Modern conservatism and the loss of virtue

Southern Illinoisan, May 20, 2014

 Charles Murray is the most influential sociologist in the country today. His 1982 book Losing Ground provided much of the intellectual rationale for the Reagan administration’s welfare policies. More recently, Rep. Paul Ryan claims Murray as his specialist on urban affairs, while columnist George Will has labeled him “the most consequential and conservative contemporary social scientist.”

Murray’s latest book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, provoked a great deal of debate in its portrait of white America increasingly split into two separate worlds based on income, education and values, with almost no shared culture remaining to link the two.

But one aspect of the book has received less attention. In defining the common culture that formerly united Americans, Murray refers to the Founding Fathers’ use of the word “virtue,” which, in his definition, is composed of four values: industriousness, honesty, marriage and religion. Murray’s argument is that, though such values remain strongly held by the upper twenty percent of white America, they are much less deeply felt among the bottom thirty percent.

While Murray is correct to say that the country was founded largely on the ideal of virtue, he misses the central meaning of the word. Though the characteristics he lists were supplementary parts of the concept, what Americans in the Revolutionary era primarily meant by virtue was a willingness to put the public good above self-interest. As historian Gordon Wood wrote in his classic The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, while in a monarchy people could be restrained by force, “in a republic, . . . each man must somehow be persuaded to submerge his personal wants into the greater good of the whole. This willingness of the individual to sacrifice his private interests for the good of the community [was what] the eighteenth century termed ‘public virtue’.”

In other words, the political vision of Murray and many contemporary conservatives significantly diminishes the value of community, which was absolutely central to the political ideology that inspired the Founding Fathers.

It wasn’t always this way. Historian Warren Susman identified what he termed the “traditional definitions of conservatism: the organic society, the need for order, for roots, for place.” In a word, community.

After the American Revolution there began to develop an increasing emphasis on individualism, especially in the aftermath of the market revolution of the early 1800s. But most conservatives sought to balance this individualism with a strong sense of the common good. Herbert Hoover, for instance, one of the most intelligent conservatives of the early twentieth century, argued in his 1922 book American Individualism for a combination of economic self-interest with a call for each person to recognize the divine element in every other person, and thus willingly work for the common good. It was, in the words of Hoover’s biographer Joan Hoff Wilson, “an attempt to reconcile individualism and cooperation through voluntarism.”

Similarly, Russell Kirk, the leading intellectual light of post-World War II conservatism, included community among the ten general principles of conservatism, saying, “It is the performance of our duties in community that teaches us prudence and efficiency and charity.”

And yet the concept of the public good has been largely missing from conservative thought in the last forty years. As economist Milton Friedman explained the moral and social obligations of capitalists in 1974, “So the question is, do corporate executives, provided they stay within the law, have responsibilities . . . other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible? And my answer to that is, no they do not.”

As journalist Will Bunch comments, one of the ways Ronald Reagan transformed American political discourse was by making it so “that the notion of sacrifice is to be ridiculed.” Thus, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush eschewed calls for sacrifice or public-spiritedness, and instead urged Americans to express their patriotism through personal consumption, saying, “Do your business around the country. . . . Get down to Disney World in Florida. Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed."

Other conservatives, like former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan and Paul Ryan, have long been under the thrall of Ayn Rand who preached the virtues of greed and selfishness, the opposite of Kirk’s prudence and charity. It’s the same kind of thinking that has made a hero of Cliven Bundy, a man whose sole claim to fame is his conviction that he is above the law.

As Gordon Wood said, in the Founding Fathers’ vision, “a republic was such a delicate polity precisely because it demanded an extraordinary moral character in the people. Every state in which people participated needed a degree of virtue; but a republic which rested solely on the people absolutely required it.”

Isn’t that a vision worth conserving?

