O tenderest of mercies! The right to speak one’s mind freely, the right to question and challenge—upon which all other rights are hinged!
1. “Corporate Personhood”
The first attack came almost two hundred years ago in 1819, as the Industrial Revolution was beginning to spin serious wheels in the budding Empire. Blacks picked cotton in the South and the mills hummed in Lowell, Mass., and other river-blessed locations in the North. It was a hundred years after Newcomen’s steam engine, and less than two decades after Fulton’s steamboat would once again spur our westward expansion. Given such multifactoral impetus, and its own proclivity—established by Marshall—to oversight, how could our Supreme Court restrain its worst intentions?
And so it declared, in “Trustees of Dartmouth College vs Woodward,” the principle of “corporate personhood.” The Court was essentially restating the 14thAmendment, but now equating the “rights” of corporations to be as free as real, live, human beings from any State’s denial of “equal protection” under the laws within its jurisdiction.
Of course, this 14th Amendment “equal protection” did not apply to cotton-picking slaves, “Indian savages,” women, etc.! And that’s the assault on our national consciousness and conscience. And we have lived with that assault for nearly two centuries!
2. “Fire in a Crowded Theater”
Fast forward exactly 1 century. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. is now Chief Justice, and the “budding Empire” is now fully fledged, not content with spreading its eagle-wings over its own continent, but, since the Monroe Doctrine, having declared its hegemony over the Western hemisphere, tightening such with the Spanish-American war—the result of which sees it slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Filipinos when they declare their own right to “freedom of speech” and an independent republic!
Up to my own boyhood in New York City, Oliver Wendell Holmes’ father’s poem, “Old Ironsides,” was still standard 9th grade fare. They say the acorn doesn’t fall far from the oak, and we may discern something of his son’s patriotic fervor in his father’s bombastic poem about an a War of 1812 ship about to be scuttled. Here’s the middle stanza: