Today’s student activists, we’re told, compare poorly to their predecessors from generations past. The activists of the the civil rights movement and student movement of the sixties, we’re told, would be embarrassed at the childishness, the petulance, the censoriousness of today’s campus organizers.
The following book excerpt, from William D. Workman’s The Case for the South (1960), suggests otherwise.
Its author, a white conservative from South Carolina, would become one of the earliest high-profile members of the Republican Party in that state, running as the GOP’s candidate for the United States Senate in 1962 on a platform that declared the party “the best hope, and perhaps the last hope, of stemming the liberal tide which has been sweeping the United States toward the murky depths of socialism.”
Here’s Workman writing in 1960 about a civil rights protest from six years earlier:
A mural depicting an early-day Charleston port scene, with Negro slaves at work about the South Carolina port, was ordered removed from an army cafeteria in Washington in March of 1954. Maj. Gen. L. K. Hastings, the quartermaster general, ordered the mural cut out because he was convinced that the painting was a potential powder keg which could increase racial tension. A number of Negroes at the installation thought the mural inoffensive, but others complained that it had prompted white workers to make derogatory remarks about Negroes.
Then, as would be expected, the District of Columbia unit of the NAACP urged removal of the mural because the slave picture reflects on race and color of Negroes, thus encouraging anti-Negro sentiment. At first blush, this business of commercial, literary, and musical censorship seems only the foolish petulance of a hyper-sensitive and inferiority-complexioned racial group which is chagrined over its own characteristic color. On second look, the practice begins to take on a more ominous outlook, something in the nature of the distortions so terrifyingly portrayed in George Orwell’s book Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Petty complaints about racial insensitivity. Petulant whiners who don’t speak for their peers attempting to bend the larger society to their whims. Unserious people who must nonetheless be taken seriously, because their embrace of censorship represents an abandonment of shared values of tolerance that constitutes the first step on the road to a terrifying Orwellian future.
Any of that sound familiar?
Update | I said a little more about this on Twitter just now. Here’s a lightly edited version of that rant:
I’ve been meaning to for a while to do a search for vintage criticisms of 1960s movements that echoed today’s criticisms of campus activists, and this passage popped up practically as soon as I sat down on the keyboard. It was the third hit on a Google Books search for “negro” and “petulant” time limited to 1960 through 1962 — the second search I tried.
And while the language in the passage is pretty mind-blowing, the resonances with today don’t end there.
Look at what Workman is complaining about. The cafeteria mural is public speech that activists object to as racist on what he considers flimsy grounds. The activists appealed to a higher authority to remove the speech they find offensive instead of engaging with their adversaries in the marketplace of ideas. The authority complied for fear of lighting a match to a tense racial environment. Suppressing the speech wasn’t literally censorship, but the folks removing it were clearly motivated by censoring impulses. It doesn’t seem like a big deal, he admits, but it’s the precedent that should scare us—in acceding to these demands we’re sacrificing liberal values to the mob.
We’ve all read this argument a dozen times since spring.
And here’s where I bend over backwards to grant the reasonable premises of folks I disagree with.
Yes, some activists in this movement, as in any movement, are wrongheaded. Yes, we’ve recently seen actual impulses to actually censor people. That’s not a good thing. But the claims of such impulses and acts have far outstripped the reality.
Freedom of speech isn’t freedom from criticism. It isn’t freedom from anger. It isn’t freedom from pushback. It isn’t even freedom from someone telling you to shut up or trying to get you fired.
Freedom of speech isn’t freedom from having someone decide to take a mural down because it’s racist, and if you go around calling people who go through channels to take down racist murals “Orwellian,” you’re not actually a supporter of free speech. And if your fear of slippery slopes leads you to abandon antiracist organizing projects the minute things get heated? Well, that’s on you, not them. That’s not them abandoning liberal values, that’s you abandoning an antiracist movement.
If you want to nudge some campus activists to think about speech rights in a different way, that’s awesome. I do too. Many activists do too. But apocalyptic slippery-slope rhetoric—rhetoric that attacks people engaging in legitimate speech acts that you happen to find uncomfortable as opponents of free expression? That kind of rhetoric serves neither the cause of antiracism nor the cause of free speech.