Joe Hill's Last Will

Salt Lake City Weekly, November 18, 2015

Almost a century ago, the socialist journalist John Reed wrote of the Industrial Workers of the World—popularly known as the Wobblies, “Remember, this is the only American working-class movement which sings… They love and revere their singers too in the IWW. All over the country, workers are singing Joe Hill’s songs.”

The unofficial songwriter for the IWW, Hill was born in Sweden in 1879 and immigrated to the United States in 1902. He composed and sang in an effort to organize the working class into One Big Union and, for his efforts, the state of Utah executed him a century ago this month.

Six-time Grammy nominee John McCutcheon recreates Hill's last night in Joe Hill's Last Will, a one-man play based on Hill's writings and songs, written by community organizer and folksinger Si Kahn. 

McCutcheon released a CD on May 1, also titled Joe Hill's Last Will, featuring the same songs as the play, including such well-known tunes as “The Preacher and the Slave,” “There is Power in a Union” and “Rebel Girl” as well as such obscurities as “What We Want” and “Overalls and Snuff.”

As McCutcheon says, Hill is difficult to understand by today's standards. "He was a different animal. He never did a gig. Was never on the radio. Never made a recording. Didn’t do anything that would further his artistic notice. He wrote to be useful, nothing more. He is a complete anachronism in twenty-first century terms."

For Wobblies, music was a weapon in the class war and proved essential in organizing campaigns. "A pamphlet,” Hill once wrote, “no matter how good, is never read more than once, but a song is learned by heart and repeated over and over." As McCutcheon explains, “you had a large immigrant work force with songs that held great emotional meaning to these workers. Utilizing those melodies, with words fitted to immediate concerns was very powerful. Think of the music of the Civil Rights Movement; the song sources had tremendous, spiritual and historical power to people, which in turn lent that foundational power to their usage in new contexts with slightly altered words. Same thing with IWW songs. They understood that people need information, but they also need emotional connection.”

The songs reflect Hill’s gift for vernacular, an especially impressive accomplishment given he was not a native English speaker. But as McCutcheon says, "When you hang around with people who don't speak the King's English—especially workers who are doing a lot of making nicknames up for one another, giving descriptive and often scatological nicknames to jobs that they have to do—you end up having an ear for the vernacular. Hill certainly seemed to have a gift for that.”

Hill drew on a wide range of influences in composing his songs, from Tin Pan Alley and vaudeville to ethnic music and popular hymns, often depending on audience and situation. His most famous song, “The Preacher and the Slave,” was written during an organizing campaign in Spokane, Washington, when the IWW and the Salvation Army often stood near each other on streets competing for the same audiences. Local company bosses began paying the Salvation Army to bring its band to drown out Wobbly soapboxers. “Joe Hill decided if you can't beat them, co-opt them,” McCutcheon observes, “and wrote new words to ‘In the Sweet Bye and Bye,’ which was one of the most popular songs that the Salvation Army was playing, and got all the men singing his words to the hymn. It was partially a matter of necessity, because it doesn't matter how loud you sing, three trumpets, two trombones, and a bass drum are going to drown you out, so you find a way to use that to your advantage.”

McCutcheon’s performance also includes the remarkably contemporary take on working-class conservatism, "Mr. Block," the worker whose loyalty consistently lies with the bosses. “One of the most interesting things about doing this album and doing this play is the reaction it gets from younger people, college-age people,” McCutcheon comments, “who will say 'All that stuff was going on one hundred years ago and we're still dealing with it today?' And the one comment many of them make is, 'Boy, "Mr. Block" has got the American workforce pegged.'"

Throughout Hill’s oeuvre runs a sharp sense of humor, which served both entertainment and political purposes. In McCutcheon’s words, “humor is a powerful weapon.  It allows the weak to reduce the powerful to manageable size. Plus, the powerful, for some reason, rarely have a sense of humor. Humor makes them vulnerable and, ultimately, conquerable. When you show them you're not afraid, they don't know what to do. And that was a great gift that the Wobblies gave to the American labor movement. And we could use a hell of a lot more of it now.”

