"If any single thing gives us reason to have confidence in the infinite future of the American people it is the fact that this most basic of our traditions is capable of infinite expansion. It does not limit us. On the contrary, it forever invites us to grow—to see beyond the horizon, to look ahead to a fairer and a brighter day, to develop and to strengthen the noble concept of brotherhood by which we live…" He indicates that its best and strongest defense was in the reactions which individual Americans made when they found the tradition under attack. They strengthened freedom simply by living it.

"Not all of the petty, malignant forces of reaction—the men who think the people need a guardian and a keeper to guide their way into a blighting conformity; the men who dread freedom unless it be limited to folks who think and talk as they themselves would do; the men who believe that there should be classes and grades in American citizenship, and dread anything that tends to remove the barriers that set man apart from man—not all of these together, operating in a time of confusion and danger, can summon a force strong enough to beat down the simple, instinctive reaction that rises in the breast of the ordinary American when he sees American freedoms being cut down."

The country had begun with a demand for freedom of religious belief, in the Plymouth colony and Providence plantations, as well as in William Penn's settlement of Pennsylvania and the charter for the first colonization of Maryland.

From there, freedom was thought to mean freedom from foreign oppression, resulting in the Revolution to make that freedom good.

Then the concept of freedom came to embrace freedom from domestic tyranny, resulting in the Constitution, and the realization that man also had to be free from dominion by government, thus adding the Bill of Rights, as much needed at present as it had been at the Founding. The country had also come to see freedom as being unlimited, applying to persons of all colors, all races and all conditions. The country had struggled through the Civil War to make that extension of freedom possible.

"All of these are not separate freedoms so much as they are varying forms of an undivided whole. For one of the things we have learned in this country is that freedom has to be indivisible. Anything that limits any part of it, for anyone, is a menace to all of us, a threat to the tradition by which we live. Our American gospel applies unto the least of these, our brethren; we share all of our rights with them, and any denial of freedom, to anybody, anywhere along the line, applies ultimately to all of us."

He indicates that American freedom at present was under attack, "very often, by people who insist that they are trying to defend it. In a short-range view conditions are extremely ominous; yet I think if we look at our present situation long-range we can see that we have little reason to be afraid. We get waves of reaction in this country, periodically, in times of extreme national stress, and the great national tradition comes under attack—seems, indeed, to be in a fair way to be overwhelmed entirely. But the waves always pass—with however much incidental injustice and oppression for certain individual victims—because the instinct in the American mind and heart which the tradition is based on is, finally, irrepressible."

In the early days of the nation, there had been the Alien and Sedition Acts, at a time when Europe was torn by a great war and unpredictable revolutions, with the U.S. position seeming insecure, with external pressures becoming all but intolerable such that people hardly knew which way to turn to find national security, resulting in unbelievably repressive laws, effectively outlawing freedom of the press and freedom of speech, it having been made a crime to criticize acts of the national Administration, and editors who spoke out against those laws were imprisoned. Thomas Jefferson's mail was opened in the hope that something could be found for which he could be arrested for sedition. A man who sought to obtain signatures to a petition to Congress urging repeal of the laws had been arrested and sentenced to jail, and lawyers who defended victims of the oppression were denounced by judges as traitors. "To all appearances, American freedom had been done to death."

But all of that period had lasted only for two years or more, at which point there was a change when in 1801, Thomas Jefferson became President and the sedition laws expired, restoring freedom in a form stronger than ever in response to the attack on it. Through history, those who had inspired and supported the sedition laws were remembered only because they had come to be symbolic of the stupidity and viciousness of those who tried briefly and unsuccessfully to turn backward the mainstream of American life.

During the early part of the Civil War, a brigadier general in the Union Army had been called before a Congressional committee and questioned because of suspicion that he had been traitorously dealing with the Confederacy, when his actual offense had only been to follow the orders of his superiors and return fugitive slaves to their Maryland owners, resulting in offense to the powerful and suspicious Abolitionists then rising in dominance in Congress. He was accused of nothing and never quite realized that he was even under suspicion, but was finally removed from command and sent to prison by the War Department, daring not to oppose a powerful Congressional committee, leading to the ruination of his career as a soldier. He had been released eventually, though not exactly cleared, because no one had ever formally accused him of anything and so there was no charge from which he could be cleared.

