Liberties Movement Research Articles

Unfulfilled Future Perfect? Comics as a Site of Liberty in Post-Mao China

ABSTRACT This study examines the changing ideological landscape of post-Mao China through the prism of the science fiction work, The Three Courts, published in the late 1970s. This work and its comic adaptations are not landmark works of literary history and popular culture but rather a utopian fable addressing the profound issues of the reform. We demonstrate how the comic version received a temporary ideological license to support the popular liberty movement, which reflects the cooperation of officials and civil society in the face of the socialist faith crisis and how such collaboration broke down in 1979. By analyzing the two revisions made to this work, we argue that the comic can be seen as a site of liberty that contains radical political content, but its visual output has not been censored. Thus, before the new myth of post-socialism took shape, this text reveals the unfulfilled expectations of democratized reforms by pro-democratic knowledge elites and cultural bureaucrats standing among the ruins of Mao-era China.

Self-Government Without Disestablishment: From the Enabling Act to the General Synod

The process of Church–State separation began 90 years before the 1919 Enabling Act, which gave the Church Assembly legislative powers. The Assembly was conceived not by William Temple's Life and Liberty movement but by aristocratic Conservative politicians, motivated by practical efficiency and High Church principles. With Church lawyers, they dominated it for 40 years. The Church's response to Parliament's rejection of the 1928 Prayer Book, to the Matrimonial Causes Act 1937 and, in the 1950s, to the impossibility of fully articulating in the Church of England's canon law its doctrine on marriage discipline and the seal of the confessional, was united, confident and defiant. The Worship and Doctrine Measure 1974 largely completed efforts to achieve legislative autonomy without disestablishment. The General Synod era has seen changes in both Church and State. The traditions that eclipsed the Church's former ‘Centre-High’ consensus have been less concerned to underline the Church's distinctive identity and doctrines, about which the Synod has been less united. Among MPs, Conservative High Churchmanship and concern for minorities have waned, while expectation that the Church's practice will reflect contemporary social attitudes has increased, placing the long-term survival of the 1919 settlement in question.

Porozumienie Stronnictw Demokratycznych 1948-1950 – próba konsolidacji polskiej emigracji politycznej

Agreement of Democratic Parties in the Years 1948-1950 – an Attempt to Consolidate the Milieu of Polish Political Immigration
 After his arrival to London in 1947, Stanisław Mikołajczyk undertook endeavors to form a national committee, which would be a projection of the World War II quadruple agreement, which brought together Polish Peasant Party (Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe), Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna), Labor Party (Stronnictwo Pracy) and National Party (Stronnictwo Narodowe). The creation of the Agreement of Democratic Parties was to be the initial step towards the future cooperation and functioning. Yet the National Party was not interested in such cooperation and the Agreement turned out to be a weak entity, unable to conduct active policy among Polish emigration. Differences between parties proved to be too big a barrier, among others regarding the question of the legality of Polish government in exile. The final blow to Mikołajczyk’s concept was the creation of Political Council by National Party, Polish Socialist Party and the Polish Liberty Movement “Independence and Democracy” (Polski Ruch Wolnościowy „Niepodległość i Demokracja”).

Commonsense anticommunism: labor and civil liberties between the world wars

Between the Great War and Pearl Harbor, conservative labor leaders declared themselves America's first line of defense against Communism. In this surprising account, Jennifer Luff shows how the American Federation of Labor fanned popular anticommunism but defended Communists' civil liberties in the aftermath of the 1919 Red Scare. The AFL's commonsense anticommunism, she argues, steered a middle course between the American Legion and the ACLU, helping to check campaigns for federal sedition laws. But in the 1930s, frustration with the New Dealorder led labor conservatives to redbait the Roosevelt administration and liberal unionists and abandon their reluctant civil libertarianism for red scare politics. That frustration contributed to the legal architecture of federal anticommunism that culminated with the McCarthyist fervor of the 1950s.Relying on untapped archival sources, Luff reveals how labor conservatives and the emerging civil liberties movement debated the proper role of the state in policing radicals and grappled with the challenges to the existing political order posed by Communist organizers. Surprising conclusions about familiar figures, like J. Edgar Hoover, and unfamiliar episodes, like a German plot to disrupt American munitions manufacture, make Luff's story a fresh retelling of the interwar years.

Contested technologies: The emergence of the digital liberties movement

The digital liberties movement is an emerging social movement that draws together activism around online censorship and surveillance, free/libre and open source software, and intellectual property. This paper uses the social movement literature’s framework to build an understanding of the movement, expanding the dominant framework by including a focus on the networks which sustain the movement. While other communities and movements have addressed these issues in the past, activists within the digital liberties movement are beginning to build a sense of a collective identity and a master frame that ties together these issues. They are doing this in online spaces, including blogs, and through campaigns around landmark issues, which also help to build the network which the movement relies upon. The 2012 campaign against the U.S. Stop Online Piracy Act has highlighted the movement’s strength, but will also, perhaps, raise challenges for digital liberties activists as they confront the tension between attempts to disavow politics and a profoundly political project.