Fifty years after the 1963 March on Washington

Southern Illinoisan, August 28, 2013

          On August 28, 1963, 250,000 people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Participants listened to speakers from all the major civil rights organizations, highlighted by Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech.

With the fiftieth anniversary of the March, media attention has focused on the stirring final section of King's speech, in which he outlines his dream "that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed--we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." The implicit message, then, will be one of self-congratulation--once upon a time, we had segregation and blacks could not vote; now we've outlawed the former and guaranteed the latter. We have achieved King's dream.

But the real message of the March on Washington is far different. The true meaning is, in the words of March organizer A. Philip Randolph, "Freedom is never granted; it is won. Justice is never given; it is exacted."

In fact, the March had its genesis more than twenty years earlier as Randolph's brainchild. A labor organizer, Randolph had struggled for twelve years to organize African-American railroad porters into a union. By 1937, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters had established itself as the largest black labor union in the country.

As wars and rumors of war spread across Europe in the late-1930s, the U.S. government increased military spending and new hiring in defense industries enabled America to begin pulling out of the Great Depression. But this recovery was for whites only, as the war industries would not hire blacks.

Randolph decided the situation called for mass action. Thus in January 1941, he called for 10,000 blacks to hold a rally on July 1 at the Lincoln Memorial demanding Roosevelt issue an executive order abolishing discrimination in national defense jobs .

Randolph's appeal resonated with rank-and-file blacks. By early summer, the number of expected participants had risen to 100,000. Ordinary African Americans were inspired by Randolph's vision. "You possess power, great power," he urged his followers. "Our problem is to harness and hitch it up for action on the broadest scale."

President Roosevelt, though, was desperate to avoid the March. Proud of his close relationship with African Americans, Roosevelt did not want the embarrassment of 100,000 protesters in Washington. On the other hand, Randolph was not going to cancel the March without an acceptable quid pro quo. On June 25, the two sides reached a deal. Randolph called off the March and, in exchange, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, ending discrimination in employment in defense industries, and established a Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC). While Randolph did not get all he sought-- the FEPC was largely powerless--two million blacks were employed in wartime defense work and African Americans largely joined the broader economic recovery.

In late 1962, seeking to pressure Congress to pass fair employment legislation, Randolph proposed a rally in Washington. The plan met with only lukewarm support at first, but momentum picked up in early 1963 as King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference began demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama, which were met with increasing brutality by police. At this point Randolph adapted his plan, and the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom won the enthusiastic approval of a broad coalition of civil rights, labor and church organizations.

Like Roosevelt before him, Kennedy felt the timing of the March inopportune, warning organizers, "We want success in Congress, not just a big show at the Capitol. Some of these people are looking for an excuse to be against us."

Randolph replied, "The Negroes are already in the streets. It is very likely impossible to get them off. If they are bound to be in the streets in any case, is it not better that they be led by organizations dedicated to civil rights and disciplined by struggle rather than to leave them to other leaders who care neither about civil rights nor nonviolence?" King emphasized that the March was not intended to intimidate, but was instead an example of "creative lobbying."

The March's ultimate success has tended to overshadow the fact that Randolph saw one of the primary goals as securing economic rights. In forging a broad, multiracial coalition of labor and religious organizations, Randolph sought to place the civil rights struggle in the forefront of the rights of all working people. In words that remain as true today as they were fifty years ago, he said, "Look for the enemies of Medicare, or higher minimum wages, of Social Security, or Federal aid to education, and there you will find the enemy of the Negro, the coalition of [southern Democrats] and reactionary Republicans that seek to dominate the Congress."

