Liberties Movement Research Articles

The politics of the enabling act (1919)

I doubt whether any event in the constitutional history of Church and State (wrote Randall Davidson in February 1921) has ever been wrought out with so little friction, and on so smooth a current as this great change ... I think it is indisputable that if we had failed in December 1919 to get through Parliament what is popularly known as the Enabling Bill, we might have waited for it for many a long year with increasing and most harmful loss of enthusiasm, and growth of irritation among the progressive groups. Instead of this we have had a continuous stream of praise and thankful gratulation at the way in which the new system has begun to work.These words are a useful reminder that contemporaries were surprised at the easy passage of the enabling act, and that its success therefore requires explanation. The ‘rightness of the cause’ has tended to obscure the fact that right causes often fail. Moreover subsequent criticisms of the act, and particularly the disappointment of the life and liberty movement with what followed, have tended to minimise the significance of the changes it made. Nevertheless the charisma of William Temple and Dick Sheppard seems to have led even the critics to attribute the act’s success to the life and liberty movement; viscount Wolmer’s church self-government association has been relegated to the sidelines; and the verdict of bishop Bell (who in 1919 was Davidson’s chaplain) that ‘Its achievement was due to Randall Davidson more than to any other single person’ has been forgotten. In this paper I shall argue that the political success of the enabling act requires a political explanation, that parliamentary tactics in both the house of commons and the house of lords are therefore of prime importance, and that the significance of the success is enhanced by a fact which has never been discussed before - the initial opposition of the government of the day.

The La Follette Committee: Labor and Civil Liberties in the New Deal

OR a century and a half federal power was the bete noire of American libertarians. After James Madison and the First Congress wrote the fears of their age into the Bill of Rights generations of Americans learned to measure liberty by governmental noninterference. In the twentieth century, when an organized civil liberties movement made its initial appearance on the American scene, it did so in opposition to federal legislation. The National Civil Liberties Bureau, predecessor of the American Civil Liberties Union, was the impassioned response of conscientious objectors and pacifists to the Espionage and Selective Service acts of 1917.1 Federal suppression of aliens and radicals during the first three decades of this century substantiated the assertions of those who attributed to centralized authority the most serious challenge to freedom.2 When the wartime and immediate postwar threats to civil liberties subsided, the ACLU recharted its course and launched a dramatic campaign of service to labor. Throughout the twenties it resolutely defended the rights of labor, organized and unorganized; several Union officials considered an attack on capitalism the corollary of protecting civil liberty.3 The Depression, understandably, predisposed them toward a reform administration. Before long, however, the New Deal reawakened their fear of a leviathan state which would manipulate the national emergency to justify repression. For men like Roger Baldwin and Arthur Garfield Hays the memory of the Espionage and Sedition acts and the Palmer raids was