Variety of Early American History religion and culture. But he is perhaps best known as one of the most prolific and important historians of the American Civil War and of course Abraham Lincoln. He has received numerous prestigious awards including the lincoln pride, the Abraham LincolnInstitute Book prize and the authors regularly a number of articles that are published in leading newspapers, usa today, the wall street journal, the Washington Post and hes featured regularly on television and radio programs such as nprs weekend edition. He is the henry luke professor of civil war era at Gettysburg College where he serves as director of the Civil War Era Studies Program however he is on sabbatical from Gettysburg College this year and he serves as William Garwood visiting professor in the James Madison program of american ideals and institutions at Princeton University. You can learn more about his work either by visiting his web site allen guelzo. Com but perhaps most importantly allen is a regular speaker at the union league of philadelphia and the Abraham Lincoln foundation. He is also a member of the union league of philadelphia so please join me in welcoming our distinguished speaker, doc there allen guelzo. [applause] what a pleasure it is to be a traduced by joan carter always the most gracious of introducers and to be invited to speak in this place that memorializes Jack Templeton whom i remember as a physician and her friends so there is privileged on all points to be enjoyed as participating in this series. What we know today as the First Amendment to the federal constitution originally appeared in the form of a resolution attached by the Virginia State ratifying convention to its approval of a new constitution in june of 1788. That resolution declared that the free exercise of religious worship cannot be canceled, are bridged, restrained or modified by the new congress which has been created by the constitution nor can any other essential rights among which were listed for liberty of conscience and of the press. This resolution was taken up by James Madison and then rewritten and adopted by the senate in september of 1789 and finally ratified by the states on march 1, 1792 in this for him. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and petition the government for redress of grievances. Madison was confident that the freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment were the source for all the triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity over error and oppression. Even so there were freed and backsliding in american politics starting with the alien sedition act of 1798 which attempted to criminalize seditious libels uttered about president john adams. That was followed by mob assaults on political speakers in the streets of new york and baltimore in 1804, in 1810, in 1811 and 1815. In 1835 alone there were 147 political riots in the United States leading to the deaths of 63 people, a riot in fact in illinois in 1837 and did in the death of the abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy and prompted the first great political speech of the upandcoming illinois Abraham Lincoln. Not until after the First World War did the u. S. Supreme Court Finally and unambiguously declare the triumph of madison dr. And saying an abrams versus United States that the best test of truth is the power of the thought did get accepted in the competition of the market and not the action of a mob or the sanction of the magistrate. And get nearly 250 years after James Madison hailed the First Amendment as the triumph of reason and humanity we once more find arguments after argument being deployed and especially to overthrow that triumph and silence free speech. This overthrow comes not in the old guys of brute tyrannical force put in the new cultural sensitivity. It involves an argument against free speech which arrives in two stages. First of all culture is distinct from the political and therefore does not enjoy the protections of free speech and that all speech is really cultural and knows speech deserves protection. Let me give you some examples. In her Constitution Day lecture at Princeton University on september 20, the chair of princetons Anthropology Department dismissed any idea of an absolute liberty for free speech. After all nowhere are people allowed to say whatever they want in any context with no social, economic or political repercussions. There are some varieties of speech but nobody tries to invoke the First Amendment to protect. What does is serve to distinguish the speech that does from the speech that doesnt deserve the shield of the First Amendment . Rouses answer is culture. Culture she says is what helps us determine the appropriateness of speech by balancing our rights as enshrined in the constitution with understandings of confidence. This seems to be true since no one suggests that cultural vulgarity or profanity or simple bad manners are things that the First Amendment is designed to protect. The problem is that by culture, rouse does not actually mean vulgarities or profanities are bad manners. What she calls culture is in fact politics. Only now by calling a culture she no longer considers itself guilty of suppressing speech protected by the First Amendment amendment. A Climate Change skeptic she explains is not actually a political dissident but an offender against a perceived culture and as such has no right to make claims about Climate Change as in all the science discovered over the last x number of centuries were irrelevant and not just Climate Change. In december of 2016 rows organized a walkout by students on a lecture at princeton by sociologist Charles Murray charging and a flyer that murray representative the normalization of racism and classism and academia. This is the same Charles Murray who was then shouted down and physically attack on march 7 by student activists at Middlebury College who were also if offended by murrays departures from their culture and in a more sensational on may 23 campus authorities that every State College refused to protect biology professor weinstein from physical threats by angry activists after weinstein questioned the wisdom of the day of racial absence that excluded white students from the evergreen state campus. In a foreshadowing a rouses constitutionalist asian of the activists insisted that weinsteins questioning violated the norms of evergreens culture. He has incited White Supremacists and he has validated White Supremacists and nazis in our community and in the nation complained one activist and i dont think that should be protected by free speech. By redefining political speech as culture the speech silencers are allowed to claim that your speech is not really political. Instead it is offensive or threatening to my whiteness or or gender or values and is therefore outside the protections of political speech. We may laugh at this as another example in which political censorship is simply called by another name. Nevertheless shell game or not this is one of the numbers of University Students who told the Brookings Institute survey that they do not believe the First Amendment protects offensive speech now outnumber those who believe that it does. By 44 to 39 and why fully one fifth of those students believe it is acceptable to inflict physical harm on those who are deemed to have made offensive and hurtful statements. Because its all culture, not politics even though it isnt. So what James Madison worked to attain in the name of reason and humanity now yields to the dictatorship politics masquerading as culture as though the nation and its institutions were a tribe rather than a republic and any unapproved remark understood as a defection from an established cultural order. There maybe some relief in realizing that the attacks on free speech in the name of culture have a history of their own, a history which from time to time has gained a measure of credibility only to have its underlying folly pull it back