It puts you on the wrong side of both questions.
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November 13, 2015 at 3:41 pm
Akire Bubar
Well, I’m not going to argue specific instances here, because the important parts are in the details. But I think most folks aren’t arguing in favor of censorship. They’re pointing out things that are hurtful to people who don’t realize they’re hurtful, and urging people to consider the effect of their speech may have on other people. That’s not censorship – that’s increased self-awareness. The whole point of communication isn’t just to say what you have to say – it’s to try to understand how the person you are speaking to will hear it. And real communication happens when you start to figure out the difference between those things.
While there are definitely some folks out there who are coming dangerously close to censorship – I agree with you there – most folks are simply asking people in the world to consider the implications of their speech and their actions more carefully. To me, that’s just paying attention, and realizing that your own view on life and the world is not the same as everyone else’s and that your own view is not the only one that matters.
November 13, 2015 at 3:43 pm
SomeTextHere (@JlnFrancisco)
It’s important to remember that when a black acitivist says “free speech has always been a distraction” this is what they’re reffering to. It isn’t because they don’t want to defend their position. They can just recognize patterns a lot better than most of the people in print today.
November 13, 2015 at 5:41 pm
Jeffrey Deutsch
Just because the same invective is used against different instances of censorship (in the morally neutral sense of the term) doesn’t mean it’s equally valid every time.
The Army has infinitely more right to remove a mural from its own cafeteria than students have to demand that a photographer avoid its *public* demonstrations in a *public* space. Let alone mob around him and physically attempt to stop him taking a picture — especially with a journalism professor calling for more “muscle” to get that photographer out of there.
Your phrase “public speech” misses the difference between government’s — let alone the military’s — regulation of its own internal spaces and a truly public space open to one and all. That difference, as you probably know, is well recognized in U.S. First Amendment law.
Similarly, I understand Yale administrators’ plea for racially and culturally sensitive Halloween costumes. However, in today’s PR, legal and regulatory climate that plea is backed up by an implied threat of disciplinary action simply for wearing a costume many would find insensitive — because otherwise Yale itself would be looking at possible social media firestorms, lawsuits and frowns by the Department of Education (who cuts the checks that keep the lights on at Yale and pretty much every other school in the country).
Not to mention Erika Christakis’ plea for tolerance, however idealistic in this day and age, did not merit mobs of students confronting her and husband — and in the crowning irony, calling *themselves* “unsafe”.
A right-wing pre-Vietnam Southern Republican may have decried the removal of a mural from an Army facility. People of all stripes are warning of a much broader menace today among some student activists at Mizzou, Yale and elsewhere.
November 13, 2015 at 6:08 pm
Angus Johnston
Jeffrey, I appreciate your position, though I obviously disagree in some important respects.
Some of the examples of recent protest activity you raise are ones that I’ve addressed in the past and others are ones that I intend to write about in the near future, but for now, let me offer a counter-example of my own.
One of the most frequently made accusations of “censorship” leveled against student activists has to do with disinvitations of speakers and cancellations of similar events — circumstances in which campuses who had previously scheduled an event have chosen to scrap those plans.
If I have the freedom to schedule an event, I must also have the freedom to change my mind and cancel the event. There are questions to be raised about what constitutes legitimate or illegitimate pressure on the person or institution making such a decision, but their right to do so, if their decision is made freely, can hardly be in doubt.
And it seems to me that the analogy between taking down a mural and cancelling a speech is a pretty precise one, as each involves—as you put it—an institution’s “regulation of its own internal spaces.” If we agree that there was no threat, immediate or implied, posed to freedom of speech by the army’s decision to take down a cafeteria mural in 1954, we have to agree that no such threat is posed by a college’s decision to cancel a scheduled speech or movie—much less a speaker’s voluntary decision to decline an invitation.
Similarly, I see no difference from a freedom of expression perspective between Erika Christakis’s email to students and students’ angry reaction to that email. If we’re going to say that her mail “did not merit” that response, we’re not talking about anyone’s free speech rights but about whose side we take in an argument in which both sides are behaving appropriately from a freedom-of-expression perspective.
