The High Cost of Free Speech
A.C.L.U. dilemma: defending "hateful and heinous " ideas
Frank Collin, 33, is a swaggering bullyboy who likes to dress up in a Nazi uniform, spout totalitarian dogma and howl racial slurs. Aryeh Neier, 41, the son of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, runs the American Civil Liberties Union, an organization that protects individual freedoms. For the past 14 months, Neier and the A.C.L.U. have defended the right of Collin and a small band of brownshirts to taunt the citizens of Skokie, Ill., thousands of whom are survivors of Nazi death camps.
Why? The answer is civil liberties gospel: if you fail to protect even the most odious and unpopular speech, you risk undermining all free speech. Basic to the First Amendment, the lesson is clear enough to the courts, which have struck down Skokie's attempts to keep the Nazis from demonstrating. Last week the Supreme Court refused to stop Nazi picketing planned for this Sunday in Skokie.
But the need to defend what Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes used to call '"freedom for the thought that we hate" is not easy to accept, for a public whose thoughts naturally turn to gas chambers and attempted genocide. The A.C.L.U. has been bitterly attacked for defending Nazis' rights. Its membership, heavily Jewish, has dropped from a peak of 270,000 in 1976 to 200,000 today. A resultant $500,000 decline in dues and gifts has caused staff layoffs of up to 15% in some state offices. There is now less money to defend civil rights and liberties of a more sympathetic kind. "People who joined us because of other great causes," Neier reports, "were stunned over Skokie."
The mass defections came as a surprise to the A.C.L.U. leadership. Founded in 1920, it has defended rights to freedom of speech and assembly on behalf of fascists and Ku Klux Klanners, as well as underdogs like Sacco and Vanzetti, the "Scottsboro boys" and conscientious objectors in World War II. Though consistently the country's foremost protector of the Bill of Rights, the A.C.L.U. had acquired only 60,000 members by 1960. Its period of large growth came in the late '60s and early '70s, when civil rights and liberties became a popular cause and thousands of young people joined to help support Freedom Riders in the South and Viet Nam draft resisters. Says Neier: "We rode the crest of public concern." Now Neier and others feel that "the country is less concerned with individual rights. There is no dominant political issue, no sexy come-on. We're back to bedrock free-speech problems."
Author of a new book on the Skokie case, entitled Defending My Enemy, Neier had intended to resign last fall as executive director. After 15 years in the A.C.L.U., he admits, "I'm combat weary." But he postponed his exit a year to see the A.C.L.U. through the Skokie crisis. Internal wrangling, which forced Washington Director Charles Morgan Jr. and Legal Director Melvin Wulf out of the organization, has added to the strain on Neier. So has the revelation that union officials passed along information about its membership to the Federal Bureau of Investigation during the 1950s.
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