Review, Conspiracy in the Streets: The Extraordinary Trial of the Chicago Eight. Edited and with an introduction by Jon Wiener. Afterword by Tom Hayden. Illustrations by Jules Feiffer (The New Press, 2006)

Peace and Change, July 2007

Following the tumultuous events at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago—in which thousands of New Leftists and antiwar protesters faced police in violent confrontations—the Nixon administration responded by indicting six prominent and two lesser-known activists for conspiracy to cross state lines with the intent to foment a riot. The resultant trial would offer nearly five months of sometimes entertaining, sometimes appalling theater pitting two different visions of America against each other: an anti-authority, youth-oriented, countercultural vision represented by the defendants and their lawyers; and a pro-establishment vision personified by the prosecutors and especially the presiding judge, Julius Hoffman. Conspiracy in the Streets presents nearly 200 pages of excerpts from the trial transcripts, offering a vivid first-hand account of one of the greatest political trials of the last sixty years.

The trial had its origins in the efforts of a coalition of antiwar and New Left groups to organize a series of demonstrations to take place in Chicago during the Democratic Convention in August 1968. But planning for the event ran afoul of the powerful administration of Mayor Richard Daley, as city officials denied organizers permits to demonstrate outside the convention hall or in Grant Park, several miles away. When thousands of demonstrators showed up anyway, city police forcibly attacked crowds of protestors, some of whom fought back. By the end of the convention, more than 600 demonstrators had been arrested, and more than 1,000 had been treated for injuries either in hospitals or by on-site medical teams, while 192 police officers had been injured. In the aftermath of the convention, the report of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence—the so-called “Walker Report”—concluded the events in Chicago were a “police riot” and Attorney General Ramsey Clark declined to seek charges against the protest organizers.

But with the Nixon administration coming into office in early 1969, indictments were handed down shortly thereafter against eight of the movement’s leaders. These included David Dellinger, a 54-year-old pacifist with a decades-long record of war resistance; Rennie Davis and Tom Hayden, who had been prominent members of the Students for a Democratic Society since the early 1960s; Bobby Seale of the Black Panther Party; Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin of the Youth International Party (Yippie!); and two relatively unknown local activists, Lee Weiner and John Froines (at trial’s end, as the judge handed out contempt citations and thought he had finished with the defendants and was about to begin on the defense lawyers, he realized he had not yet sentenced Froines, prompting Froines’ lament, “It’s part of being a media unknown that even the judge finally forgets you’re here”). The eight were charged with conspiring to riot despite the fact that Bobby Seale had never met any of the others and, as Abbie Hoffman would testify, “We couldn’t agree on lunch.” All the defendants but Seale chose as their lawyers William Kuntsler, who had a long record of working in the civil rights movement, and Leonard Weinglass, who was working in his first federal trial, and when Seale’s lawyer fell ill, the judge assigned Kuntsler as Seale’s attorney.

As the transcripts clearly show, Judge Hoffman made little attempt to conceal his contempt for the defendants and his antipathy for the lawyers. If the defense sought to use the trial as an effective piece of agitprop, then they could have ordered Judge Hoffman straight from central casting. Cantankerous and combative, the judge rushed through jury selection in less than a day, consistently denied defense motions, insulted defense attorneys in front of the jury, and refused to allowed crucial defense witnesses to testify—most egregiously, former Attorney General Clark, who was prevented from explaining why he had refused to seek indictments against the defendants. The judge’s actions reached their nadir when Seale repeatedly insisted on a delay until he could be represented by his own lawyer or, barring that, representing himself, and Judge Hoffman responded by ordering Seale bound and gagged, prompting outrage on the part of the defense lawyers and the rest of the defendants. Eventually Seale’s case was separated from the others’.

The defense team chose to use the trial to present to the jury and the broader American audience the ideas and values of what was loosely called “the Movement.” Thus, defense witnesses featured a wide array of New Left, countercultural, and civil rights celebrities—including, among others, Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, Dick Gregory, Jesse Jackson, Julian Bond, Timothy Leary, Judy Collins, and Arlo Guthrie. The testimonies offer abundant examples of entertaining cultural clashes, as when Ginsberg, asked what he did when he encountered police at the demonstrations, began to chant “O-o-m-m-m-m, o-o-m-m-m” only to have the judge cut him off after two “oommms,” or when Collins or Guthrie began singing, only to have the judge order them silenced. As a defense, though, this strategy came across as unfocused, bordering on incoherent. More effective are the lesser-known witnesses who gave first-hand accounts of the brutal behavior of the Chicago police and the intransigence of the Daley administration.

