Subject: Free Speech - The Bill of Rights and Winston Smith’s Diary
Event: The Bill of Rights presented to Congress, 1789; Orwell’s 1984 published, 1949
Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write. -John Adams
On this day in 1789, a draft of the Bill of Rights was presented to the First Federal Congress. The United States Constitution had been ratified on September 17, 1787. It established the organization of the central government and the elaborate system of checks and balances on the power of the three branches. What was not included in the Constitution at this time, however, was an explanation of how the powers of the central government should be balanced against the rights and liberties of the people.
Beginning with the Magna Carta, signed by King John on June 15, 1215, there is a long history of attempts to balance the power of the state or the Crown against the power of the individual. The Bill of Rights is a high-water mark in this history.
Credit for championing the draft of the Bill of Rights goes to James Madison, who would later become the fourth President of the United States. Madison had been the major architect of the document that was written at the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, and in 1789, he demonstrated the same breadth of knowledge and the same skill in forming compromises as he argued for the Bill of Rights.
Madison’s first draft of 17 amendments was approved by the House of Representatives, but 5 of the amendments were later shot down by the Senate. The state legislatures would later remove two more amendments. The first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution, known as the Bill of Rights, were finally adopted on December 15, 1791 (1).
Of all the Bill of Rights’ amendments, it is the First Amendment that is best known and most hallowed. And within this one amendment are packed five essential rights:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
It’s a hard task to rank these rights from most important to least important, but if we focus on the one essential liberty that makes all others possible, it is freedom of speech. One writer who made vigorous arguments for free speech was Christopher Hitchings (1949-2011), the English author and critic who eventually became an American citizen:
The right of others to free expression is part of my own. If someone’s voice is silenced, then I am deprived of the right to hear. Moreover, I have never met nor heard of anybody I would trust with the job of deciding in advance what it might be permissible for me or anyone else to say or read. That freedom of expression consists of being able to tell people what they may not wish to hear, and that it must extend, above all, to those who think differently is, to me, self-evident.
In supporting his case for free speech, Hitchings continues with a history lesson, illustrating that the freedom of the people is inextricably linked with their freedom to express what is on their minds:
From the predawn of human history, despots have relied on the idea that, quite literally, their word is law, or absolute. Pre-Roman and Roman emperors sought to cloak this in the idea that they themselves were supra-human and had themselves deified in their own lifetimes. Later tyrants claimed to rule by “the divine right of kings,” an assertion that didn’t end until the 18th century. All modern successors, from Hitler to Khomeini to Kim Jong-il, have insisted that only one man or one party or one book represents the absolute truth, and to challenge it is folly or worse. But all it takes is one little boy to blurt out the inconvenient truth that the emperor is as naked as the day he was born, and with that, the entire edifice of absolutism begins to crumble. (2)
On the same day we celebrate the freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, we can coincidentally look at a piece of writing that warns us not to take those freedoms for granted. It was on this day in 1949 that George Orwell’s novel 1984 was published.
Orwell imagines a dystopian future where a one-party government is in a perpetual state of war and is led by an all-seeing but unseen leader called Big Brother. In this society, not only is writing and speaking your mind forbidden, but also is thinking wrong thoughts, i.e., “thought crime.”
In the novel’s opening chapter, the protagonist Winston Smith commits an act of rebellion, an act that we all take for granted. In the world of the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the simple act that Winston performs could lead to punishment by death or a sentence of twenty-five years of forced labor. Facing a Rubicon moment, Winston contemplates his act of defiance:
The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary. . . . He dipped the pen into the ink and then faltered for just a second. A tremor had gone through his bowels. To mark the paper was the decisive act. In small clumsy letters he wrote:
April 4th, 1984.
He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him.. . .
Suddenly he began writing in sheer panic, only imperfectly aware of what he was setting down. His small but childish handwriting straggled up and down the page, shedding first its capital letters and finally even its full stops:
April 4th, 1984. Last night to the flicks. All war films. . . .
Recall, Retrieve, Recite, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason: Besides today’s date, what is the connection between the U.S. Bill of Rights and George Orwell’s novel 1984?
Challenge - Know Your Rights: Read all of the original ten amendments in the Bill of Rights. Select one that you find interesting and do a bit of research on its history. What Supreme Court cases, for example, have been decided based on or in support of this right?
Sources:
1-The National Constitution Center. “On this day: James Madison introduces the Bill of Rights.” 8 June 2022.
2-Hitchens, Christopher. Why Even Hate Speech Needs to Be Protected. Reader’s Digest 24 October 2022.
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