prepotenza indomabile dei nobili li vinsero. Nessuna dinastia, del resto, avrebbe potuto mantenersi a lungo sul vulcanico suolo di Napoli e di Sicilia; tutte furono d'origine straniera, tutte vennero in possesso dell'isola in modo avventuroso, tutte finirono miseramente e per lo più per tradimento. Guglielmo II, del resto, fu molto dissimile dal padre, e la posterità gli confermò il titolo di Buono che il clero, per gratitudine, avevagli dato. Mentre Guglielmo il Malo viveva come un maomettano e si fabbricava sontuosi palazzi e giardini, Guglielmo il Buono fondava monasteri e conventi. A lui sono dovuti parecchi monumenti d'architettura religiosa, in ispecie il famoso duomo di Monreale e la cattedrale di Palermo. Morì il 1o novembre 1189, in età di soli trentasei anni. Della stirpe di Ruggero I non rimaneva più che un bastardo, Tancredi conte di Lecce, figlio naturale di Ruggero, primogenito di re Ruggero, premorto al padre; inoltre, l'altra figlia Costanza aveva sposato l'imperatore Arrigo VI; erede legittimo delle Due Sicilie sarebbe dunque stato l'imperatore. Ma il partito nazionale si rivolse a Tancredi, conte di Lecce, che venne a Palermo nel 1190 e si fece incoronare. Questo prode bastardo ebbe molti punti di somiglianza con re Manfredi, vissuto dopo di lui; come questo fu uomo
- 77. d'ingegno, poeta, musico, versato nelle matematiche e nell'astronomia, che gli Arabi avevano allora diffuse, e come questo fu generoso ed infelice. Riuscì vittorioso nei primordi della guerra che ebbe a sostenere contro i Tedeschi di Arrigo, per assicurarsi il possesso del regno, e quando Costanza cadde nelle sue mani, la trattò con grande cavalleria, restituendole la libertà. Pareva che la nobile stirpe dei Normanni dovesse rifiorire in Tancredi, che aveva, ei pure, due figli, Ruggero e Guglielmo, al primo dei quali, bellissimo giovane, aveva dato in isposa Irene, la figlia dell'imperatore greco Isacco Angelo ed avevalo già fatto incoronare re, quando il giovane repentinamente morì nel 1193. Tancredi provò gran dolore alla perdita di questo figlio, tanto che presto, il 20 febbraio 1194, lo raggiunse nella tomba. Rimase suo unico erede Guglielmo, ancor minorenne, che fu incoronato a Palermo. La reggenza venne assunta dalla vedova di Tancredi, Sibilla, che aveva pure tre figlie: Albina, Costanza e Mandonia. In questo stato di cose, facile fu ad Arrigo conquistare la Sicilia. L'esercito di Sibilla fu sconfitto; Messina, Catania e Siracusa caddero nelle mani dell'imperatore e i baroni passarono dalla parte di questo. L'infelice regina si era ritirata co' figli suoi nella rocca di Caltabellotta ed attendeva colà il corso degli avvenimenti. Il 30 novembre 1194, Arrigo era entrato in Palermo, che avevagli fatto festosa accoglienza, salutando con musica ed inni di gioia la nuova signoria degli Svevi. Sibilla, allora, vistasi da tutti tradita, si decise a trattare, ed il giovane principe Guglielmo, cui l'imperatore aveva promesso solennemente la contea di Lecce e il principato di Taranto, venne a deporre a' suoi piedi la corona. Ma gl'infelici erano caduti in un tranello: Arrigo, non appena incoronato, col pretesto di una falsa congiura, dimentico de' suoi giuramenti, sfogò la sua selvaggia passione di vendetta contro i partigiani della stirpe normanna e contro la misera famiglia regale. Molti baroni e sacerdoti furono tormentati e condannati a morte; Sibilla e i suoi figli furon cacciati in carcere, e Guglielmo, l'ultimo campione della sua gente, venne accecato. Indi la regina e le figlie furono trasportate nel monastero di Hoenburgo, in Alsazia, ove a lungo vissero in prigionia. S'ignora qual fine facesse Guglielmo; una
