Free Speech For Me - But Not For Thee: How The American Left and Right Relentlessly Censor Each Other. - book reviews

Reason, Oct, 1993 by Thomas W. Hazlett

When it comes to literary censorship, Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, published in 1884, is probably the American heavyweight champion. In its early days it was banned by prudes offended by its vulgarity. In 1885 the Concord, Massachusetts, public library expunged the book, calling it the "veriest trash," and in 1902 the Denver public library did likewise, decrying it as "immoral and sacrilegious." In modern times, politically correct Americans have been outraged by Twain's novel, which employs the term nigger some 300 times. New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois, banished the tome in 1976 upon finding that it was "degrading and destructive to black humanity." The book now faces virtually constant attack from do-gooders across the fruited plain.

Left, right, and center, Americans have not been shy about censorship. Yet under whatever banner, book burning is itself offensive and insensitive to the values of a free people. As Nat Hentoff tirelessly details in his brilliantly argued, documented, and written book, Free Speech for Me--But Not for Thee, neither does censorship do justice to those it purports to protect. The black school children who are spared the jarring confrontation with Huck's friend, Nigger Jim, will be less well-armed to surmount the travails of racism in real life. In fact, the censors generally seem to miss the whole point.

With Huckleberry Finn, the speech regulators miss the mark by an incredible margin: Twain's aim was to ridicule racism. And not just with some sterile, academic diatribe, or with some drippy account of victimization, but from the perspective of a white boy who figures out the stupidity of bigotry all on his own. Hentoff quotes Russell Baker's description of Huckleberry Finn's moral: "The people |Huck and Jim~ encounter are drunkards, murderers, bullies, swindlers, lynchers, thieves, liars, frauds, child abusers, numb-skulls, hypocrites, windbags and traders in human flesh. All are white. The one man of honor in this phantasmagoria is black Jim, the runaway slave. 'Nigger Jim,' as Twain called him to emphasize the irony of a society in which the only true gentleman was held beneath contempt."

Ah, good point, Mr. Twain. But just a tad insensitive for our young scholars, don't you think? OK, maybe it's not a bad book; Ernest Hemingway did say that "all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn." But that word nigger is so hurtful! The black parents object strongly to that book in the classroom, and the white liberal administrators just don't want any trouble. As the principal of Mark Twain (!) Intermediate School in Fairfax County, Virginia, said after banning the book: "I just felt that a student of any race or nationality shouldn't be made to feel uncomfortable in a classroom."

Sometimes being protected means being disrespected, Hentoff notes. "Let us suppose it is true that Huck had paralyzed those black kids," he writes of a successful censorship campaign waged by African-American parents in Pennsylvania. "All the more reason for them to get all the way into understanding Huckleberry Finn. Otherwise, what a terrible thing to learn! That he is so fragile, so vulnerable, so without intellectual and emotional resources that a book can lay him low. And that is what the teachers and supervisors of the junior high schools in Warrington, Pennsylvania, had allowed the black children in their care to learn."

Hentoff is a marvelous tour guide in this cruise through modern American censorship. While it begins with Twain, it passes through a house of First Amendment horrors that now stretches coast to coast: hate-speech ordinances, speech codes on campus, flag-burning amendments to the U.S. Constitution, feminist-Moral Majority coalitions to ban pornography. A loyal civil libertarian, Hentoff dependably gives us his personal view of the friends and foes of free speech. He is particularly meticulous in charting the path of the American Civil Liberties Union--where it stands up for freedom and where it chickens out.

The book spins from an interesting political dynamic. A committed man of the left, a proud veteran of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the counterculture publications of today (The Nation, The Village Voice, the Washington Post editorial page), Hentoff must expend virtually all of his ammo on left-wing censors. When one hunts for intolerance, that's where one finds the ducks. (He goes far and wide in search of right-wing censorship, however, going back to an interesting personal rendition of the campaign against his friend, the late, great comic and social satirist Lenny Bruce.) Hentoff is a marksman, and you trust his aim because his targets are not gratuitous.

The feminists, for instance. Hentoff, who labels one chapter "The Gospel According to Catharine MacKinnon," reports that a group of librarians in upstate New York recently suggested that the following label be put on particular books in school libraries, as needed: "WARNING: It has been determined that these materials are sex-stereotyped and may limit your sense of freedom and choice. (These labels can be typed and reproduced as a student project.)" How nice for our youngsters to absorb a bit of applied civics.