out to sea. The puritans of Massachusetts Bay were confident enough with their culture to insist that any deviation from it was simply a departure and toleration of that infidelity would only sow doubt and confusion among true believers who needed no further truth. He that is willing to tolerate any religion road nathanael poured in 1647 or discrepant way of religion besides his own unless it even matters that just in the doubts of his own are not sincere enough. Supporters of the alien sedition acts were no less confident in the axioms of their culture and likewise felt no need to learn anything from what they regarded as palpable error. Truth has but one side and listening to air and falsehood is indeed a strange way to discover truth wrote a pennsylvania lawyer Alexander Hansen and what might have passed for a parity of rouses princeton lecture. Contempt of free political speech were the principle characteristics of american defenders who also believe that they representative a culture of sorts based this time on race. In 1835 postmaster general amos kendall yielded to demands by slaveholders to censor abolitionists materials from the u. S. Mail and justify this decision by appealing to Cultural Values over political liberty. We owe an obligation to the laws but a higher one to the community in which we live and the former be so as did destroy the laughter it is patriotism to disregard them. What we deal with today in the confusion of politics and culture and excuse for suppressing speech is not new but todays culture despisers are not merely victims of the semantic confusion of culture and politics and this is what leads to the second stage of this new strategy of overthrow, his second stage which says there is nothing which is legitimately political anymore that all political speech really is cultural and those can be severely regulated without any reference to the First Amendment. In fact the First Amendment becomes a letter. The genealogy of the second stage begins with karl marx or rather with the italian marxist Antonio Graham ski. Graham ski believed that marks had missed an important detail in describing how the working class should one fine day overthrow the capitalist class. Marx described it as oppressed by the political and economic power of the ruling classes. Graham ski however believe that matters were personal to the working class as oppressed he said not only by the political and economic power of the european classes but ruling class culture which entices and persuades the working class to adopt the Cultural Values of their norms. Political revolution therefore would have to be about the overthrow of that culture first. Graham skis ideas among americans of the left in the 1960s under the plea of free speech complained herbert mark uzoh tolerance is extended to policies, conditions and modes of behavior which should not be tolerated because the tolerance expressed in such impartiality serve to minimize or even absolve prevailing intolerance and suppression. This is practically indistinguishable from the plea of ward and addison but in the more appealing of the oppressed and the disadvantage. The idea that all political speech really is cultural does however allow us to see a bright line connecting the attacks on free speech with the craze for monument removal that began in may in new orleans and has peaked since the Charlottesville Riot in august. On one level rage against monument may seem like an exercise in cultural criticism especially if the monuments are examples of bad taste. Think of a rocky statue on the steps of the museum of arts. But in the world of marxist ideology after gramski culture absorbs politics. Hence the confederate statues in new orleans and charlottesville in the eye of the storm cannot be merely statues are cultural artifacts in the usual sense of the word culture. Can better memorials on these terms were never and are never less than what one fervent history professor at the university of North Carolina described as a campaign to take the southern culture of the civil war as just and slavery is that Benevolent Institution and made a very pointed statement about the rule of white supremacy. No, actually the monuments actually it was the laws of the jim crow era that did that. No one has yet shown that general lee defended on his monumental force and charlottesville to burn crosses along the blue ridge. What is cultural only becomes literally threatening and what is offensive only becomes literally lethal when it is translated into regulations. By the same token however removals of offensive speakers or offensive public art become more than merely sympathetic and tedium responses to bad taste. They are a practical and aggressive strategy under the cover of appeals to cultural offense for suppressing political disbelief. Since the goal of the dissent is the destabilization of a political order it should come as no surprise that the cultural rage of the Confederate Monument activists often shades over into furious condemnations of the entire of american history. It is not nearly confederate generals who have become targets targets. Christs church in alexandria virginia decided last month to remove the plaque marking the pew once occupied because it might make some visitors feel unsafe or unwelcome. Student activists at the university of wisconsin in madison campaigned in 2016 2d colonized our campus around a statue of Abraham Lincoln which was deemed belittling because lincoln according to one of the organizers owned slaves and ordered the execution of native men. Nor is it even with american history. In may as the confederate statues were being brought down even a statue of joan of arc was spraypainted. Joan of arc . This is to cloud understanding with words. It is to perform what is called a moral inversion, and intellectual juggling act in which we invoke the language of cultural offense as a stratagem for silencing political dissent. Do not be deceived. Culture is culture and politics is politics and we are in deep trouble when one absorbs the other. But let us not a simplistic. Carolyn rouse is certainly correct in one respect. Culture does influence speech. There is some speech which is rude and some which is foolish and Cultural Values encourage boorish people to censor their rudeness and their foolishness. Even Oliver OliverWendell Holmes recognized the serious public arm that can result from someone falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic. But what rouse and gramsci ignores the culture and politics really are two different qualities. Cultural inhibitions are fake and consensual and easily viable to transgression and shifting. Politics is about laws which involve crimes and punishments in which take time to implement and time to repeal. Again culture becomes lethal only when power is invoked to terminate the competition. Rouse is also correct to say that there are different arenas of speech. In the private sphere one person can tell another person to stop gossiping or to stop demanding that the umpire be killed without that being a trespass on the First Amendment. While in the public sphere a different standard applies. The problem of rouse does not address is that the line separating the private sphere where the First Amendment may not operate in the public where it does is not always clear. For instance rouse believes that hate speech has no place in the university because it violates the culture of the university and he also believes that the university can add to suppress such hate speech without violating the First Amendment because the university operates within the private sphere and can thus live by its own private rules. But the idea that the university is a private enclave that can establish the boundaries of the culture and political for itself is becoming less and less persuasive. For one thing discouraging some forms of cultural speech in academia may be bad for academia even if culture is not the province of the First Amendment and