In the trial’s context, the defendant who shone brightest was Abbie Hoffman. A veteran of the Southern civil rights movement, Hoffman emerged in the mid-1960s as a public figure in the New Left specializing in acts of guerilla theater. The Yippies were his and Rubin’s attempt to forego the hard work of grassroots organizing and create a movement from the top down by using the mass media, a strategy that led them to make outrageous and sometimes irresponsible statements, like their threat to put LSD in Chicago’s water system. While not especially effective as an organizing tactic, it often made for entertaining theater and the trial provided a perfect forum for Hoffman’s comedic talents. Whether blowing kisses to the jury, dressing in judicial robes, dropping his last name (so as not to be confused with Judge Hoffman), or insulting the judge in Yiddish (as the transcripts make clear, almost all of the defendants’ outbursts came in response to some especially provocative judicial ruling; in this case it was the revocation of Dellinger’s bail), Hoffman used the trial as a forum to make a mockery of the government’s case. As a witness, Hoffman gave the judge and prosecutor fits, as when, for instance, he stated that he resided in “Woodstock Nation,” and when asked where that was located, responded, “It is in my mind and the minds of my brothers and sisters. We carry it around with us in the same way that the Sioux Indians carry around the Sioux nation. It does not consist of property or material, but, rather, of ideas and certain values, those values being cooperation versus competition.”

Excerpts of the trial transcripts have been available in paperback form, especially in the long out-of-print Tales of Hoffman (Bantam Books, 1970), a book that in roughly the same number of pages presents a much fuller account. As Norman Mailer pointedly observed during his testimony, “Facts are nothing without their nuance,” and what is missing from this version is much of the trial’s nuance. Hoffman’s testimony, for instance, is significantly truncated in this edition, often without indicating what has been left out. Thus, when Weinglass commented that the prosecutor had finally understood that much of the Yippies’ rhetoric was not meant to be taken seriously, the prosecution’s objection prompting the comment is not included. The present edition also completely eliminates the ongoing conflict over bathroom privileges, which symbolized the judge’s petty imperiousness as well as providing a recurring source of humor.

Jon Wiener’s introduction briefly sets the trial in context, although the price of such brevity is often oversimplification, as well as occasional bad editing and sloppy history. For instance, he says that Tom Hayden was first elected to the California state assembly in 1992, when in fact it was in 1982, and he gives Jerry Rubin credit for coining the phrase “Never trust anyone over thirty” when it was really Berkeley Free Speech activist Jack Weinberg. Tom Hayden’s afterword provides some interesting reflections on the trial, although his comments on the current scene probably reflect more wishful thinking than anything else.

Review, Richard Schickel, Brando: A Life in Our Times (Atheneum, 1991)

Columbia Missourian, September 22, 1991

Beneath the political conformity and cultural complacency of the early 1950s, many Americans felt a vague sense of disquietude. Yet the political issues around which this anxiety could coalesce remained a decade away. The rise of rock ‘n’ roll, which provided young people with their own cultural form and icons, lay a few years in the future. In this context the children of the American Cold War and middle-class consensus looked for someone to articulate their dissatisfaction.

Onto this stage stepped Marlon Brando. In a string of successful movies between 1950 and 1954, Brando came to symbolize the outsider who sneered at social niceties, whose barely repressed sexuality threatened to break loose at any time. If James Dean, who followed in Brando’s footsteps a few years later, symbolized middle-class angst, Brando was much more menacing because he was openly contemptuous of the social order Dean uneasily tried to fit into. When, as leader of the motorcycle gang The Rebels in The Wild One (1954), Brando was asked “What are you rebelling against?” and he replied, “Whaddya got?” a whole generation of rebels without a cause felt they had found their champion.

