THE CULTURE WARS ★^799revolution. Brandeis voted with the
majority on technical grounds. But he
issued a powerful defense of freedom
of speech as essential to active citizen-
ship in a democracy: “Those who won
our independence believed... that
freedom to think as you will and to
speak as you think are indispensable
to the discovery and spread of political
truth.... The greatest menace to free-
dom is an inert people.” A month after
the decision, the governor of California
pardoned Whitney, terming freedom
of speech the “indispensable birthright
of every free American.” The intrepid
Mrs. Whitney was soon back in court
for violating a California law making
it a crime to display a red flag. In 1931,
the Supreme Court overturned the law
as “repugnant to the guaranty of liberty
contained in the Fourteenth Amend-
ment.” A judicial defense of civil liber-
ties was slowly being born.
THE CULTURE WARS
The Fundamentalist Revolt
Although many Americans embraced modern urban culture with its religious
and ethnic pluralism, mass entertainment, and liberated sexual rules, others
found it alarming. Many evangelical Protestants felt threatened by the decline
of traditional values and the increased visibility of Catholicism and Judaism
because of immigration. They also resented the growing presence within main-
stream Protestant denominations of “modernists” who sought to integrate sci-
ence and religion and adapt Christianity to the new secular culture. “The day
is past,” declared Harry Emerson Fosdick, pastor of New York’s First Presbyte-
rian Church and a prominent modernist, “when you can ask thoughtful men
to hold religion in one compartment of their minds and their modern world
view in another.”
Convinced that the literal truth of the Bible formed the basis of Christian
belief, fundamentalists launched a campaign to rid Protestant denominations
What were the major flash points between fundamentalism and pluralism in the 1920s?The defendants in U.S. v. Abrams, on the day
of their deportation to Russia in 1921. Jacob
Abrams is on the right. They were convicted
under the Espionage Act of 1918 for impeding
the war effort by distributing pamphlets critical
of the American intervention in Russia after the
Russian revolution.