- 78. vaga leggenda vuole che ei fuggisse dal carcere e vivesse a lungo da eremita a S. Giacomo, presso Chiavenna. Così tragicamente si spense la stirpe normanna, cui la fortuna aveva fatto dono di una fra le più belle contrade del mondo, e la sua fine fu tanto più notevole in quanto che non tardò a tenergli dietro quella degli Hohenstaufen. La Nemesi vendicativa colpì questa pure. Come erasi impadronita della signoria di Sicilia col sangue e la crudeltà, così ebbe a patire la stessa sorte, raccogliendo quel che aveva seminato. Secondo la tradizione, Federigo nacque lo stesso giorno in cui suo padre Arrigo macchiava la sua mano di sangue, il 26 dicembre 1194. Arrigo morì tre anni dopo in Messina, di soli 32 anni. Manfredi, bastardo al pari di Tancredi ed al pari di Tancredi prode e generoso, fu tradito e cadde nella battaglia di Benevento; Elena, sua moglie, ricoveratasi nella rocca di Trani, come un dì Sibilla co' suoi figli in quella di Caltabellotta, al pari di lei si vide tradita e fu rinchiusa insieme con i figli in carcere, dove morì di dolore; sua figlia Beatrice visse per ben diciotto anni nel Castel dell'Uovo a Napoli; i tre figli minori, Enrico, Federigo e Anselmo rimasero per trenta anni in carcere, e Corradino, infine, lasciò la vita sul patibolo. Tanto sangue versato suscitò novella sete di vendetta che poi si sfogò sopra gli Angioini, nei Vespri siciliani. Gli Hohenstaufen trovarono, del resto, l'isola in floride condizioni; paese dalla natura prediletto, la Sicilia era divenuta durante la signoria normanna ricca, mercè l'industria e il commercio. Nessun nemico esterno in quel periodo era entrato nella città, mentre dall'Oriente e dall'Africa erano stati portati in grande quantità oggetti preziosi. Allorquando Arrigo VI entrò in Palermo, rimase impressionato dallo splendore della città, e trovò nel palazzo dei re normanni grandi tesori, oro, gemme, rare stoffe di seta, che fece imbarcare. Arnoldo, abate di Lubecca, narra che «entrato Arrigo nella dimora del morto Tancredi, vi trovò letti, sedili, tavole d'argento, vasellame
- 79. d'oro finissimo, tesori nascosti, gemme, meravigliosi gioielli sì da caricarne centocinquanta bestie da soma, facendo ritorno in patria ricco e glorioso». Fu in questa occasione che venne portato in Germania il prezioso manto, tessuto con seta, ornato di caratteri arabi, che aveva servito all'incoronazione di Ruggero I, e che, nel 1424, per volere dell'imperatore Sigismondo, fu riunito con altri gioielli dell'Impero a Norimberga, tanto che poi lo si credette il pallio di Carlomagno. Reynaud recentemente ha dato questa traduzione dell'iscrizione araba ricamata sul manto di re Ruggero: «Tessuto nella fabbrica reale, nella sede della felicità, della nobiltà, della gloria, del conseguimento duraturo del benessere, della buona accoglienza, della fortuna, dello splendore, della reputazione, della bellezza, del compimento di ogni desiderio, di ogni speranza; del piacere del giorno e della notte, senza tregua, della devozione, della conservazione, della simpatia, della felicità, della salute, dell'aiuto, della soddisfazione, nella città di Sicilia nell'anno 528» (1133 dell'èra volgare). Questa orgogliosa ed ampollosa iscrizione in stile orientale, sul manto solenne di un re normanno, basta a provare quanto i Normanni si compiacessero di conformarsi agli usi ed ai costumi arabi. Di quei tempi ci rimane una delle più antiche descrizioni di Palermo, quella del normanno Ugo Falcando, che visse in quella città durante il regno di Guglielmo il Malo, e che poi fece ritorno nella sua patria. Mentre la dinastia di Ruggero stava per estinguersi, egli scrisse un'epistola a Pietro, tesoriere della cattedrale di Palermo, lamentando i mali che stavano per cadere sopra la città e dando un'idea della sua bellezza. La sua lettera rivela un odio feroce contro i Tedeschi. Dopo aver rivolto apostrofi piene di entusiasmo verso i Normanni che a Messina ed a Catania stavano allora lottando coi barbari, si rivolge a Siracusa, esclamando: «Dovrà dunque ridursi a servire i barbari l'antica nobiltà di Corinto che, abbandonata la propria patria, venne in Sicilia per edificare una città, e finì per
