Opinion of the Court. 320 U.S. objective standard is the requirement, petitioner satisfied the statute. His conduct has been law abiding in all respects. According to the record he has never been arrested, or connected with any disorder, and not a single written or spoken statement of his, during the relevant period from 1922 to 1927 or thereafter, advocating violent overthrow of the Government, or indeed even a statement, apart from his testimony in this proceeding, that he desired any change in the Constitution has been produced. The sole possible criticism is petitioner's membership and activity in the League and the Party, but those memberships qua memberships were immaterial under the 1906 Act. of 1798, 1 Stat. 566. See Franklin, op. cit., Chapter VI. It continued. unchanged until the Act of 1906 which for the first time imported the test of present belief into the naturalization laws when it provided in § 7 that disbelievers in organized government and polygamists could not become citizens. The continuation of the behavior test for attachment is some indication that a less searching examination was intended in this field-that conduct and not belief (other than anarchist or polygamist) was the criterion. The Nationality Act of 1940 changed the behavior requirement to a provision that no person could be naturalized unless he "has been and still is a person of good moral character, attached to the principles of the Constitution of the United States, and well disposed to the good order and happiness of the United States," 54 Stat. 1142, 8 U. S. C. § 707. The Report of the President's Committee to Revise the Nationality Laws (1939) indicates this change in language was not regarded as a change in substance. p. 23. The Congressional committee reports are silent on the question. The sponsors of the Act in the House, however, declared generally an intent to tighten and restrict the naturalization laws. See 86 Cong. Rec. 11939, 11942, 11947, 11949. The chairman of the sub-committee who had charge of the bill stated that "substantive changes are necessary in connection with certain rights, with a view to preventing persons who have no real attachment to the United States from enjoying the high privilege of American nationality." 86 Cong. Rec. 11948. This remark suggests that the change from "behaved as a man attached" to "has been and still is a person attached" was a change in meaning. 118 Opinion of the Court. In United States v. Schwimmer, 279 U. S. 644, and United States v. Macintosh, 283 U. S. 605, however, it was held that the statute created a test of belief-that an applicant under the 1906 Act must not only behave as a man attached to the principles of the Constitution, but must be so attached in fact at the time of naturalization. We do not stop to reexamine this construction for even if it is accepted the result is not changed. As mentioned before, we agree with the statement of Chief Justice Hughes in dissent in Macintosh's case that the behavior requirement is "a general phrase which should be construed, not in opposition to, but in accord with, the theory and practice of our Government in relation to freedom of conscience." 283 U. S. at 635. See also the dissenting opinion of Justice Holmes in the Schwimmer case, supra, 653-55. As pointed out before, this is a denaturalization proceeding, and it is a judgment, not merely a claim or a grant, which is being attacked. Assuming as we have that the United States is entitled to attack a finding of attachment upon a charge of illegality, it must sustain the heavy burden which then rests upon it to prove lack of attachment by "clear, unequivocal, and convincing" evidence which does not leave the issue in doubt. When the attachment requirement is construed as indicated above, we do not think the Government has carried its burden of proof. The claim that petitioner was not in fact attached to the Constitution and well disposed to the good order and happiness of the United States at the time of his naturalization and for the previous five year period is twofold: First, that he believed in such sweeping changes in the Constitution that he simply could not be attached to it; Second, that he believed in and advocated the overthrow by force and violence of the Government, Constitution and laws of the United States. In support of its position that petitioner was not in fact attached to the principles of the Constitution because of Opinion of the Court. 320 U.S. his membership in the League and the Party, the Government has directed our attention first to petitioner's testimony that he subscribed to the principles of those organizations, and then to certain alleged Party principles and statements by Party Leaders which are said to be fundamentally at variance with the principles of the Constitution. At this point it is appropriate to mention what will be more fully developed later-that under our traditions beliefs are personal and not a matter of mere association, and that men in adhering to a political party or other organization notoriously do not subscribe unqualifiedly to all of its platforms or asserted principles. Said to be among those Communist principles in 1927 are: the abolition of private property without compensation; the erection of a new proletarian state upon the ruins of the old bourgeois state; the creation of a dictatorship of the proletariat; denial of political rights to others than members of the Party or of the proletariat; and the creation of a world union of soviet republics. Statements that American democracy "is a fraud" 13 and that the purposes of the Party are "utterly antagonistic to the purposes for which the American democracy, so called, was formed," " are stressed. Those principles and views are not generally accepted— in fact they are distasteful to most of us—and they call for considerable change in our present form of government and society. But we do not think the Government has carried its burden of proving by evidence which does not leave the issue in doubt that petitioner was not in fact attached to the principles of the Constitution and well disposed to the good order and happiness of the United States when he was naturalized in 1927. 18 Program and Constitution of the Workers Party (1921-24). 14 Acceptance speech of William Z. Foster, the Party's nominee for the Presidency in 1928. The constitutional fathers, fresh from a revolution, did not forge a political strait-jacket for the generations to come.15 Instead they wrote Article V and the First Amendment, guaranteeing freedom of thought, soon followed. Article V contains procedural provisions for constitutional change by amendment without any present limitation whatsoever except that no State may be deprived of equal representation in the Senate without its consent. Cf. National Prohibition Cases, 253 U. S. 350. This provision and the many important and far-reaching changes made in the Constitution since 1787 refute the idea that attachment to any particular provision or provisions is essential, or that one who advocates radical changes is necessarily not attached to the Constitution. 15 Writing in 1816 Jefferson said: "Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well; I belonged to it, and labored with it. It deserved well of its country. It was very like the present, but without the experience of the present; and forty years of experience in government is worth a century of bookreading; and this they would say themselves, were they to rise from the dead. I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions. I think moderate imperfections had better be borne with; because, when once known, we accommodate ourselves to them, and find practical means of correcting their ill effects. But I know also, that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors." Ford, Jefferson's Writings, vol. X, p. 42. Compare his First Inaugural Address: "And let us reflect that, having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we Opinion of the Court. 320 U.S. United States v. Rovin, 12 F. 2d 942, 944-45.16 As Justice Holmes said, "Surely it cannot show lack of attachment to the principles of the Constitution that . . . [one] thinks it can be improved." United States v. Schwimmer, supra (dissent). Criticism of, and the sincerity of desires to improve, the Constitution should not be judged by conformity to prevailing thought because, "if there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought—not free thought for those who agree with us, but freedom for the thought that we hate." Id. See also countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions. During the throes and convulsions of the ancient world, during the agonizing spasms of infuriated man, seeking through blood and slaughter his long-lost liberty, it was not wonderful that the agitation of the billows should reach even this distant and peaceful shore; that this should be more felt and feared by some and less by others, and should divide opinions as to measures of safety. But every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists. If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it. I know, indeed, that some honest men fear that a republican government cannot be strong, that this Government is not strong enough; but would the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon a government which has so far kept us free and firm on the theoretic and visionary fear that this Government, the world's best hope, may by possibility want energy to preserve itself? I trust not." Richardson, Messages and Papers of the Presidents, vol. I, p. 310 (emphasis added). 16 See also 18 Cornell Law Quarterly 251; Freund, United States v. Macintosh, A Symposium, 26 Illinois Law Review 375, 385; 46 Harvard Law Review 325. As a matter of fact one very material change in the Constitution as it stood in 1927 when petitioner was naturalized has since been effected by the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment. |