There were many more such cases from American history, some of which had been in comparatively recent times, but it was important to realize that such things which occurred from time to time were only of temporary duration and effect, and the country emerged from them, with those who had caused these aberrations passing into history and forgotten as only melancholy footnotes to history.

"We are today emerging from the latest of these spasms of terror. We have seen more highly discouraging things in recent years. We have seen an atmosphere in which the mere fact that a man was accused of something was taken as proof of his guilt. We have been reminded of Mark Twain's comment on the reign of terror that prevailed in late medieval times under the Doges of Venice, when a committee on public safety received anonymous accusations against the loyalty of citizens; as Mark Twain remarked, if the committee could find no proof to support an accusation it usually found the accused guilty on the grounds [that] this simply showed how deep and devious and inscrutable the man's villainy really was. We have witnessed an era in which it was widely taken as a crime for an accused person to invoke the Bill of Rights itself in his own defense—as if the provisions of the Bill of Rights were not meant to operate in precisely a time like the present. We have seen times in which no one in authority seemed willing to place the slightest amount of trust in the innate loyalty, good faith and intelligence of the American people; times which led former Sen. Harry Cain to burst out with the cry: 'A whole clique of spies could hardly do as much damage to us as could our failure as a government to have confidence in the people.'"

Mr. Catton indicates that the crest of that wave, however, was now passing because the American people were responding to the deeply held instinct to defend the tradition of freedom when it came under attack, and because the courts had stood firmly in defense of individual liberties, as well as because many groups and individuals had stood up for the rights of their fellow Americans. Scientists had made a contribution through their efforts to promote rational discussion of the dangers of too much secrecy about their work. The Congressional committee headed by Representative John Moss of California had thrown light on the secretive practices of some Government agencies, and the press, through its reports on that Committee's work and through the efforts of individual members of the press, had helped to break through some of the official barriers to free up the flow of information.

The American people were gradually obtaining the materials for a better factual understanding of Communism within the U.S. and in the world. The events in Hungary the prior fall had clearly demonstrated the essential falsity of Communist claims to be concerned for civil liberties, and had contributed to the decline of Communism both in the U.S. and in other free countries.

He clarifies that when he indicated that the crest of the wave was passing, he did not mean that no threats to liberty remained. "Arbitrary censorship both by private and governmental groups has continued to affect a wide area of American life. Government restrictions on the flow of information are still excessive in some agencies. Much confusion remains in the administration of security measures; some unfair procedures have become institutionalized. The pressures of conformity are still strong in many places."

He expresses confidence that the American tradition would flourish in the future as it had in the past. Freedom was an abiding inner faith in the country which could not be limited by doubt or confusion or fear, being built into the American soul, and in the long-run, unconquerable. "The secret of the American tradition is freedom—freedom unabridged and unadulterated, freedom that applies to everybody in the land at all times and places, freedom for those with whom we disagree as well as for those with whom we do agree."

He finds that the secret of freedom was courage arising in individual citizens, leading to the kind of actions which were commemorated in the letters with which the present meeting was concerned, which had led the poet to cry: "Yet, freedom, yet, thy banner, torn but flying,/ Streams like the thundercloud against the wind."

Courage, in turn, rested on faith in which the people believed and lived by as immortal and everlasting, "a fundamental truth of the universe with which we move on toward the future. It is on this faith that our confidence finally rests. For out of this faith come those noble statements which show why this American tradition is in the end invulnerable; statements like that one of an Oklahoma schoolmaster (who lost his job battling discrimination): 'In a thing like this you don't stop to think. You just do what you feel you have to do.'

"On that spirit, and in that spirit, we can go ahead to broaden the great American tradition."

The piece propitiously appeared just eight days before the death of Senator McCarthy. It is reprinted on this website just eight days after a jury in Manhattan found a former White House occupant guilty of 34 felony counts, ultimately convicting him of having falsified business records to cover up a large campaign contribution designed to suppress adverse stories to the candidate and thus to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, as it no doubt did just enough to enable an electoral college victory, convictions which, one way or the other, will inevitably end the political career of the worst demagogue and least qualified person ever to occupy the White House, whose view of freedom embraces ultimate, unrestrained freedom for those who support him politically, even though they be thugs, racists and dictators big and small, and the lock-up or threat of same for all who oppose, the way of totalitarian regimes, a despiser, in the end, as with his mentor Roy Cohn, adjutant to Senator McCarthy, of American freedom in the broad sense as embodied in the Fourteenth Amendment.

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