June 28, 2005

The Ten Commandments and the ACLU

Probably the most enjoyable part of reading David Hackett Fischer's new Liberty and Freedom is stumbling across interesting historical tidbits. Who knew that a broken pitcher was a specifically feminine image of emancipation?

One of those bits of historical trivia seems timely after yesterday's rulings. Fischer covers the founding of the ACLU in the wake of the Red Scare and the revival of the Ku Klux Klan. In his portrait of Arthur Garfield Hays — general counsel for the ACLU in the twenties — Fischer lists Hays' rather surprising "Ten Commandments for Civil Rights":

  1. The right to speak and hear and print and read
  2. The right to be arrested, which set the due process of law in motion, and protected against the worst abuses of police and vigilantes
  3. The right to associate and to refuse to associate
  4. The right to personal prejudices, and not to like or employ Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Negroes, Communists, or Nazis
  5. The right to privacy
  6. The right to persuade and refuse to be persuaded; the right to be a nuisance, other fellow has a right to refuse to associate with you
  7. The right to bargain, in every activity of life
  8. The right to obey your conscience as to oaths, flags, soldiering
  9. The right to be provocative and to be protected from mobs
  10. The right to assert your own idea of Americanism

A few of those "commandments" have fallen into disfavor or suffered Third Amendment-like obsolescence, but they're still an interesting read.

Posted by Ben Brumfield at June 28, 2005 12:28 PM
Comments

The ACLU has been through a lot of changes. During WWII the national office ordered the Northern California office to stop representing some of the parties contesting the Japanese American Internment -- and to their credit the Northern California staff politely ignored the national office. The ACLU also wouldn't defend many subjects of McCarthy red-hunting subpoenas in the '50s despite the obvious First Amendment issues at stake. Which is not to criticize the present-day ACLU, of which I am a member, only to note that it has a far from perfect history.

Posted by: Martha Bridegam at June 28, 2005 09:36 PM

Interesting to see the shift in priorities (e.g. Commandment 4). Just as modern conservatism has to deal with an inherent tension between the desire for social cohesion and the pursuit of market-driven change, so modern liberalism has to wrestle with this conflict between liberty of conscience and social justice.

Posted by: Alan Allport at June 29, 2005 03:51 AM

this conflict between liberty of conscience and social justice

Reminds me of the essay I had to write for an Intro to the Study of Women and Gender class on how the doctrine of individual rights was incompatible with the achievement of racial or sexual equity. Showed up on an exam too, I think.

Fischer draws attention to #4, though I don't remember whether he saw the modern view as a rejection of private prejudice or a rejection of the distinction between private and public prejudice.

Eugene Genovese spends a great deal of time on this sort of thing in Southern Tradition and various articles about The Citadel, talking about the right to free association necessarily carrying with it a right to exclude members. If I recall correctly, he sees a contradition between the modern Left's support for groups and communities and its insistence on their inability to exclude anyone. I can probably look it up if you're interested.

The other thing about Hays's commandments that Fischer points out is how many of them are concerned with mob violence.

Posted by: Ben Brumfield at June 29, 2005 06:36 AM

Just as one's preference for Locke over Hobbes, or vice versa, depends on one's confidence in individual human behavior, so I suppose there's a need for different sets of 'rights' in societies with and without strong states. In rural America in the 1920s the problem wasn't the imposition of government, it was the absence of it.

Posted by: Alan Allport at June 29, 2005 07:15 AM