John Seigenthaler knows the First Amendment perhaps as well as anyone. But it wasn’t always that way.
“It was almost 60 years ago that I first walked into a newsroom,” he said in his presentation to about 100 people at Seattle Public Library. “For most of those years as a working journalist, I took the First Amendment for granted.”
Not anymore. He founded the First Amendment Center in 1991 with the mission of creating national discussion, dialogue and debate about our First Amendment rights and values.
“The great thing I have learned is that it really belongs to everybody,” he said. However, he added: “I think it is at risk today.”
Seigenthaler has become an eloquent national champion of the First Amendment. He delivered an entertaining, educational multi-media speech that left no one unmoved or unconcerned about our basic rights as citizens.
With a mane of wavy white hair, a lyrical Southern accent (he’s from Tennessee), and an encyclopedic knowledge of First Amendment history, Seigenthaler kept his audience alert and engaged for 90 minutes.
He calls his presentation, which he has been doing nationwide for the last 10 years, “basically an exercise in storytelling.” But he added that it is “interactive” with challenging questions. “When I tell publishers that we’re gonna have a pop quiz, they start looking for the bathroom,” he said.
Using PowerPoint slides filled with multiple-choice questions, pithy quotes, riveting photographs, textbook pages, newspaper and magazine articles, Seigenthaler illuminated the history and evolution of the amendment that gave Americans our fundamental rights. He also raised concern about the ongoing struggle to ensure that we maintain them.
His presentation was not only enlightening, but fun. Assistants tossed First Amendment Center T-shirts, coffee mugs and CDs to audience members who raised their hands with the right answers to questions he put up on the big screen.
Question: “How many freedoms are guaranteed by the First Amendment?”
“Five,” said someone in the audience. “T-shirt!” shouted Seigenthaler.
Question: “Who can name them?”
Seattle Times Editor-at-Large Mike Fancher raised his hand. “Religion, press, petition and assembly, and speech,” Fancher said. “T-shirt!” shouted Seigenthaler.
“Every year we do a poll of more than 1,015 people,” he said. “Only three out of 100 can do what Mike just did.”
He added: “There are holes in our history. Public education and private education are not doing a very good job” when it comes to our Constitution and Bill of Rights.
He put a photo of President George W. Bush on the screen, with a quote from a speech Bush made shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks: “Freedom and fear are at war,” Bush said.
Seigenthaler noted that if you look back in history, “When we are a frightened nation, our civil liberties are most at risk.” When freedom and fear are at war, we’re in danger, he said.
Seigenthaler is also a senior advisory trustee of the Freedom Forum, and one of the key figures behind the Newseum in Washington, D.C., which just opened in its new location on Pennsylvania Avenue, halfway between the White House and Capitol Hill.
“When they drive by it, they see the words of the First Amendment emblazoned on the front of the Newseum” in large letters, he said: “Congress shall make no law….” However, he noted, “They can still ignore it, sometimes, but they know it’s there.”
Question: “Who wrote the First Amendment?” Three people in the audience got that right: James Madison. (They all won T-shirts.)
Seigenthaler explained that Madison actually “flip-flopped” on having a Bill of Rights. He was originally against it, having “bonded” with Alexander Hamilton in writing the Federalist Papers. Hamilton opposed a Bill of Rights, calling it “dangerous.” But Thomas Jefferson wrote to Madison from Paris that we needed a Bill of Rights, and Madison changed his mind. “It was expediency,” Seigenthaler said, noting that Madison was running for office at the time and wanted to get elected from Virginia.
Seigenthaler put up a photo of a man named Francis Bellamy, and asked if anyone knew what he did for a living. No one did.
“He wrote the Pledge of Allegiance,” Seigenthaler said. Turns out Bellamy was a Baptist preacher – and a socialist! “His favorite sermon was ‘Jesus, the Socialist,’” Seigenthaler said. “He was thrown out of the pulpit and was looking for a job.”
In 1892, on the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ voyage in1492, Bellamy was asked to write something for Youth Companion magazine to celebrate the United States flag. He wrote the pledge. However, Seigenthaler noted wryly, the magazine’s owner also owned a flag factory and sold 100,000 flags to schools in two years for $10 each.
