Carl Sagan

The Universe of Carl

5h  ·

The ink was barely dry on the Bill of Rights before politicians found a way to subvert it—by cashing in on fear and patriotic hysteria. In 1798, the ruling Federalist Party knew that the button to push was ethnic and cultural prejudice. Exploiting tensions between France and the U.S., and a widespread fear that French and Irish immigrants were somehow intrinsically unfit to be Americans, the Federalists passed a set of laws that have come to be known as the Alien and Sedition Acts.

One law upped the residency requirement for citizenship from five to 14 years. (Citizens of French and Irish origin usually voted for the opposition, Thomas Jefferson's Democratic-Republican Party.) The Alien Act gave President John Adams the power to deport any foreigner who aroused his suspicions. Making the President nervous, said a member of Congress, "is the new crime." Jefferson believed the Alien Act had been framed particularly to expel C. F. Volney, the French historian and philosopher; Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, patriarch of the famous chemical family; and the British scientist Joseph Priestley, the discoverer of oxygen and an intellectual antecedent of James Clerk Maxwell. In Jefferson's view, these were just the sort of people America needed.

-The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark – by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, 1995