History of homeland security in the United States

[1] Prior to the American Revolution many coastal fortifications already dotted the Atlantic coast, as protection from pirate raids and French incursions.

The Revolutionary War led to the construction of many additional fortifications, mostly comprising simple earthworks erected to meet specific threats.

[2] With Europe at war during 1793-1815, a new national program of fortification building was begun under the leadership of Alexander Hamilton and a Navy was built up by President John Adams.

After 1801 President Thomas Jefferson minimized the Navy and set up the Second System to protect major ports by the use of small inexpensive gunboats manned by unpaid volunteers.

[2][6] In 1885 President Grover Cleveland appointed the Endicott Board, whose recommendations led to a large-scale modernization program of harbor and coastal defenses.

Under a major program developed in the wake of the Fall of France in 1940, a near-total replacement of previous coast defenses was implemented, centered on 16-inch guns in new casemated batteries.

[2] The United States Coast Guard was created by Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton in 1790 when Congress authorized the construction of 10 vessels to enforce tariffs and prevent smuggling.

In 1822, the Revenue Marine was merged with the Life-Saving Service, which was responsible for rescuing shipwreck victims, to form the modern Coast Guard.

[9] In June 1942 during World War II a Coast Guard patrol of the beach in Amagansett, New York, discovered the landing of German saboteurs in Operation Pastorius.

[10] The Freemasons are a secret fraternal group that originated in Europe and became popular in elite circles in the United States in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Andrew Jackson a highly controversial politician was a Mason and one of his enemies Thurlow Weed set up a movement that became the Anti-Masonic Party.

By 1835 the party had disbanded everywhere except Pennsylvania.,[16] but John Quincy Adams, president of the United States during the Morgan affair, ran for governor of Massachusetts on the Anti-Masonic ticket in 1833.

The arrival after 1840 of hundreds of thousands and indeed millions of Catholic immigrants from Europe, especially Ireland and Germany, ignited a Protestant nativist fear for American security.

Again in the fierce struggle for supremacy, men have forgotten the ban which the Republic puts on the intrusion of religious influence on the political arena.

But not all, there was a resurgence of anti-Catholicism in the American Protective Association of the late 1880s, The nomination of a Catholic for president in 1928 focused attention on Al Smith, a liberal Democrat in aa largely conservative era.

Top officials in London favored the Confederacy, but realized that much of its food supply came from the North, and in a war the Union navy would sink much of the British merchant fleet.

Its main success was borrowing some cash used to spread propaganda, and in getting Britain to build a warship "CSS Alabama" that captured American merchant ships.

The KKK used violence, lynching, murder and acts of intimidation such as cross burning to oppress newly freed African Americans, as well as "Carpetbaggers" (new arrivals from the North) who worked with blacks in the Republican Party.

President Ulysses S. Grant was determined to stamp out terrorism but first he asked Congress for new laws on March 23, 1871:[36] A condition of affairs now exists in some of the States of the Union rendering life and property insecure, and the carrying of the mails and the collection of the revenue dangerous....That the power to correct these evils is beyond the control of State authorities, I do not doubt.

In areas with inadequate law enforcement agencies, especially in the newly settled American Frontier, concerned citizens formed extra-legal "vigilance committees.

[41] In 1900 a conspiracy led by Republican politicians assassinated William Goebel, newly elected Democratic governor of Kentucky because he had seized control of the machinery of the state and seemed on the verge of becoming a local dictator.

Multiple solutions were attempted, including: Lincoln's aggressive policy against the Sioux 1862; Army imprisonment of the entire Navajo tribe in 1864; the Colorado militia's Sand Creek massacre of innocent Indians in 1864; civil war between tribes in Oklahoma 1861-1865; building a network of army forts to control the Plains; President Grant's peace policy and sending in the missionaries; enforcement of a tough reservation policy; destruction of the buffalo (the food supply of the nomads); Dawes Act requiring Indians to become farmers; and the forced assimilation via federal Indian schools.

[49] Most Black people were denied their right to keep and bear arms under Jim Crow laws, and they were therefore unable to protect themselves or their families.

The Sedition Act criminalized any expression of opinion that used "disloyal, profane, scurrilous or abusive language" about the U.S. government, flag or armed forces.

Government police action, private vigilante groups, and public war hysteria compromised the peacetime civil liberties of many Americans who opposed the nation's policies.

[51] In March 1919 the Supreme Court upheld the convictions in a unanimous opinion: When a nation is at war many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured.

The question is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.

[52] The most dramatic case was the conviction of Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs for encouraging young men to defy the draft laws.

[57] The First Red Scare of 1919-1920 was marked by a widespread fear of far-left movements, including Bolshevism and anarchism, due to real and imagined events.

Fueled by labor unrest and the anarchist bombings, and then spurred on by the Palmer Raids and attempts by United States Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer to suppress radical organizations, it was characterized by exaggerated rhetoric, illegal search and seizures, unwarranted arrests and detentions, and the deportation of several hundred suspected radicals and anarchists.