If the Klan Can Be Gagged. None of Us Is Safe
Hentof, Nat
If the Klan Can Be Gagged. None of Us Is Safe BY NAT HENTOFF Reading Rod Davis's lyrical tribute to Thomas Hobbes's "state of nature," I had the sense of having heard similar cadences of...
...Presser reminded Texas City officials that the Supreme Court ruled in 1969 that no government has the right to stop anyone from leafieting and speaking on the ground that he hasn't obtained official permission to do so...
...Pay them no mind...
...I was reminded of Nicholas Von Hoffman's clever linking of Lenin and Hitler in Harper's last year...
...And a much longer list too of triumphs that had a hell of a lot to do with actual "social change...
...Including Rod Davis and his gang...
...They're all an illusion...
...Again, any good First Amendment primer, including mine, will provide him remedial reading...
...So who will smash the Klan...
...I mean the "heckler's veto...
...the anti-racist himself could be suppressed if he undertakes to speak in 'restricted' areas...
...I could have compiled a much longer list...
...I'll demonstrate against the Klan...
...None of Us Is Safe BY NAT HENTOFF Reading Rod Davis's lyrical tribute to Thomas Hobbes's "state of nature," I had the sense of having heard similar cadences of righteousness, similar bold, brave solutions to national evils...
...Logically, Hentoff can only sustain this position by reference to an abstraction—the very premise of which the nonliberal Left cannot accept—that all ideas are neutral and equal, existing outside of history...
...And in the new Rod Davis society, accomplices in evil will not be overlooked...
...Hentoff uses the old rhetorical saw of implying that my words match those of Himm-ler and his ilk...
...Well, you can't trust the Government to do it...
...Native Nazis, for one...
...Certain people should simply not be heard, no matter who wants to hear them...
...The survival of the best armed...
...The Klan is dangerous, and worse...
...And I'm willing to bet Davis is in favor of a nuclear freeze...
...As for the bloody, vicious history of the Klan, and its current resurgence, even a rotting police force can be—and has been— forced to bust Klan members for criminal activity, forced by civil-liberties and civil-rights lawyers who have a good deal more courage and stamina in these matters than folks who get their jollies (and their rush of virtue) by throwing stones at Klan marchers...
...Hentoff and I really have nothing to say to each other...
...That part of Government that has not been infiltrated by the Klan is hung up on the artificial, ritualistic, racist, classist, utterly bourgeois First Amendment...
...Including the Klan...
...And indeed, look at the First Amendment battles, a good many of them won, by Martin Luther King and other civil-rights marchers and demonstrators in the civil-rights campaigns...
...Since Davis and his allies are all true populists who simply want to purge the nation of inferior people, maybe the answer is for us just to have faith that he will do only good, and smite the doers of evil...
...That's what I mean by the First Amendment being indivisible...
...That reflective chord was sounded by Heinrich Himmler...
...M A Rejoinder FROM ROD DAVIS The illusion of "freedom," whether in speech or action, has long been the hollow pillar of bourgeois liberalism...
...Otherwise, the preacher of any strange doctrine could be stopped...
...He resorts to the Cold War liberal slur that leftist, especially Marxist (not Hobbesian, incidentally), analysis of issues is ultimately identical to fascist or Nazi analysis...
...Those of you who balk must face the possibility that you're hopelessly, and irrelevantly, bourgeois...
...How about anybody organized on the basis of sexism, anti-affirmative action, or whatever else is dangerous to the people's welfare...
...He can't have it both ways...
...And the city commission has absolute discretion to decide who can march and speak and who can't...
...What would Davis prefer...
...If you were to compile a box score, the Government loses more often, on free-speech matters, than it wins...
...The court victories achieved by them applied to everybody because—and this point eludes Davis—the First Amendment is indivisible...
...That's what I meant about Davis summoning us back to a "state of nature...
...So Davis says...
...As Huey Long said, if fascism comes to America, it will be in the guise of antifascism...
...Maybe he doesn't think kids count, but the Supreme Court's decision in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent School District (1969) has given students all over the country personal knowledge of the First Amendment through freepress battles they've won...
...It is the responsibility of society to produce that which will reflect its values...
...Instead of offering a serious response to the philosophical vulnerability of the meaning of "free speech," Nat Hentoff reverts to a disappointing and predictable spate of name-calling...