Richard Schickel was one such teenager who believed he had found a spokesman and he has followed Brando’s career ever since. Currently film critic for Time, Schickel’s biography avoids focusing on Brando’s often sensational personal life, concentrating instead on the complex relationship between an actor and his audience—the thrill of discovery, the shared pleasure in great accomplishments, the disappointment of failed expectations, and the anger when the audience believes the actor has betrayed his promise.

Brando’s promise began after his expulsion from military school in 1942 when, at 18, he decided to move to New York to try to make it as an actor. There he came under the tutelage of Stella Adler, an outstanding stage actress and teacher. Adler taught “the Method,” a psychologically oriented style of acting that called on performers to be close observers of human nature and, through self-examination, draw on their own experiences for emotions similar to those the character was playing.

Quickly mastering the Method, Brando performed in several Broadway plays before achieving his greatest stage success in 1947 in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. As Stanley Kowalski in both the play and the movie, Brando electrified audiences with, as Schickel says, “the almost satanic satirical spirit he loosed on the fine literary-romantic pretensions of his visiting sister-in-law,” an attack which became, “in effect, an assault on the manners and morals of an entire class.”

Brando’s decision to leave the stage after his success in Streetcar and move to Hollywood was considered at the time—when few people believed that film could also be art—a sell-out. But as Schickel says, there existed in the late 1940s only a small repertory of plays that fit the Method actor’s need for characterizations based on intensive self-exploration. Meanwhile, Hollywood in the post-war years was going through a brief period of making topical, socially conscious movies. Thus the move appealed both to Brando’s sense of his craft and his growing political awareness.

In such early movies as The Men (1950) and Viva Zapata! (1952), Brando’s Method acting successfully made the transition from stage to screen. In Julius Caesar (1953) he demonstrated that he also could adapt the Method to handle Shakespeare. With his Academy Award-winning performance in On the Waterfront (1954), Brando reached the pinnacle of his early career, prompting director Elia Kazan to say, “If there is a better performance by a man in the history of film in America, I don’t know what it is.”

But Brando’s early performances did not meet with everyone’s approval. Among defenders of traditional standards of decency, Brando seemed threatening, though the exact nature of that threat was unclear. Hollywood studios made significant cuts in both Streetcar and The Wild One to satisfy the Catholic Legion of Decency, which promised a boycott of all movies that did not meet its approval. Yet, as Schickel says, such censorship was unavailing because the sexuality of Brando’s Stanley Kowalski and rebelliousness of his motorcycle gang leader did not emanate from the scripts, but from Brando’s subtle performances. Thus in such movies Brando’s acting subverted the compromises the filmmakers were forced to make.

By the late 1950s Brando’s career had fallen into a rapid, sustained decline, partly the victim of his own success, for he had opened the way for a host of imitators who could play inarticulate rage without seeming quite so threatening. Ironically during the 1960s, Schickel says, Brando fell increasingly out of touch with his times. As movies became more frankly sexual—partly due to the advances he had made a decade earlier—Brando’s own sustaining libidinal energy seemed to diminish. His performances were marked by “professionalism,” which Schickel defines as “practical moves presented with bland conviction.”

“It was not just that he was working in bad pictures . . . ,” Schickel says. “It was for the most part that he was working in cheap bad pictures.” In all fairness though, several of the movies during this period, including One Eyed Jacks (1961, the only movie Brando directed), Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), and Burn! (1968), were artistic—though not commercial—near misses.

Rumors of Brando’s professional death turned out to be greatly exaggerated, though. His brilliant performance in The Godfather (1972), for which he won, and refused, an Academy Award, and Last Tango in Paris (1972) attest to that. Last Tango especially signaled a triumph, Schickel says, because “Brando had for the first time linked himself with an alternative school of filmmaking . . . [and] had taken the dangerous art of improvisation further than it had ever gone before—making up not just a scene or two, but an entire character, an entire movie while he was on his feet. This was the kind of daring his talent and his spirit had promised from the start.”