From Public Interest to Private Rights: Free Speech, Liberal Individualism, and the Making of Modern Tort Law

Drawing on John Witt's 2007 book, Patriots and Cosmopolitans: Hidden Histories of American Law, this essay explores the role of the interwar civil liberties movement in rehabilitating the discourse of rights and privatizing the American welfare state. In the years after World War I, most proponents of free speech were hostile to Lochner‐era legalism and preferred to pursue civil liberties through legislative and regulatory measures as a means of advancing the public interest. By the onset of World War II, however, they had instead adopted a court‐centered strategy that emphasized individual autonomy. The popular and political resonance of their new state‐skeptical vocabulary suggests that post‐New Deal liberalism in America was a hybrid of classical and Progressive approaches.

Patriots and cosmopolitans: hidden histories of American law

Ranging widely from the founding era to Reconstruction, from the making of the modern state to post - New Deal limits, John Fabian Witt illuminates the legal and constitutional foundations of American nationhood through the little-known stories of five patriots and critics. He shows how law and constitutionalism have powerfully shaped and been shaped by the experience of nationhood at key moments in American history. Founding Father James Wilson's star-crossed life is testament to the capacity of American nationhood to capture the imagination of those who have lived within its orbit. For South Carolina freedman Elias Hill, the 19th Century saga of black citizenship in the United States gave way to a quest for a black nationhood of his own on the West African coast. Greenwich Village radical Crystal Eastman became one of the most articulate critics of American nationhood, advocating world federation and other forms of supranational government and establishing the modern American civil liberties movement. By contrast, the self-conscious patriotism of Dean Roscoe Pound of Harvard Law School and trial lawyer Melvin Belli aimed to stave off what Pound and Belli saw as the dangerous growth of a foreign administrative state. In their own way, each of these individuals came up against the power of American national institutions to shape and constrain the directions of legal change. Yet, their engagements with American nationhood remade the institutions and ideals of the United States even as the national tradition shaped and constrained the course of their lives.

Remembering the Brisbane Protests, 1965–72

Beyond just my bias as a participant, I see a need to place the understanding of the innovative and distinctive character of Brisbane protests of the late 1960s and early 1970s on solid analytical foundations. These protests remain excluded from satisfying historical debate: while acknowledged as the product of the Queensland legacy of illiberality (Lunn; Whitton; Fitzgerald 1985, 1986), their connections with broader national and international social movements are largely ignored. This essay provides important details but points to broader reflections as well in its analysis of the civil liberties movement (CLM). My discussion focuses on the period 1965–75 but places the Brisbane protests historically in the general moves for liberalisation in the aftermath of World War II.

The Royal Commission on Espionage and the Spy Trials of 1946-9: A Case Study in Parliamentary Supremacy

Through an examination of the 1946 Royal Commission on Espionage, this paper explores the relationship between Parliamentary supremacy and the civil liberties movement in the period immediately after the Second World War. The commission was formed in late 1945 in response to the defection of Russian cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko, and investigated the existence of a Russian-led spy ring that had recruited several Canadian civil servants. The commission is unique in Canadian history because it was empowered under the War Measures Act, which granted the commission enormous powers. In examining the legal debate surrounding the extreme measures used by this commission, this paper attempts to offer a few answers to some important questions about Canadian civil liberties. What were the consequences of the commission's actions? Do Canadians accept the argument that a government can violate individual liberties to protect the integrity of the state? The Royal Commission on Espionage played a central role in stimulating debate over the need to develop greater legal protection for individual rights against state abuse in Canada.

Toward the Charter: Canadians and the Demand for a National Bill of Rights, 1929-1960 (review)