The question of the merits of Christakis’s views or Germaine Greer’s or those of the activists at Yale or Missouri is one that’s well worth debating, and one on which reasonable people can disagree. But the constant invocation of the specter of censorship in circumstances in which it does not apply impedes, rather than advancing, such discussions.
November 13, 2015 at 10:49 pm
wobblywheel
Is…Johnston aware that he’s actually making a very compelling liberal argument for putting that painting back up?
November 14, 2015 at 5:14 am
SomeTextHere (@JlnFrancisco)
There is no compelling argument for putting the mural back up. If you see one you should ask yourself if there’s any level of level racism too great for a public space. If the answer is none or involves physical assault, you probably missed something big along the way.
November 14, 2015 at 10:51 am
wobblywheel
Hey, AJ is the one equating Yale students’ reaction to the non-racist Christakis email to the way students in the 1950s responded to that painting. What AJ is saying amounts to an argument that the painting, like the Christakis email, was also not racist. So if, according to AJ’s logic, it actually wasn’t a racist painting, then now I’m thinking it shouldn’t have come down to begin with.
November 14, 2015 at 12:35 pm
Jeffrey Deutsch
Another way of looking at your comparison of reactions is to recall Carl Sagan:
“But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.”
Meanwhile, you mentioned:
“If I have the freedom to schedule an event, I must also have the freedom to change my mind and cancel the event. There are questions to be raised about what constitutes legitimate or illegitimate pressure on the person or institution making such a decision, but their right to do so, if their decision is made freely, can hardly be in doubt.”
Must? Can hardly be in doubt? Pretty strong words there. For one thing, we’ve got this thing called contract law and more broadly the morality of keeping your promises. Once you freely commit to someone else to do something, you’re not quite as free to cancel it.
Now let’s assume that all these speakers’ contracts included clauses allowing cancellation, perhaps with payment of a kill fee (and if so let’s assume said kill fee is paid).
This is very much unlike an Army cafeteria regulating its own walls. For one thing, these are not only civilian institutions but in fact colleges and universities, precisely the places where controversial ideas should be experienced, explored and discussed the most.
For another thing, these are generally if not always public events — quite the opposite of the inside of a military facility.
Is canceling a speaker simply because many students don’t like his or her politics little police state censorship? No. But that means we need words for intermediate actions which also limit access to controversial viewpoints precisely because they’re controversial.
Many years ago, Richard Cornuelle pointed out that we need a private concept of the common good, in between government welfare and similar programs and private businesses out for their own profit. Similarly, we need a private concept of limitations on ideas just because they’re ideas, but do not rise (sink?) to the level of government censorship.
Now let’s move on to the Yale protests. Who, exactly, was giving whom cause to feel unsafe? The protesters were implicitly, if not also explicitly, threatening the Christakises — not simply arguing with them. For what they said. That comes perilously close to censorship by mob, and certainly goes even further down the continuum.
November 14, 2015 at 1:08 pm
Angus Johnston
Jeffrey, you write that “we need words for intermediate actions which also limit access to controversial viewpoints precisely because they’re controversial.”
Two thoughts on that. First, I don’t think t’s at all common to limit “access to controversial viewpoints precisely because they’re controversial.” If we’re going to come up with a new word to describe a phenomenon, we need to understand that phenomenon properly, and getting the “because” clause of your description right is the first step in that process.
Second, I think it’s really important to understand that “limit[ing] access to controversial viewpoints” is on its face morally and legally neutral. There are times when it’s proper to do so, and times when it’s improper. So rather than invent a new word to cover all such cases, I’d rather frame the discussion of them as follows:
1. Disassociating yourself from speech, declining to promulgate speech, or criticizing speech are not per se acts of censorship.
2. Disassociating yourself from speech, declining to promulgate speech, or criticizing speech may be a morally just or unjust act.
3. The really interesting conversation to be had about such acts is one that grapples with their specificity.
In the spirit of such a framing, let’s take a look at Yale. What I see when I look at those events is a group of administrators (the author of the original email) criticizing certain expressive acts, another administrator (Christakis, who is also a lecturer but was speaking in her capacity as Master) criticizing those administrators, and a group of students criticizing Christakis.
