Abstract
No idea is more fundamental to Americans’ sense of ourselves as individuals and as a nation than freedom. The central term in our political vocabulary, freedom—or liberty, with which it is almost always used interchangeably—is deeply embedded in the record of our history and the language of everyday life. The Declaration of Independence lists liberty among mankind’s inalienable rights; the Constitution announces securing liberty’s blessings as its purpose.1 Freedom has often been invoked to mobilize support for war: the United States fought the Civil War to bring about “a new birth of freedom,” World War II for the “Four Freedoms,” the Cold War to defend the “Free World.” The recently concluded war in Iraq was given the title “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” Americans’ love of freedom has been represented by liberty poles, caps, and statues and been acted out by burning stamps and draft cards, fleeing from slave masters, and demonstrating for the right to vote. Obviously, other peoples also cherish freedom, but the idea seems to occupy a more prominent place in public and private discourse in the United States than in many other countries. “Every man in the street, white, black, red or yellow,” wrote the educator and statesman Ralph Bunche in 1940, “knows that this is ‘the land of the free’... [and] ‘the cradle of liberty.’”