Reviewed by: Toward the Charter: Canadians and the Demand for a National Bill of Rights, 1929-1960 Kirk Niergarth Toward the Charter: Canadians and the Demand for a National Bill of Rights, 1929-1960. Christopher MacLennan. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003. Pp. 236, illus. $70.00 cloth, $27.95 paper The teleology implied by the title Toward the Charter is characteristic of this 'narrative analysis of the bill of rights idea in Canada' (9). The term narrative analysis is a curious fusion - and here we have seemingly more narrative than analysis - but perhaps what is really implied is 'selective discourse analysis,' that is, an attempt to trace various manifestations of 'bill of rights' talk that cumulatively construct a linear storyline. The [End Page 160] climax of MacLennan's story is the 1982 Charter, but his book ends two decades earlier in the aftermath of the passage of Diefenbaker's much-maligned and largely ineffective 1960 Bill of Rights. MacLennan's narrative approach may be justly criticized for reducing the complexity of thirties, forties, and fifties rights discourse and for privileging certain manifestations and connotations of the 'bill of rights idea' above others. With these limitations in mind, Towards the Charter could still be used effectively at the undergraduate level to provide students with a basic framework for understanding the history of rights legislation in Canada before 1960. MacLennan's story begins with the 1931 conviction of eight Toronto Communists under the auspices of the infamous Section 98 of the Criminal Code. While the Canadian state's record on human rights was hardly unblemished before this juncture, MacLennan is probably correct to highlight this notorious case because of the range of supporters who protested the perceived violation of the Communists' traditional legal civil liberties. Many prominent Depression-era civil libertarians did not themselves suffer civil rights abuses (including Communists, recent immigrants, the unemployed, women, and racial and religious minorities); rather they were often highly educated, waspish men like Frank Scott, B.K. Sandwell, and Arthur Lower, who had access to the mainstream media and connections to the increasingly powerful group of academics-turned-civil-servants that Douglas Owram has dubbed the 'government generation.' These figures remain central to MacLennan's story as it slips into the 1940s and discusses the influence on the civil liberties movement of the controversial Defence of Canada Regulations; the evacuation, deportation, and dispersal of Japanese Canadians; and the suspension of the legal rights of espionage suspects in the aftermath of the 1946 Gouzenko affair. MacLennan regards the last as a watershed in demonstrating to the public the need for a national bill of rights. Despite efforts of rights activists in Canada and at the United Nations, the federal government was reluctant to endorse domestic or international rights legislation. Ministers and bureaucrats argued that a bill of rights would undermine traditional parliamentary sovereignty and provide no additional protection to Canadians. But the main stumbling block was, and would remain, Dominion-provincial relations. From the opposition benches, John Diefenbaker had argued for a Canadian bill of rights for more than a decade, but his ascendancy to the prime minister's office in 1957 faced him with the difficulty of obtaining consent from provincial premiers like Maurice Duplessis to achieve a constitutionally entrenched rights guarantee. Diefenbaker was forced to argue that a [End Page 161] federal parliamentary statute, rather than a constitutional amendment, could provide adequate and effective protection of Canadians' rights. But his argument was rejected by constitutional scholars like Frank Scott and Bora Laskin, who correctly anticipated the limited effectiveness of Diefenbaker's Bill of Rights. MacLennan's slim monograph is especially effective in navigating through the machinations of the parliamentary committees and justice department bureaucracies that complicated and delayed rights legislation in Canada. MacLennan should also be commended for recognizing the variety of rights activists and organizations of the time - including Communist, labour, ethnic, religious, and women's groups. His coverage of these groups, however, gives insufficient attention to the differences in their rights claims and ability to voice them effectively. In the book's only explicit foray into rights theory, MacLennan argues that the Canadian case follows the international shift in...

Radical Times: Brisbane in the Sixties and Seventies

This conference organised by the fledgling Brisbane Labour History Association with the assistance of the Queensland Council of Unions was long overdue. If its organisers were inspired by the apparent success of the earlier Sydney Labour History Conference, which traversed similar themes and issues, the Brisbane show emphasised how different its historical context and political experiences were. The conference participants did not engage in amnesiac nostalgia for radical times past. Instead, they offered analyses and testimonies of how radical their social movements were within the confines of the big country town of Brisbane where racism, political repression, and social conservatism held sway. Only Dan O'Neill spoke briefly but incisively about the roots of Brisbane's sunny oppressiveness and its reaction to the first stirrings of political engagement by a moderate minority of university students to the American war in Vietnam, military conscription, institutional and casual racism, South African apartheid, sexism and women's liberation. The jack-boot tradition of Bjelke-Petersen's police force to any manifestation of a student political rally, march or demonstration deepened their political radicalism and swelled their numbers. Unlike Sydney or Melbourne during the same period, there were few Queensland trade union leaders and rank-and-file unionists who actively supported the student struggles. This point was emphasised by the 'southerner,' Alan Anderson who was a Plumber's Union delegate to the Brisbane Trades and Labour Council. 'Ando' stressed that most ALP union officials were either indifferent or openly hostile to the emerging civil liberties movement, led by the St Lucia students. The few Communist Party union leaders may have been personally sympathetic to the students, but never attempted to agitate for these causes as Jack Mundey and Norm Gallagher had done on Sydney and Melbourne BLF building sites. Nevertheless, Left trade union leaders, through Anderson's encouragement, allowed the student radicals to establish 'Foco' within the portals of Brisbane's Trade Hall. 'Foco' became, for a time, a weekly gathering for the alienated young. Rock music, underground posters, and the subversive ideas of the New Left found a willing 'Foco' audience. If some of Australia's best rock bands played their first gig at the Brisbane Trades Hall, many 'Focoists' became radical activists against war, racism and poverty. Only when 'Foco' was forced to vacate its union bastion because of exaggerated complaints about noise and refuse did the police raid and close down every other venue in Brisbane hired by the 'Foco' organisers.