As a First Amendment advocate, I’m not at all clear which of these should trouble me and why. All of the emails and all of the criticism they received are to my mind quite clearly protected speech, and taken as a whole they serve as an example of the kind of robust, contentious debate and advocacy that free-speech supporters are always calling for.
Why are we attacking those students? Why aren’t we cheering them?
November 14, 2015 at 2:40 pm
wobblywheel
AJ: “…and a group of students criticizing Christakises.” Students sent around a petition demanding the Christakises either apologize or be fired. In what universe is that “criticism”?
Look, I get that your instinct is always to be the student activists’ advocate. And that’s good, they need someone like that. But please don’t teach them that demanding someone apologize or be fired constitutes “criticism.” As a faculty member, you’re there to sharpen their thinking too.
November 14, 2015 at 3:18 pm
James Walker
Freedom of speech should not forsake or preclude decorum, social mores and general values nor empathy…but that’s the rub. My rights begin where yours’ end and vice versa.. but who determines the actual boundaries?.. A mural that offends should bear scrutiny, but by whom? We need a transcendent common ground..wishful thinking on my part..I know..
November 14, 2015 at 3:37 pm
Angus Johnston
Fair enough, Wobblywheel — I didn’t emphasize the calls for her to be fired. (Though in fairness, neither did Jeffrey or many of the others who criticized the protesters.)
My own view is that both the general criticism and the specific calls for firing are protected, legitimate speech — both as a matter of law and in the context of the proper values of the university. The role of house Master at Yale is an odd hybrid, but in my understanding it’s more of an administrative position than a faculty one — it’s essentially a student affairs job. And I don’t see anything wrong in principle with students calling for the firing of a student affairs staffer who they don’t consider an appropriate advocate for students’ interests.
(Again, this is setting aside the question of whether she should have been fired, or whether her speech was objectionable in the first place. I’m speaking only to the question of whether student pressure to fire a Master for speech they find inconsistent with the Master’s campus role is in principle improper.)
But if I find the case against attacking the students on free-speech grounds for calling for her resignation on balance uncompelling, I have to admit I have to find other arguments I’ve seen — that it was somehow a violation of free-speech values for them to urge her to resign, or yell at her, or crowd around her — frankly mystifying.
There’s speech we like, and speech we don’t like, but it’s nearly all free speech whether we like it or not. I honestly don’t understand what principle underlies the idea that a student telling an administrator that she should resign is somehow an act hostile to free speech.
November 14, 2015 at 4:02 pm
wobblywheel
“And I don’t see anything wrong in principle with students calling for the firing of a student affairs staffer who they don’t consider an appropriate advocate for students’ interests.”
Of course “in principle” students have a right to act like anti-intellectual boors. But who gives a crap whether or not that’s right or wrong in principle? Nobody is saying the students should be BANNED for calling for this sort of thing, and if you think you’re arguing against people who want such a ban, then you’re delusional.
What’s at stake is these students’ *education* — remember? Aren’t you a professor? Is there not a single remaining part of you that wants these kids to become intelligent adults?
I mean, you seem to be saying that it doesn’t matter how dumb the students’ rationale is. If some student wants a house master fired because he’s wearing the wrong color shoes, what Angus Johnston will have to say about it is: “I see nothing wrong with this in principle.”
November 14, 2015 at 4:11 pm
Angus Johnston
Well, no, WW, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that I can imagine situations in which I’d agree with students who were calling for an administrator to be fired, and situations in which I’d disagree, and that I don’t consider the mere act of calling for an administrator’s dismissal to be an act of hostility to free speech or the values of the university.
The question of whether this particular administrator deserved to be fired is a separate question, and one I also have opinions on. But right now what I’m interested in is the framing I described above, because it’s really common and, as I’ve said, completely flabbergasting to me.
November 14, 2015 at 4:28 pm
wobblywheel
“I’m saying that I can imagine situations in which I’d agree with students who were calling for an administrator to be fired.” Me too. Sure.
“and situations in which I’d disagree” — me too, and calling for the Christakises to be fired was ridiculous. The students who called for this were wrong. Not on legal principle or whatever your point was there, but on intellectual, moral and political principle. As professors, whose primary calling and responsibility is teaching each new generation knowledge and wisdom, we should be appalled when students are wrong on such principles.
