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  • Presidents and Civil Liberties from Wilson to Obama: A Story of Poor Custodians by Samuel Walker
  • Zoë Hess Carney
Presidents and Civil Liberties from Wilson to Obama: A Story of Poor Custodians. By Samuel Walker. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012; pp. vii + 546. $120.00 cloth; $44.99 paper.

Historian Samuel Walker set out to analyze the relationship between modern presidents and civil liberties in an effort to know whether or not his account of the presidency of George W. Bush, whom he judged as the “worst president ever on civil liberties,” was fair (xiii). To rank Bush as the worst on civil liberties, Walker realized he must understand how valiantly—or, as he found, poorly—presidents who came before Bush defended the Bill of Rights themselves (3).

Within the scope of “civil liberties,” Walker examines the “freedom of speech and press, religious liberty, due process of law, equal protection of the law, privacy, and all of the civil liberties issues raised by national security considerations” (xiii). Walker does not bring specific civil liberties to bear on each president, nor does he explain how particular contexts co-create civil liberty victories and crises with the presidents. Instead, he treats “civil liberties” as a stable term, failing to demystify the meaning of civil liberties in the United States, how it changes over time, and the role of the presidency in this process. What the book lacks in clarity on the presidents’ roles in creating and shaping the national understanding of civil liberties, it makes up for in its analysis of presidential performance of the most politically significant moments of each presidency, with special attention focused toward how those moments influenced civil liberties.

Walker divides his analysis into four sections. In each of these sections, Walker attends to presidential “performance,” not only policy. For Walker, that performance is fairly comprehensive and includes speeches; interactions between presidents and organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the National Woman’s Party; Supreme Court nominations; presidential diaries; legislation; and more. The scope necessarily lends itself to a broad understanding of these presidents’ relationships with civil liberties, and it leaves room for scholars to dig deeper into this history. [End Page 745]

“The Early Years” covers the presidencies of Woodrow Wilson through Franklin D. Roosevelt. Walker begins his study with Wilson because, Walker argues, it was not until Wilson’s suppression of free speech during World War I that civil liberties became a part of “the American political and legal agenda on a permanent basis” (3). Before this time, only episodes of civil liberties crises—such as the Alien and Sedition Acts, the “suppression of anti-slavery activity prior to the Civil War, and Abraham Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War”—characterized civic life in the United States (3). Walker marks Wilson and Roosevelt as being particularly contradictory on the issue of civil liberties. For instance, Walker teases out the paradox that Wilson “consistently ranks among the few near-great presidents” while having “perpetrated terrible violations of individual rights during the war” (9–10). Roosevelt’s performance, likewise, was a “tangle of contradictions” regarding civil liberties—the high point being his Four Freedoms speech, which Walker names “the greatest tribute to freedom of speech and religious liberty ever given by a sitting president,” and his low points being Japanese American internment camps, FBI spying, and the expression of “blatant contempt for the Supreme Court and the rule of law” (79–80). The Republican presidents between Wilson and FDR, Walker argues, mark no “tumultuous civil liberties crises.” However, Walker also notes that during these presidencies, “free speech was equated with ‘un-American’ ideologies, the First Amendment rights of working people were systematically suppressed, prohibition enforcement agents routinely committed violations of due process, while lynchings and other racist violence continued unchecked.” This leaves room to wonder what constitutes a “civil liberties crisis” (76).

The second section, “Civil Liberties in the Cold War and Civil Rights Eras,” explores the presidencies of Truman through Nixon. Walker explains that although Truman created the Federal Loyalty Program, which assaulted freedom of belief, he also...

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