- 80. stabilirsi sulla costa più amena dell'isola ed ivi innalzò una città, fra porti che non hanno gli eguali? A che ti vale ora l'antico splendore de' tuoi filosofi, dei poeti che s'inspirarono alla tua fonte profetica? A che ti vale avere scosso il giogo del tiranno Dionigi e de' suoi eguali? Minor danno sarebbe per te stato sopportare il furore dei despoti siciliani, piuttosto che la tirannia di un popolo barbaro e crudele. Guai a te, guai a te, Aretusa, fonte cantata da uomini illustri che, dopo aver offerto ai vati l'ispirazione, devi saziare l'ebbrezza dei Tedeschi e soffrire le loro turpitudini!» La lettera di Falcando è un documento importantissimo per la conoscenza delle condizioni di Palermo al tempo dei Normanni. A questo proposito, l'autore ad un certo punto esclama: «Chi potrà mai bastantemente esaltare la bellezza degli edifici di questa nobile città? Chi l'abbondanza delle fontane sgorganti d'ogni parte? Chi lo splendore della lussureggiante vegetazione? Chi gli acquedotti, che in tanta abbondanza forniscono alla città il salutare elemento?» Ancora prima di Falcando, Ibn-Hankal di Bagdad, verso la metà del secolo X, aveva dato una descrizione di Palermo in un'opera geografica, descrizione che venne pubblicata, tradotta in francese da Michele Amari, a Parigi nel 1845. Il lavoro non è di gran mole, ma ha un certo valore. L'autore divide Palermo in cinque quartieri, e nell'Alcazar (la Paleopoli di Polibio) fa menzione della grandiosa moschea, l'antica cattedrale dei cristiani, nella quale eravi una cappella in cui stava sospesa per aria la tomba di Aristotile. Ivi, nei tempi anteriori, venivano i cristiani a pregare per implorare la pioggia. Nel Khalessah stava la dimora dell'emiro; nel Sakalibah (secondo l'Amari, quartiere degli Schiavoni) c'era il porto; il quarto quartiere era quello della moschea di Ibn-Saktab; a mezzogiorno della città si stendeva il quartiere di El-Jadid, l'attuale Albergaria. Ibn-Hankal accenna anche ai mercanti, alle loro botteghe, specie quella dei macellai, alla preparazione dei papiri, ed ancor più
- 81. descrive le fontane, sopratutto quella di Favara. Ho già ricordato il viaggio di Mohamed-Ibn-Djobair, che contiene pure una pregevole descrizione della città sotto i Normanni: egli paragona Palermo, specialmente la città antica, l'Alcazar, per i suoi bei palazzi e le sue torri, a Cordova. «La città, egli scrive, è fabbricata mirabilmente sullo stesso tipo di Cordova, tutta in pietra lavorata, della cosidetta El-Kiddan. I palazzi reali stanno all'intorno e la circondano come una collana posta sul bel collo di una fanciulla». Le notizie di questi due Arabi e dell'ebreo Beniamino di Tudela completano la breve descrizione del normanno Falcando, il quale descrive pure i principali edifici di Palermo ed afferma che la città al suo tempo si era mantenuta divisa in quartieri, come sotto la dominazione araba, e che parecchie piazze e strade e porte avevano conservato i loro antichi nomi arabi. Da quanto egli narra si arguisce che la città a quel tempo si trovava nel suo massimo splendore. Per la ricchezza e la bellezza dell'architettura indubbiamente il periodo normanno fu il più felice e normanni sono difatti i monumenti più notevoli che ancora rimangono. Gli Svevi, compreso Federico, non hanno lasciato alcun ricordo architettonico. Per varie ragioni essi dimorarono sempre fuori dell'isola, mentre i principi normanni stabilirono colà la loro dimora e cercarono di dare alla città lo splendore necessario alla capitale di una nuova e possente monarchia. Ci resta ora da parlare dei principali monumenti dell'epoca normanna, primo fra tutti il palazzo reale. Questo castello, così straordinariamente interessante in special modo pei Tedeschi, poichè fra le sue mura trascorse la poetica giovinezza uno dei più grandi imperatori di Germania, e del pari interessante per gl'Italiani, che lo considerano quale culla della poesia nazionale,—sorge in fondo alla via detta Cassero, sulla piazza da cui si domina tutta la città. A quanto pare, è l'edificio più antico di Palermo, non risalendo soltanto ai Saraceni, ma ai Cartaginesi, ai Romani ed ai Goti, che vi stabilirono la loro sede principale. Ivi sorgeva indubbiamente il