...Well, again, let's look at the alternative in the nonabstract society...
...That'll take care of everything...
...But what does reality have to do with Rod Davis's succulent fantasy of smashing Klan heads...
...The Left became bored with liberal illusions long ago, in the way Copernicus became impatient with Ptolemy...
...This notion, Davis tells us, is absurd, insulting, racist, abstract...
...Or to make it do what it says...
...Back in 1961, a lot of people with ferocious ideals similar to those of Rod Davis wanted to prevent George Lincoln Rockwell, the American Nazi leader, from speaking in a New York City park...
...I rather think it's too late, but before he orders the denim uniforms, Davis might look at some First Amendment history in view of his notion that only the "dominant class" gets to exercise free speech...
...An example: Last October, in Texas City, Texas, the cops arrested four Klan members and charged them with the crime of "unlawful handbilling...
...The hell it does...
...And if people who want to hear Klan speakers don't shut up, in the new society, the new FBI will start keeping tabs on them because they are obviously a danger to the purity of the State...
...And then I remembered the passage: "We had the moral right, we had the duty to our people, to kill this people that wanted to kill us...
...The Klansmen went right to the Greater Houston ACLU...
...and one who asks that public schools be open indiscriminately to all ethnic groups could be lawfully suppressed, if only he chose to speak where persuasion is needed most...
...Are any of you willing to take that leap into faith...
...That the Klan still not be allowed to parade in Texas City and that the city commission still be able to stifle whomever it wants...
...Nobody can distribute leaflets in Texas City without first getting a permit...
...Whoever these folks may be, they do not speak for me...
...Enough of this abstraction—free speech—that has never been put into practice anyway...
...Legal systems gave these mass actions specific focus...
...Therefore, the Klan must be smashed...
...If any group can be denied the most fundamental of liberties—because if you can't speak and write, you can't change a damned thing—then no group is safe...
...The purpose, by the way, of most mass action—Davis, not incidentally, omits the word "nonviolent" in characterizing the mass action of Gandhi and Martin Luther King— has been to change the legal system...
...They have decided who shall not be heard—even if there are those at the demonstration who would like to hear, for whatever reason, what those racists have to say...
...Does he know of the rising number of union contracts—notably in UAW locals—that now guarantee this...
...I've printed a lot of stuff that government, on all levels, told me I couldn't...
...But I don't carry stones...
...Does he know of the increasing involvement of the ACLU in economic rights, to most of which free speech is inextricably tied...
...It's lucky for that judge he doesn't live in Texas...
...By and large we can say that we have performed this task in love of our people...
...Some antifascist might bounce a rock off his skull...
...That 1969 case, Presser told his Klan clients, had been brought against the city of Birmingham, Alabama, by the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, an ally of Martin Luther King and one of the bravest of all the civil-rights activists in the South...
...If you contemplate the options, and if you are unwilling to deny the Klan "any vestige of protection," and if you "waver behind the mirage of 'free speech,'" why, be forewarned that "you must consider DAVIS: 'A society that hates racism would not permit it to flourish and would, in particular, not allow a vanguard racist group to operate with official sanction and police protection' HENTOFF: If any group can be denied the most fundamental of liberties—because if you cant speak and write, you cant change a damned thing—then no group is safe9 the possibility of complicity...
...The final proof of HentofFs absurd and dissimulative concept of "free speech" is his notion that people who heckle Klan/Nazi goons are worse than the goons themselves...
...Davis talks in his piece about getting "the proper power installed...
...By whom...
...If the law is irrelevant, if the First Amendment is abstract, what is to stop the Davis truth squad and, on the other hand, those who will surely rise to do battle with it...
...Then there is the matter, according to Davis, of those who will not demonstrate against the Klan because that would mean "stooping" to the Klan's level...
...Let us begin where Davis does...
...Keep your eye on what's important: throwing stones at the Klan...
...If Davis's coun-tervigilantes get enough numbers and weapons to suppress the Klan in a particular city, then his truth squad can go on to shut down other dangers to the motherland...
...Dependence on that abstraction will forever leave Hentoff floundering and name-calling, high above the fray, worshipping freedom as a good idea but a dangerous practice...
...Texas City is now going to scrap its licensing requirement, and now everybody is going to be able to speak in the streets there without interference...