Spies, Lies, and a Commission: A Case Study in the Mobilization of the Canadian Civil Liberties Movement

Left History features articles from a variety of theoretical approaches; these include feminist, marxist, and postmodernist deliberations on topics such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, culture, the state, labour, the environment, theory, and method.

In the Shadows of Gompers: Lucy Robins and the Politics of Amnesty, 1918–1922

This essay examines Lucy Robins's contributions to the amnesty movement. A protégé of Emma Goldman, Robins undertook her amnesty campaign at Goldman's behest. Frustrated with what she defined as the left's lack of “constructive” solutions, Robins shifted her political alliances and joined the American Federation of Labor. Robins's choice to pursue amnesty within the A.F. of L., the essay argues, sheds important light on the early history of the civil liberties movement and its relationship to labor politics.

A world without war: how U.S. feminists and pacifists resisted World War I

Frances H. Early traces the connection between feminist antiwar activism and the emergence of the modern civil liberties movement in World War I America. Through the lives and deeds of Frances Witherspoon and Tracy Mygatt, Early provides a detailed account of the activities of the New York Bureau of Legal Advice, a mixed-gender organization associated with the feminist-oriented, left-wing pacifist movement of the war years. A World Without War explores the role of women's political activism during an era of militarism and social repression. Early shows how a small coalition of activists struggled to expose the antidemocratic forces of the wartime state, including its brutal treatment of conscientious objectors. She presents the personal dimension to pacifist work, as women and men disrupted conventional wartime notions of femininity and masculinity with a view to fashioning nonviolent gender identities.

Distinguished Dissenters and Opposition to the 1919-1920 Red Scare

This study traces the activity of an important civil liberties coalition which developed in response to the 1919-1920 Red Scare, a time when national and state governments used the fear of Russian Communism to justify persecution of left-wing organizations, and mass deportation of suspect radical aliens. The threats to freedom of speech and due process of law were so severe that influential people organized a loose but highly effective civil liberties movement to block passage of draconian sedition laws and rescue thousands of innocent aliens from deportation. The book examines the political strategy and follows its networking from the American Civil Liberties Union and Harvard Law School to the United States Department of Labor and federal courts. The historical narrative provides a basis for the development of a theory of opposition to cycles of political repress, the libertarian check, and provides an opportunity to evaluate the strengths and limitations of civil liberties in the United States.

Feminism, peace, and civil liberties: Women's role in the origins of the World War I civil liberties movement

Historians of the women's movement in the World War I era tend, understandably, to concentrate on the final heroic chapter of the suffrage campaign. Since the majority of suffragists followed their leader, Carrie Chapman Catt, into the war effort after April 6, 1917, suffragist‐feminist patriotism is a dominant theme. Recently historians have begun to chronicle women's pre‐war and wartime peace work, particularly through the aegis of the Woman's Peace Party, founded in early 1915.1 Women's civil liberties activism during the war and in the Red Scare aftermath is still uncharted terrain. There is, to date, little appreciation of the way the World War I era experience in the United States influenced a small but determined and articulate number of left‐wing feminists to become civil‐libertarian activists. In this article I examine women's involvement in several important civil liberties organizations and argue that the convictions and activities of women not only helped to shape the agenda of the burgeoning ...

From Custom to Right: The Politicization of the Village in Early Meiji Japan

In 1874 Itagaki Taisuke and other critics of the newly established Meiji government submitted a petition demanding a popularly elected national assembly. This is said to be the origin of the Liberty and People's Rights Movement (jiyū minken undō). Around the same time a number of local political leaders intensified their campaign for the creation of village assemblies. Although the demand for local autonomy in the early Meiji period was both deep-felt and widespread, only a few scholars, notably Neil Waters, have diverted their attention from Itagaki and other political activists and thinkers at the center. An examination of Meiji local politics is nonetheless essential to understand Japan's modern political development.

The Protagonists of the Italian Liberty Movement

The Protagonists of the Italian Liberty Movement

The Civil Liberties Movement in India: New Approaches to the State and Social Change

The Civil Liberties Movement in India: New Approaches to the State and Social Change

The Civil Liberties Movement in India: New Approaches to the State and Social Change

The Civil Liberties Movement in India: New Approaches to the State and Social Change