- 82. palazzo degli emiri, da cui si farebbe derivare il nome di Cassero, che fui poi esteso a tutta la città e finì per rimanere alla strada principale. Si vuole che il palazzo sia stato costruito dal saraceno Adelkam. Ruggero I e il suo successore lo ampliarono; ivi vissero Federico, Manfredi e i suoi successori, che lo resero sempre più vasto, riducendolo nella forma irregolare di palazzo e di fortezza che attualmente presenta. Falcando così ce lo descrive ai tempi di Guglielmo il Malo: «Lo stupendo edificio è costruito con pietre lavorate con grande cura ed arte squisita; è circondato da solide mura ed è pieno di ori e di argenti. Alle estremità sorgono due torri, la Pisana, destinata a custodire i tesori regali, e la Greca, dominante la parte della città chiamata Khemonia. Nel centro sorge una sala straordinariamente decorata, per nome Ioaria, in cui si trattengono in udienze segrete il re e i suoi confidenti, ed in cui il re concede udienza ai baroni, per discutere degli affari più importanti del regno». Quasi ogni traccia di quelle antiche costruzioni è ormai andata perduta; solo rimane la torre di S. Ninfa, che doveva essere la parte più antica del castello, e la famosa cappella palatina. In cima alla torre sorge l'osservatorio, da cui padre Piazzi, il 1o giugno 1801, scoprì Cerere, la stella dal nome della Dea protettrice dell'isola. Il cortile ha tre ordini di portici, che lo circondano; al primo piano trovasi la celebre cappella palatina, uno dei più bei monumenti dell'epoca normanna, costruita da re Ruggero nel 1132 e dedicata a S. Pietro. Essa è connessa al palazzo e non ha una vera facciata; vi si accede da un portico sostenuto da otto colonne di granito egiziano, con mosaici nelle parti superiori, illustranti i fatti dell'antico Testamento e l'incoronazione di Ruggero. Sull'ingresso sta un'iscrizione in lingua greca, araba e latina, che indica come il re avesse fatto disegnare con somma cura nel palazzo un orologio solare. L'iscrizione in lingua araba è stata così tradotta: «Fu dato ordine dalla maestà reale, il magnifico ed illustre re Ruggero, che Iddio protegga ed eterni, di costruire questo strumento per segnare
- 83. le ore, nella metropoli di Sicilia, protetta da Dio, l'anno 536» (dell'Egira). La basilica, davvero caratteristica, fantastica e misteriosa, non paragonabile a nessun altro tempio italiano dello stesso genere, scarsamente illuminata dal sole, ha le pareti rivestite di marmi e di mosaici a figure su fondo d'oro, che a momenti si perdono nella dubbia luce e a momenti, colpite da un raggio improvviso e passeggero, balzano fuori violentemente. Quando io vi entrai, si stava celebrando una messa solenne da morto per l'ultimo re defunto. Nella navata centrale sorgeva un alto catafalco coperto di velluto nero, su cui posava una regale corona d'oro; tutt'intorno ardevano ceri e sotto le volte risuonavano i canti dei sacerdoti e si elevavano nubi d'incenso. Lo spettacolo, fra lo splendore misterioso dei mosaici e le decorazioni arabe, riportava la fantasia ai tempi di re Ruggero. La cappella ha forma di basilica, con una tribuna e superiormente una cupola d'oro. Dieci colonne corinzie, sulle quali riposano gli archi, la dividono in tre navate. Le pareti, all'intorno, sono del pari rivestite, sino all'altezza di dodici palmi, di marmi diversi, e al disopra, ovunque, sono mosaici, che illustrano gli episodi dell'antico e del nuovo Testamento. Sull'arco della tribuna vi è rappresentata l'Annunciazione e sulla tribuna stessa una mezza figura gigantesca di Cristo, con la mano sollevata in atto di benedire. Sotto le figure stanno iscrizioni greche e latine. Questi mosaici non risalgono a Ruggero I, ma a Guglielmo I, secondo quanto afferma Romualdo da Salerno, il quale ha lasciato scritto che «Guglielmo fece ornare di pitture preziose la cappella di S. Pietro, nel palazzo, e ne fece rivestire le pareti di marmi preziosi». Ciò non esclude però che tali lavori fossero stati iniziati, come pare, da Ruggero. A quel che sembra, in Sicilia e nell'Italia meridionale esisteva una scuola di mosaicisti greci, i quali allo stile bizantino diedero una più vivace espressione. Infatti, i mosaici siciliani sono di una dolcezza tutta speciale, non hanno nulla della durezza e dell'angolosità della
