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Reviews
| From Chinese Exclusion to Guantánamo Bay: Plenary Power and the Prerogative State. By Natsu Taylor Saito. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2007. 497 pp. Photos, notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95 (cloth).
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At the end of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, George Mason said he could not sign the document the delegates had drafted. The author of Virginia's seminal declaration of rights and an opponent of slavery, he objected to the lack of guarantees for freedom in the federal Constitution. According to James Madison's notes, Mason made "animadversions on the dangerous power and structure of the Government, concluding that it would end either in a monarchy, or a tyrannical aristocracy; which, he was in doubt, but one or other, he was sure" (Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 Reported by James Madison [Athens: Ohio University Press, 1966], p. 651). |
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Under public pressure, the First Congress then wrote the Bill of Rights, which were ratified by the states as the first ten constitutional amendments in 1791. However, as Natsu Taylor Saito shows, freedom has been shredded by suppression of the subjugated and supposedly subversive "Other." In 1798 Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts to rid the country of foreign radicals and to restrict Jeffersonian journalists accused of being in league with revolutionary France. In 1857 the Supreme Court's Dred Scott ruling declared that slaves were property and not U.S. citizens who could sue for their freedom after living in free territory. |
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Later government decisions endorsed racial segregation, discriminated on the basis of national origins, and violated the treaty rights of American Indians. Fearing that treasonous acts might be committed in the future, the federal government ordered the internment of Japanese American citizens after Pearl Harbor and spied on civil rights activists and suspected Communists. Following the September 11 attacks in 2001, Congress hastily passed the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT) Act that greatly expanded the executive branch's "foreign intelligence" powers of surveillance for reasons of national security. |
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Saito's survey of such actions argues that they are not aberrations but routine American behavior. Motivated by racism, paranoia, and a desire to protect privilege, the various branches of government have established a lengthy record of finding reasons to deny rights to people deemed outside the protection of the Constitution. Establishing secret prisons and even condoning the abuse of prisoners in the twenty-first century is, in this light, simply another step in the progression of tyranny that George Mason predicted. As he knew—and as history has shown—oppression can be based on the perception that certain categories of people are dangerous or uncivilized. |
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From Chinese Exclusion to Guantánamo Bay observes that people of color are disproportionately affected by repressive actions to preserve America's "freedom" and "way of life." The author advocates respect for rights recognized in the Constitution and in international law that the U.S. has chosen to disregard on the grounds of supposed peril. Saito sees claims of extralegal "national security" authority arising from efforts to preserve an economic structure with extreme and growing disparities in wealth. The powerful rely on the acquiescence of the public, she writes, and should be reined in with more demands for justice and equality. |
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Saito provides an extensive, well-documented compendium of wrongs perpetrated against outsiders and domestic outcasts in the name of societal safety and well-being. Her attention to lawless, immoral attacks on ethnic groups, immigrants, and noncitizens exposes the often-hidden side of the American psyche that can produce a Wounded Knee, a Birmingham church bombing, a My Lai, or an Abu Ghraib. Scholarship can play its part in recalling the prejudice and pain, but a forgetful and often self-absorbed nation must cultivate higher ethical standards and establish stronger legal protections to avoid being at war with a seemingly endless array of foreign and domestic enemies.
Jeffery A. Smith
University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
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