Today Bellamy’s words are memorized and recited every day, he said, but who can recite the First Amendment?
Seigenthaler put up a photo of a father flanked by a young son and daughter. He said they were the Gobitas family, and were Jehovah’s Witnesses in Minersville, Pennsylvania.
One day in school in 1935, young Billy Gobitas refused to recite the pledge of allegiance, saying he would support “no graven images” for religious reasons. He put his hand in his pocket. His teacher tried to pull it out and make him say the pledge. It became a test case for First Amendment rights.
“This was a pogrom,” Seigenthaler said. In a year, 1,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses were prosecuted, their homes and cars were vandalized, or they were run out of town. One man was beaten and castrated by a mob. “It was an outrage,” Seigenthaler said. Billy Gobitas’s case was not upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, but three years later they reversed that decision.
Question: Ratification of the U.S. Constitution was tied to:
a) preservation of slavery
b) Bill of Rights
c) Two senators for every state
d) no state income tax.
Answer: b) “T-shirt!”
“We got our rights largely because the people demanded it,” Seigenthaler said. “Most states said they’d ratify the Constitution if the Congress passed a Bill of Rights.”
“This Amendment belongs to all of us,” he said. “It belongs to the disenfranchised, it belongs to the disadvantaged.”
In his concluding remarks, Seigenthaler asked: “What has this amendment done to make us a better country in the 20th Century?”
He put up a photograph of Alice Paul, a leader of the National Women’s Party, who led a crusade for women’s right to vote in 1918. About 180 women went to jail for picketing the White House, Seigenthaler noted. They burned Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations speeches about freedom, setting fires in urns on the sidewalk. They circled the White House with pickets and marched on Pennsylvania Avenue. They were beaten and spat upon.
“They were exercising their First Amendment rights of free speech, peaceable assembly and petition,” Seigenthaler said. “And a free press covered the injustice eked upon them.”
Wilson finally realized they were right, and in 1920 he supported passage of the Suffrage Amendment in Congress.
Recalling his own youth in the segregated South, Seigenthaler spoke movingly about his indifference to the rights and dignity of African Americans. He said his conversion came gradually, through “reading and observing.”
He noted that the civil rights movement started in black churches, expressing freedom of religion. Then speeches from the pulpits and on street corners led to peaceable assembly marches. He quoted from Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” with its powerful words that helped change minds.
Seigenthaler was deeply involved in the civil rights movement. He served as administrative assistant to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy in the early 1960s. During the Freedom Rides in Alabama, he was attacked by a mob of Ku Klux Klansmen and hospitalized with a skull fracture and a concussion.
He noted that the women’s suffrage movement and the civil rights movement were both examples of people exercising their basic First Amendment rights. “We’re a better country, a more just society, a fairer society, with expanded dignity for all human beings.”
In a question-and-answer period, Seigenthaler supported our free press, with all its faults, and also strongly endorsed the Washington News Council.
“There are enduring values embodied in the traditional practice of journalism,” he said. “The value of this (Washington News) Council is that it gives the public the opportunity to criticize the news media. Look, (the press) is a fallible profession.”
Just as there is value in accurately monitoring the offices of government or the offices of the private sector, he suggested, there is also value in monitoring the press.
“Somehow, along the way, I felt a slippage, a disconnect,” he said. The press lost the “enduring values, which include the willingness to correct errors and to set the record straight,” he said.
When asked what can average people do, he responded:
“Find ways to examine what goes on inside news organizations. The News Council is one way to examine what goes on….
“We (in the press) have drifted from a commitment to accuracy, a commitment to corrections, a commitment to depth, a commitment to balance….
“We don’t have enough people stand up in front of a News Council to say: ‘They did me wrong,’” he said.
“It would be helpful if newspapers explained themselves better,” he concluded. “We’re not really making the case to the public that we are operating in the public interest.”
NOTE: John Seigenthaler’s presentation on the First Amendment may be viewed online at www.tvw.org, or on local TVW channels. DVDs are also available for sale.