- 84. scuola bizantina. Mentre i Veneziani chiamavano mosaicisti da Costantinopoli per la decorazione del S. Marco, i Normanni, allorchè edificarono in Sicilia le loro chiese, vi trovarono già una scuola, che era in fiore al tempo dei Greci, come ne fa fede il tempio grandioso di Gerone a Siracusa, ove era rappresentata in mosaico l'Iliade. La pratica di quest'arte non venne mai meno: sul finire del secolo IV dell'èra cristiana gli artefici del mosaico in Sicilia erano superiori a quelli di Roma, da quel che si rileva dall'epistola che papa Simmaco scrisse ad un certo Antioco di Sicilia per avere dei modelli per i mosaicisti romani: «L'eleganza del tuo ingegno—dice la lettera—e la squisitezza delle tue invenzioni meritano di essere tenute in gran conto, poichè tu hai trovato nell'arte tua mezzi nuovi, prima sconosciuti, e ci piacerebbe poter ornare con qualcosa di tuo i nostri appartamenti: inviaci dunque una tavola, o una lastra di marmo con un modello dei metodi nuovi da te escogitati». L'arte del mosaico non si perdette nell'isola, neppure sotto la dominazione degli Arabi; la Sicilia si era mantenuta sempre in relazioni continue con Costantinopoli, e gli Arabi si valsero dell'opera loro per ornare le proprie case, con figure e sopratutto con disegni capricciosi e con arabeschi. Molto probabilmente i lavori in mosaico del duomo di Salerno, di quello di Palermo, di quello di Monreale, sono opera di scuola indigena dell'Italia meridionale. Ruggero stesso fece eseguire notevoli lavori in mosaico nel suo palazzo e la cappella palatina è adorna di dorature, pitture e arabeschi, che conferiscono ancor più al tempio un carattere misterioso. Nel 1798 fu scoperta nella vòlta di questa cappella una lunga iscrizione araba, in caratteri cufici, compresa in venti grandi compartimenti, che, per quanto si potè decifrarla, si riferiva al fondatore della cappella ed al tempio stesso, con parole esagerate di lode e invocazioni di durata. Siccome poi quest'iscrizione, al pari di tutte le altre arabe che sono nelle chiese palermitane, era di origine cristiana, si rimane davvero stupiti nel trovare adoperata con tanta ingenuità nei tempi cristiani la lingua e le parole del Corano, specie in un'epoca in cui il fanatismo religioso dei crociati aveva raggiunto
- 85. l'apogèo. Come facilmente si arguisce, nessuna di queste iscrizioni è tolta testualmente dal Corano, ma coi caratteri serba anche una certa impronta mussulmana. L'idioma arabo a quel tempo non era ritenuto da meno del greco, e l'Oriente, per intelligenza e per civiltà, era grandemente superiore all'Occidente, e buona parte della letteratura greca era pure stata rivelata all'Occidente per mezzo della lingua araba che divenne quasi una lingua ufficiale. Del resto, i caratteri orientali avevano un non so che di enigmatico, di misterioso; avevano già in sè delle linee geometriche e si prestavano quindi mirabilmente all'ornamento delle pareti e delle colonne delle basiliche siciliane, che formano quasi un nesso tra il cristianesimo e l'Oriente, nella stessa guisa che quelle di Roma lo formano tra il paganesimo e il cristianesimo. Negli archivi della cappella palatina sono conservati parecchi diplomi greci, latini ed arabi del periodo normanno ed un prezioso cofano circondato d'iscrizioni in caratteri cufici. Uscito dall'antica cappella, salii al piano superiore del palazzo e vidi i ricchi e belli appartamenti, che hanno un valore storico, poichè vi si ammira ancora la sala del Parlamento, la sala del trono e quella delle udienze, ove si conserva ancora uno dei due famosi arieti di bronzo, che ornavano un tempo una delle porte di Siracusa; l'altro andò distrutto in un incendio. La sala dei Vicerè ne contiene i ritratti dal 1488 ai giorni nostri. Più interessante di tutte queste sale mi parve la stanza di re Ruggero, ornata di mirabili mosaici, che rappresentano una lotta di centauri, una caccia e degli uccelli. Non si sa veramente perchè questa stanza porti il nome di Ruggero: i mosaici appartengono al XII secolo. Tutti i locali subirono trasformazioni, ed invano io ricercai l'appartamento di Federico II, o almeno una stanza che portasse il suo nome. Qual nome avrebbe del resto potuto dar lustro al palazzo quanto quello di Federigo? Molti principi di diversi paesi, Saraceni, Normanni, Svevi, Spagnuoli, Angioini, Borboni, abitarono questo palagio nella prospera ed avversa fortuna; ma il ricordo di tutti