...And those kids are hardly all from the "dominant class...
...If he survives, he'll just pick up a bigger pole or axe or dynamite charge...
...The Wobblies, for instance, conducted their grand free-speech fights (nonviolent) in the streets of Nat Hentoffs books include "The First Freedom: The Tumultuous History of Free Speech in America...
...Everybody...
...If, as he says, legality is "irrelevant," then I assume that Davis himself, sustaining the integrity of his beliefs, will never come to the ACLU or any other civil-liberties organization for aid if his rights to speak and demonstrate are staved in with a pole or an axe...
...The ACLU took the case and a judge, overturning a lower-court decision denying Rockwell the right to talk, said: "The unpopularity of views, their shocking quality, their obnoxiousness, and even their alarming impact is not enough [to prohibit speech...
...Since liberals are always more concerned with sustaining their expropriated "freeedom" than with extending it to others, they never confront the philosophical or political obligations that ultimately must come into conflict with their own privileged position and definition...
...It fits right into Davis's piece because Davis's thinking in this matter is totalitarian...
...When they defend the Klan on those grounds, they are defending us all, and that's why they do it...
...Only in a country thoroughly deformed by McCarthyism could such ludicrous analysis be seriously presented...
...This very magazine fought a historic and ultimately triumphant battle against a bristling array of Government officials, lawyers, and a hostile judge in order to be able to print Howard Morland's article on utterly disingenuous Government secrecy concerning nuclear matters...
...As for the alleged menace implied by my desire to drown out the Klan (I do not, by the way, shun the tactic of nonviolence), my position is based on values derived from the analysis of real, not phony, freedom...
...Rod Davis, being properly qualified, will decide whether you can speak or not...
...Or would it be more to Davis's taste that each occasion for marching be settled with clubs and baseball bats...
...But look at the conscientious objectors during the Vietnam war, and what the First Amendment did to broaden the grounds for exemption...
...The liberal response, therefore, is unwittingly to make their own position totalitarian...
...Neither Gandhi nor King nor even the Wobblies found the legal system irrelevant...
...He also declares, with his customary broad sweep—the better to throw stones with—that "constitutional 'free speech,' in the daily, concrete world, consists of what the Government decides it to be...
...And liberals hate more than anything to have their fetish exposed— to have it revealed that the "freedom" of a certain group or class is always, necessarily, based on the unfreedom of a much larger but less powerful class (or race...
...Stefan Presser, the ACLU staff counsel, despises the Klan at least as much as Rod Davis does...
...What about the free-speech cases the ACLU wins every year around the country...
...If there is to be no licensing, everyone must be able to speak...
...If a Klan demonstration is not protected by the First Amendment—that is, if the State is not prepared to extend physical protection to those who would express profoundly unpopular ideas—then the Davises who threaten or actually commit violence have successfully exercised the "heckler's veto...
...And how about members of Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum...
...Yes, indeed, as Rod Davis says, "A society creates itself...
...Such lawyers oppose the Klan with "ferocity," to use Davis's term, but they are far too concerned with everyone's liberties to deny the Klan the right to such noncriminal activities as speaking, writing, and assembling...
...How about, ultimately, critics of Rod Davis...
...Davis lists the times the Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment, has failed...
...A small matter, Rod Davis would say...
...Those with the will and the power and the requisite scorn for such irrelevant niceties as the law, let alone the Bill of Rights...
...He talks of "free speech on the shop floor...
...I would be remiss in my devotion to that phantom fetish, the First Amendment, if I did not also point out another difficulty with Rod Davis's plan to silence the Klan forev-ermore...
...And, to his credit, he doesn't hide behind euphemisms...
...cities in the West because they considered the First Amendment so palpable they used it as a weapon...
...But unlike Davis, he knows how the First Amendment actually works...
...Any challenge to liberal ideology is depicted as dangerous, malevolent, and silly...
...He tells us the kind of values he wants his society to reflect...
...And we have suffered no damage from it in our inner self, in our soul, in our character...
...A society without "the phantom fetish of the First Amendment...
...In a society that is free for everyone, there would be no more need for a First Amendment than for a Klan, because neither racism nor freedom would be commodities dispensed by government, lawyers, or word-brokers...
Vol. 47 • July 1977 • No. 7
