Robert Justin Goldstein

Discusses laws, court challenges, and issues regarding flag burning in the United States.

In 1989 a political fire storm erupted after the United States Supreme Court declared that dissidents had the constitutional right under the First Amendment to burn the flag. To some, including President George Bush and many members of Congress, the flag was a sacred symbol of American freedoms. They believed its physical destruction posed a serious threat to the country and demanded a constitutional amendment to reverse the Court's decision. For those who defended the Court's ruling, flag desecration was a form of constitutionally protected free speech, and any attempt to forbid such conduct was seen as creating a dangerous precedent. Burning the Flag brings together the disciplines of law, journalism, political science, and history to explain and place the development of the controversy in its full context. It is based on extensive research in legal, congressional, and journalistic sources and on exclusive interviews with nearly 100 of the key players in the dispute, among them flag burners, judges, lawyers and lobbyists on both sides, members of Congress, congressional aides, and journalists. A timely addendum chronicles the late 1995 attempts once again to pass a constitutional amendment on flag desecration, adding to the significance of this readable account. Burning the Flag will be of value to both an academic and a general audience, particularly to civil libertarians, flag buffs, and those interested in popular media, American politics, modern American history, and constitutional law.

In this, the first comprehensive historical analysis of the debate over the desecration of the American flag, Robert Justin Goldstein takes us from the 1989 flagburning incident that ignited an emotionally charged controversy across the nation back to the very origins of the flag as a symbol of America. It may surprise some present-day flag-protectionists to learn that the flag did not become an object of veneration until the end of the Civil War, when groups of ultra-patriotic citizens and veterans lobbied hard to give it unique status as a symbol of the nation.

xvi, 564 p. : 29 cm

"After joining a tiny and insignificant extreme left-wing group, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), in the 1930s, Kutcher was drafted shortly before American entry into World War II. He saw frequent battle action in North Africa and Italy, and both of his legs were blown off by a German mortar shell during the American invasion of Italy in late 1943. After having both legs amputated and learning to walk with artificial limbs and two canes, Kutcher was hired in 1946 in a menial position as a Veterans Administration (VA) file clerk, with no access to national security information. However, as a result of President Truman's March 1946 federal loyalty program, and more specifically due to the listing of the SWP on the so-called "Attorney General's List of Subversive Organizations" ... in 1948 as seeking the violent overthrow of the government, Kutcher was fired from his VA position. Subsequently ... the government also sought to take away Kutcher's World War II disability pension and to evict him (and his ill and aged parents, whom he supported) from their federally subsidized public housing unit in Newark, New Jersey. ... Kutcher described the decision he made to fight his case to the end as one he preferably would never have had to make ... . In the end, Kutcher won all of the fights for his rights, and in doing so helped to expose some of the worse abuses of the Red Scare."--Preface, page ix-xi.