But Brando failed to follow up on the success of Last Tango, withdrawing increasingly into political activism, making only occasional brief and outrageously overpriced appearances in films before disappearing from public view in the early 1980s. His minor comeback in 1989, with an effective performance in A Dry White Season (1989) and a humorous self-parody in The Freshman (1990), was cut short by personal tragedy when his son was arrested for murdering his daughter’s lover.

Schickel avoids the easy sensationalism such events lend themselves to, choosing to de-emphasize Brando’s politics and personal life and concentrate on his performances. In doing so he presents a complex and fascinating portrait of how Brando came to represent the hopes of a generation and show the way for a new crop of actors—like Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro—who followed in his footsteps.

'Giving the Devil the benefit of the law': A brief survey of the state of free speech

Southern Illinoisan, July 15, 2014

 In Robert Bolt's classic play A Man For All Seasons, William Roper asks Thomas More, "You'd give the Devil benefit of the law?"

More replies, "Yes, what would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?"

"I'd cut down every law in England to do that!" Roper replies.

"Oh?" More says. "And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you—where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast—man’s laws, not God’s—and if you cut them down—and you’re just the man to do it—d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of the law, for my own safety's sake."

A quick survey across today’s America reveals a country filled with Ropers willing to deny the rights of free speech and academic freedom to a wide variety of devils. For instance, a promotions committee at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington denied Mike Adams, an associate professor of criminology, elevation to full professor status in 2006, allegedly for his writings attacking diversity, gay rights and feminism (Exhibit A: a chapter in one of his books titled “Behind Every Successful Man, There’s a Fat, Stupid Woman”). Adams sued, and earlier this year a federal court ruled in his favor.

Despite this particular victory, academic freedom remains under widespread assault from a variety of sources. A bill passed by the Michigan state senate this year, for instance, would levy a $500,000 penalty against any state institution that teaches labor history. Or, in Holyoke, Mass., the school board refused to renew the contract of a teacher, recently elected president of his local union, who had spoken out against “data walls” that publicly displayed students’ test scores at a school committee meeting. And in Belleville, NJ, a teacher—also a local union president—has been suspended and threatened with firing for protesting against a surveillance system installed by the school district to monitor students and teachers.

 As George Orwell once wrote, “Governments make laws, but whether they are carried out . . . depends on the general temper of the country. If large numbers of people are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it; if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to prevent them.”

Orwell went on to say, "even those who declare themselves to be in favor of freedom of opinion generally drop their claim when it is their own adversaries who are being persecuted." Thus did Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal complain about the lack of tolerance shown toward Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson’s opinions, but then quickly turned around and sued the policy group MoveOn.org for its billboard criticizing Jindal’s failure to expand Medicaid in his state. In April, a federal judge ruled in MoveOn’s favor. A victory for free speech, but the legal costs incurred by MoveOn likely create a chilling effect for others who might disagree with Jindal’s policies.

Or take the case of the National Rifle Association, which is based on the idea of Second Amendment absolutism, but is much less particular about the First Amendment. The NRA has pressured the University of Kansas’ Board of Regents to institute a new policy sharply restricting what faculty and staff may say on social media after one associate professor tweeted a criticism of the NRA. The new policy prohibits employees from saying anything “contrary to the best interests of the university.” The NRA also has pushed for laws like Florida’s 2011 “Privacy of Firearm Owners” bill making it a crime for pediatricians, concerned about the potential hazards of unsecured firearms, even to ask patients whether they have guns in their houses, punishable by a fine of $10,000 and revocation of the doctor’s license.

In his classic 1859 work On Liberty, British political philosopher John Stuart Mill commented, “the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race, posterity as well as the existing generation—those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth produced by its collision with error.”

Review, