by Nat Hentoff
“You must have quite a library at home,” Deirdre said.
“Everywhere, the books are everywhere. American history’s on top of one of the front hall closets. Jewish history is in Dad’s closet. Hardly any room left for his clothes. Dad’s an atheist, but he says there’s a long, honorable tradition of Jewish atheism. He just tried to start a pile of Dickens in the kitchen. He said he thought Charles—Dad’s like you, he thinks of all of them as friends—he thought Charles would enjoy being in the center of things. But my mother, she said that if he wanted Mr. Dickens in the kitchen, he could get Mr. McDonald to feed Mr. Dickens and everybody else in the house, because she wasn’t about to duck books falling on her head with everything else she has to do. Don’t get me wrong. My mother likes to read too, but she says books are a sickness with my father, and with me too. Anything you overdo, she says, is a sickness. Do you think so? I mean, about books.”
“You know what my answer is going to be.” Deirdre smiled. “Sure, you can overdo eating and you can overdo buying clothes or whatever, and you can overdo work, and you can overdo just about anything. But not books. Say, I was just looking you up. It’s Barnaby. That’s an interesting name. It comes from Barnabas, doesn’t it? From the Hebrew, I think. Son of exhortation, or consolation? Do you know?”
“I should, I guess, but I don’t. But that’s not how I got the name anyway.”
“What do you mean?” Deirdre looked at him quizzically.
Barney grinned. “I come out of a comic strip. There was this strip my mother loved when she was growing up. A kid named Barnaby and his fairy godfather, Mr. O’Malley, who had these magic powers, but somehow he always got it wrong. Things never came out the way he intended, not that he’d ever admit it. She kept a lot of the strips, and I still read them now and then. Anyway, Barnaby’s parents never believed Mr. O’Malley even existed, but Barnaby sure did. He and Mr. O’Malley talked a lot, and they went out on adventures all the time. I think my mother really wanted to call me O’Malley, but she thought the kids would laugh at me. So she settled for Barnaby so I’d always remind her, I guess, of Mr. O’Malley. You see, even though he did make mistakes, Mr. O’Malley was a lot of fun.”
“Well,” the librarian said, “it must be nice to have a name that comes out of so much pleasure. My name”—her voice became low and deep—“comes out of tragedy, terrible tragedy. Long, long ago, there was a young girl, the daughter of a harpist at the court of an Irish king. She was raised in seclusion because the king wanted her for his wife. But there was a prophecy that Deirdre’s beauty—we’re speaking of the past now—would cause an awful, awful disaster. Not by her will, for she was the most innocent of maidens. But prophecy can curse even the innocent.
“Anyway,” Deirdre went on, “she fell in love with a young man, and he and his brothers kidnapped her, spiriting her away to Scotland. In time, the old king, the one who had wanted her for his wife, found them and killed the young man and his brothers. In anguish and in remorse—for she blamed her beauty for having caused those deaths—Deirdre killed herself. There, you see how lucky you are to have come out of a comic strip?”
“I guess so,” said Barnaby, “but Deirdre is a lovely name. It sounds, well, like music.”
“What kinds of books do you want to write, Barnaby?”
“Oh, stories,” he said. “Long, long stories. About tragedy. And about funny things. About people I know. Changed, of course. About people I’d like to know.” He smiled. “About me. I would like to imagine me in all kinds of—”
“Deirdre”—Nora Baines strode into the library—“we’ve got to talk. There’s going to be one god damn big explosion around here. Oh, hello, Barney. Deirdre, did you hear what our leader, our mighty leader, wants me to do?”
“Oh, my God,” the librarian said. “I got a message to see him.” She looked at her watch. “I’m late. I got started talking to Barney—”
“I’m sorry,” Barney said.
“Oh, no.” Deirdre smiled. “I enjoyed that talk a lot.”
“Okay,” he said, “so did I.”
“I’ll walk up with you,” Nora Baines said to Deirdre. “I have to go to that debate, but I can fill you in on the way.”
“See ya.” Barney waved to them as they walked out of the library.
“Yes, indeed.” Deirdre Fitzgerald waved back.
VII
Since the debate would be held before the two combined classes, and since neither Maggie Crowley nor Nora Baines presided over a large enough room, the event was scheduled for the auditorium on the main floor where John Wayne had once stood, as alive as you or me.
On the outside of the door to the auditorium was a sign:
IS INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM
GETTING OUT OF HAND?
MATTHEW GRISWOLD, CITIZENS’ LEAGUE FOR
THE PRESERVATION OF AMERICAN VALUES
VS.
KENT DICKINSON, AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION
Luke shook his head as he read the sign.
“Out of hand?” he said to Barney. “This has got nothing to do with me. Not with the general I’ve got for a mother. I’ve got about as much freedom as if I were doing time. It’s bad enough she has to know where I am all the time and whom I’m with, but she even opens my mail. Well, you know that.”
“Yeah,” Barney said, “but what I don’t know is why you let her do that.”
“What do you mean, why do I let her?” Luke said in exasperation. “What’s my alternative? Turn her in to the postal authorities for tampering with the U.S. mail? How would that look on my college application? ‘Mother: doing five to ten in the federal pen.’ ”
“I know what you mean,” said Gordon McLean behind them. “My parents don’t trust me for one second. They say I should be grateful I got parents who care that much about me. Well, you know, you can overdo caring. I feel like I’m wearing a collar. What about you?” He turned to Barney. “Your folks on top of you all the time?”
“No,” Barney said, “not really. I mean, so long as my grades are okay and I don’t come home walking sideways. Or upside down. They take an interest, you know, but they’re not all over me.”
“Barney, I’d like you to come home to dinner some night,” Gordon said, “and tell my folks just that. Just that one thing. You got to be near the top of the class, you’re the editor of the paper, and you never get into hassles with any of the teachers or anybody else. So you are a walking advertisement for the freedom way of life.”
Meanwhile, seated behind a long table on the stage of the auditorium, Matthew Griswold, who always arrived early for every appointment because that was a surefire way not to be late, was amusedly watching the lively interplay among the students as they took their seats. Including Luke Hagstrom’s affectionate bouncing of a book off Kate Steven’s head, and her taking the book and shoving it into his stomach.
A tall, bony man with stooped shoulders and sparse gray hair, Griswold bowed slightly as Maggie Crowley introduced him to Nora Baines.
“Are you going to be grading us on our loyalty to American values today,” Nora asked with a wintry smile, “or will you just be debating?”
“Are you requesting a grade?” Griswold smiled.
“Only if I can test you in return.” Nora’s smile grew colder.”
“On what?” Griswold persisted in being friendly.
“Oh, on your Americanism. On whether, for example, you agree with James Madison that the real danger to liberty in our democracy comes from the power of the majority.”
Griswold looked appreciatively at Nora Baines. “That’s too good a question,” he said, “for a brief answer.” He looked at his watch. “I wish you were debating me today.”
His actual opponent, a short, stocky young man in his late twenties with light-brown hair and an armful of newspapers, from which a banana could just barely be seen peeking, rushed onstage.
“Sorry to be late,” Kent Dickinson said. “The elevator in the courthouse got stuck.”
“I thought the ACLU could work wonders,” said Griswold.
“Hiya, Matt.” Dickinson grinned. “If only the power of faith in the Constitution were that great.”
“Ah, Kent,” said the older man, “if you’d only put God on your board of directors, you’d never get stuck at all.”
Maggie Crowley suggested it was time to get started. Dickinson was to be first. As he tossed his newspapers on the table, the banana slid out onto the stage and then onto the floor, to the snickering of the students. The young lawyer looked at it sadly. “That was my lunch. Oh, well,” he said to the front row of students, “maybe one of you would hold it for me.”
Going up to the microphone, Dickinson rummaged through his pockets, found a battered paperback, opened it to a page marked by a rubber band, looked up, and said:
“There was a man, a great American, who served on the United States Supreme Court for a long time. His name was Hugo Black, and he once said”—Dickinson looked at the book—“that since the earliest days of human history, I quote, ‘Philosophers have dreamed of a country where the mind and spirit of man would be free; where there would be no limits to inquiry; where men would be free—”
“And women!” Kate shouted.
“Sure.” Dickinson, startled, looked up. “Who said no? Where all would be free, okay, ‘to challenge the most deeply rooted beliefs and principles.’ “He turned and looked at Griswold, who smiled and raised his eyebrows.
“Well”—Dickinson faced the audience again—“at last, at long last, such a country actually came into being. And you’re in it. You’re part of it. For the first time in the history of the world, here was a nation with—and I quote—‘no legal restrictions of any kind upon the subjects people could investigate, discuss, and deny.’ You’ve got to realize”—Dickinson looked at the students—“this had never happened before. There had never been a place like America.”
He began to pour out some water without looking at the glass, and there was now a small puddle under the table.
“And then”—Dickinson tried again and half filled the glass—“Justice Black went on to say that the people who wrote our Constitution—among them, George Mason—knew that having a country with all this freedom going on could be very risky. With everybody constantly doubting and questioning anything they wanted to. Good Lord—sorry, Matt”—he nodded to Griswold—“you could have another revolution with all that freedom. So why did they take that chance? Because the one thing they knew for sure was that freedom, real freedom, is always—always—the deadliest enemy of tyranny. George Mason believed that, and Jefferson, and Madison.”
He grabbed for his book, which was sliding down the stand. “One more thing from Justice Black. He was talking about the people I just mentioned, and all the other American revolutionaries who defied King George and the British troops so that they could live in liberty. But again, immediate liberty wasn’t the only thing on their minds. They were convinced that, with all the risks involved, liberty would bring extraordinary advantages to Americans to come.” Dickinson looked down and read:
“They believed that ‘the ultimate happiness and security of a nation lies in its ability’ “—his voice grew louder and louder—” ‘to explore, to grow, and ceaselessly to adapt itself to new knowledge, born of inquiry, FREE FROM ANY GOVERNMENTAL CONTROL OVER THE MIND AND SPIRIT OF MAN.’ ”
Dickinson paused to mild applause from most of the students, although Barney and Luke were clapping vigorously, as were the two faculty members.
“He’s not being very objective,” Nora Baines whispered to Maggie Crowley.
“Maybe not, but he’s sure being patriotic.” Crowley laughed.
“Now”—Dickinson threw his paperback on the table. It just missed his water glass, to his surprise and pleasure. “Now, there are a lot of groups going around the country these days trying to destroy that vision—that marvelous vision of a country where individual liberty is so natural a right that it is in the very air the citizens breathe. I shouldn’t say ‘vision’ because, with constant struggle, we’ve made it real. We are free. But if these groups succeed, liberty will be only a vision again—just the stuff of dreams.
“What groups am I talking about?” The young lawyer looked at some notes on the back of an envelope, and then stuffed it back in his pocket. “You can usually recognize them by how they call themselves. MORAL or MORALITY is in there somewhere. Or DECENCY. Or AMERICANISM. And each one of them has a list of things they want changed, you know; but what they really want is to have everybody thinking the same way. The way they think.”
“Even if that were true,” Matthew Griswold, from his chair behind the table, said mildly, “what’s wrong with that? Isn’t everybody free in this free country to try to persuade everybody else to his way of thinking?”
“Of course, Matt,” Dickinson said heartily. “But the people I’m talking about are not content to see if their ideas can prevail in the free marketplace of ideas. They are trying to get GOVERNMENT to enforce their notions of morality, of decency, of Americanism. You see, they do indeed believe that individual freedoms are getting out of hand, that they must be controlled. But by whose standards? By their standards! And Government will be the policeman to make sure that everybody else falls in line with what these groups want.”
Griswold was shaking his head while writing some notes.
“Let me give you some examples of what I mean,” Dickinson said. “A number of these groups are getting school boards to censor books. To throw them right out of classrooms and out of school libraries. And in two cities—Drake, North Dakota, and Warsaw, Indiana—they actually BURNED those books. Like the Nazis did in Germany.
“And some of these people”—the lawyer took off his suit jacket and tossed it on the table next to the newspapers—“have been pushing hard to get the government to force prayers into public schools. But suppose you don’t want to pray in school? Oh, they say, those students who don’t want to, won’t have to. They’ll be excused from praying. But that way everybody will know who prayed and who didn’t pray. That’s not a choice anyone should have to make in public—in a school or anywhere else. You know why?”
“Because it’s nobody else’s damn business if you pray or not!” Luke yelled.
“You got it!” Dickinson smiled broadly. “Religion is personal, and it’s a private matter for those who want it to be a private matter. Religion has nothing to do with Government, and Government must have nothing to do with religion. To make sure that in this country, everybody would be free to worship in his own way—would be free of any Government pressure to worship in the way the Government wanted him to—the Constitution set up what Thomas Jefferson called a wall of separation between church and state. And the Supreme Court has agreed with Tom Jefferson again and again.”
The lawyer loosened his tie and began to walk up and down the stage. “But these decency groups and morality groups and Americanism groups, they want the Government to line you up at eight o’clock every morning so you can get ready to pray. Does that sound like a free country to you? It’s these groups who are getting out of hand. If they keep getting stronger, what’s to stop some Government official—somewhere down the line—from telling you not to wear anything red because that’s the Communists’ color?”
There were some giggles in the audience.
“Oh, you think it can’t happen here?” Dickinson said. “Well, let me tell you something. In 1919 twenty-four state legislatures passed a law saying that if you hung a red flag out of the window, you were committing a criminal act. The next year, eight more state legislatures did the same thing. And so did some cities. Before that nonsense was all over, fourteen hundred Americans were arrested for breaking the Red Flag laws, and about three hundred of them wound up in prison. No Government craziness is impossible if people just let it happen. Freedom does not come with any guarantees, you know. You can lose it just by not paying any attention to those who are taking it away from you.”
> As he returned to his seat, there was more applause from the students. Dickinson got up, at first seeming to bow, but he was actually looking for his banana, which was suddenly tossed up to him by a student in the first row.
“I sure wouldn’t want to be Matthew Griswold after that,” Maggie Crowley said to Nora Baines.
“Don’t engrave the winner’s cup yet, Maggie. You haven’t seen Griswold at work. I have.”
VIII
Matthew Griswold, pushing his eyeglasses down onto his nose, walked slowly to the lectern. He opened a thin manila folder, glanced at it, and looked out into the audience.
“Let me begin with a story,” Griswold said in a calm, clear voice that carried throughout the auditorium without any discernible effort on his part. “It’s a true story. Not long ago, a brilliant neurobiologist from Australia was lecturing at Harvard on how the brain works. At the end of his series of lectures, he said that the theory of evolution certainly accounts for man’s brain in its present physical state, but evolution cannot explain the mysteries of the mind. That is, the mysteries of thought, of imagination. Only something else, something beyond the capacity of science to explain, could account for these mysteries. This scientist did not actually say that these mysteries come from God, but some of those in the audience thought that was what he meant. And do you know what they did? They hissed him.”
Griswold paused. “I told you this story not because of that neurobiologist’s notion about the limits of science. I don’t know enough about the brain, or about evolution for that matter, to be able to tell whether he’s right or not about what he calls the mysteries of the mind. I told you that story because my friend here, Mr. Dickinson, makes so much of the individual’s freedom to inquire. Yet here was this audience at Harvard, presumably the very citadel of free inquiry in this nation, and they could not endure listening to an idea that contradicted their own religion—the religion of anti-religion.