- 86. questi scompare quando il nostro pensiero va a quel grande imperatore che vi trascorse la sua giovinezza. III. Molte cause contribuirono a far sorgere in Sicilia un'eccellente architettura ecclesiastica ed a darle un'impronta tutta speciale, e sopratutto il carattere di quel secolo in cui il cristianesimo venne in lotta con l'islamismo, in contatto del quale sì a lungo era vissuto, specie quando la dominazione dei Normanni si trovò di fronte alla religione di Maometto. Trionfante, allora, risorse in Sicilia la fede di Cristo e riacquistò il terreno perduto: chiese stupende, capolavori in cui l'ispirazione orientale sopravviveva, monumenti della vittoria della religione cristiana su quella di Maometto, sorsero ovunque. Qualcosa di simile era già avvenuto quando gli Elleni avevano sconfitto nella battaglia d'Imera i Cartaginesi, che avevano invasa tutta quanta l'isola: essi, nell'ebbrezza della vittoria, avevano disseminato il suolo conquistato delle loro magnifiche costruzioni. Gli Dei della Grecia, Giove, Apollo, Cerere e Venere, avevano atterrato il Moloch africano, e il contrasto della civiltà e della religione greca con la barbarie africana si era pronunciato meravigliosamente, avendo Gelone di Siracusa, fra le altre condizioni di pace, imposto ai Cartaginesi di cessare del tutto, qualsiasi sacrificio umano. Dopo oltre quindici secoli, nel secondo grande periodo architettonico siculo, un fatto quasi identico si ripetè, fatto degno di osservazione, unico, che prova ad un tempo come la civiltà umana si svolga secondo le leggi esterne immutabili nella sostanza, varie nella forma. Nella stessa guisa che i Greci nel primo periodo innalzarono i famosi templi di Segesta, di Selinunte, di Agrigento e di Siracusa, i Normanni, una volta liberata l'isola dai novelli Cartaginesi, innalzarono le splendide cattedrali di Monreale, di Palermo, di Cefalù e di Messina. Nel primo periodo la civiltà si era rivolta verso il mezzodì, nel secondo invece si estese nel settentrione, mentre le contrade di mezzodì e di levante decadevano.
- 87. A lato del tempio greco a colonne sorse la cattedrale cristiana; a lato del tempio marmoreo, maestoso, severo di Giunone ad Agrigento, sorse il duomo scintillante d'ori dedicato alla Vergine Maria di Monreale: ambedue segnarono un'epoca di florido rinnovamento nella storia dello spirito umano; ambedue avevano un carattere originale diverso e diversa è quindi l'impressione che oggi suscitano. Chi può esprimere la commozione che si prova nel contemplare, in mezzo alla solitudine della campagna siciliana, uno dei templi maestosi di Agrigento? Si direbbe impossibile poter trovare cosa più perfetta, più bella, più armonica nelle forme. Ma anche entrando in una cappella normanna, nella sua semioscurità, fra le sue navate, sotto i suoi archi, fra quelle pareti splendenti di mosaici, non si può fare a meno, dimentichi dell'antichità, di persuadersi di essere entrati in una novella sfera di beltà e d'armonia. Il sentimento religioso suscitato da questa architettura normanna, che io volentieri, per la sua origine orientale, chiamerei architettura delle Crociate, fu profondo. Da ciò nacquero altre conseguenze. La Chiesa romana di fronte a Bisanzio che sosteneva esser la Sicilia sua proprietà, dovette dare alla conquista dei Normanni quasi un diritto sacro, un'alta consacrazione. Il papa aveva nominato i conti Normanni suoi legati apostolici, aveva concesso a re Ruggero le sacre insegne, quasi a testimonianza della conferma data dalla Chiesa alla sua signoria; i re, inoltre, si ritenevano eletti, non per concessione del papa, ma per grazia di Dio, e difatti rappresentavano nei mosaici delle loro chiese Ruggero e Guglielmo nell'atto di venire incoronati da Cristo stesso. Era dunque necessario che fossero zelanti nel promuovere il risorgimento del cristianesimo nel loro nuovo regno, e tali furono. Malaterra, storico dei due Ruggeri, così parla del conquistatore della Sicilia: «Allorchè il conte Ruggero vide che per la grazia di Dio, tutta quanta la Sicilia faceva omaggio alla sua signoria, non volle mostrarsi ingrato a così gran beneficio e cominciò a render grazia a Dio, ad
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