Monday, June 15, 2020, 11:30 AM – 1 PM EDT

Daniel LaChance, Associate Professor, Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellow in Law and the Humanities, Department of History

“Mrs. Miller’s Constitution: Civil Liberties and the Radical Right in Cold War America”

In the early years of the Cold War, grassroots activists on the far-right end of the political spectrum waged a campaign against government bureaucracies they believed were quietly ushering in an age of despotism. They grew especially alarmed at the growing power the government was giving to psychiatrists to oversee the psychological wellbeing of Americans. Under the pretense of treating mental illness, they feared, liberals would soon banish conservatives to mental institutions. As Emory historian Daniel LaChance will explain, two events in the 1950s brought these anxieties to a fever pitch: the involuntary confinement of Vermont anti-communist activist Lucille Miller to a federal psychiatric hospital and federal legislation to fund the construction of a mental hospital in the Alaska territory.

In their campaigns to free Miller and stop the construction of what they believed would be an Alaskan gulag, these activists turned to the law, arguing that the Constitution safeguarded a vision of liberty as the absence of unwanted government intrusions into an individual’s life. In subsequent decades, as we know too well, others, too, would grow wary of government paternalism and embrace a more libertarian and procedural understanding of rights, countering the alternative vision of rights as a tool for pursuing collective, egalitarian ends that so many of us prefer.