“and one I also have opinions on” — what are your opinions on this? If you’re unwilling to say, then why?
November 14, 2015 at 4:46 pm
Angus Johnston
It’s not that I’m unwilling to say, WW, it’s that I’m trying to keep this comment thread on track.
It sounds to me like you’re saying you don’t regard students’ call for the resignation or firing of an administrator because of their views to be an assault on free speech rights or the university’s values. That’s great. On that we agree. But a lot of people don’t agree, and I’m trying to get to the bottom of why.
As for Christakis, I don’t consider her email all that egregious, though I do disagree with elements of both its content and its tone. It’s pretty clear that there’s more to this dispute than just the email, though, including some stuff that I’m not sure I’m privy to.
November 15, 2015 at 9:42 am
biscuits and such | Lovely Internet 11.15.15
[…] 10. Listen to how Civil Rights activists in the 1950s were described and compare it to how Civil Rights activists today are described. Sound familiar? […]
November 15, 2015 at 9:45 am
wobblywheel
I don’t think the students at Yale are infringing on the Christakises’ free speech rights, no. What’s damning about the attitudes they’ve expressed is that they’re explicitly anti-intellectual (“you’re not here to create an intellectual space, you’re here to create a home”).
But look, elsewhere student protesters clearly *are* showing an antagonistic attitude towards free speech. The way Mizzou student journalist Tim Tai was treated by student protesters (and by admin/faculty allies) was a clear violation of Tai’s 1st amendment right to be present in and to document a public space.
Both incidents are pretty bad overall for student protesters. What should have been a straightforward day of victory at Mizzou was undermined by fanatical, counterproductive tactics which (inevitably) went unflatteringly viral.
As for Yale, the halloween episode will serve only to drive a wedge between those who believe in the university as a space for free and critical intellectual inquiry, and those who want “safe spaces.”
November 15, 2015 at 10:34 am
Weekend Reading on Student Protests | Backslash Scott Thoughts
[…] The Petulant, Hyper-Sensitive, Censorious, Orwellian Activists of 1954 shows us that the liberal “free-speech” crowd’s backlash against activists isn’t anything new. […]
November 15, 2015 at 10:46 am
Jeffrey Deutsch
(1) The “because” clause of my definition is just fine, thank you very much. I wasn’t making a statement on exactly how many of our colleges and universities see incidents like this. When controversial views are blocked off or threatened just because they’re controversial, it’s a problem.
(2) I didn’t mention the students’ calls for the Christakises to be fired because their directly, physically mobbing Mr. (Master?) Christakis was, in my opinion, intimidating enough to be a threat to free speech. The students may not have *said* “Apologize or we’ll beat you up,” but the implicit threat was there. And it surely could have deterred others from supporting controversial speech.
It is *not* “nearly all free speech” when it shades over into intimidation. Let alone when it’s precisely retaliation for free speech.
(3) In any case, getting back to my continuum, it may be legal to call for someone’s firing in response to controversial views (at least at a *private* school). But it still, in effect, suppresses controversial views and belongs somewhere on the darker side of that continuum.
My sense, Angus, is that we disagree on basic premises and so we’re talking past each other. So, I’m going to call it a day. Nice talking with you!
November 15, 2015 at 4:51 pm
asdf
Reactionaries are all the same no matter time or place, they oppose social progress on principle without regard to history or any social context.
November 15, 2015 at 7:44 pm
Same Argument, Different Decade | bolshevikpunx
[…] “Then, as would be expected, the District of Columbia unit of the NAACP urged removal of the mural because the slave picture reflects on race and color of Negroes, thus encouraging anti-Negro sentiment. At first blush, this business of commercial, literary, and musical censorship seems only the foolish petulance of a hyper-sensitive and inferiority-complexioned racial group which is chagrined over its own characteristic color. On second look, the practice begins to take on a more ominous outlook, something in the nature of the distortions so terrifyingly portrayed in George Orwell’s book Nineteen Eighty-Four.” – William D. Workman, Case for the South (1960) […]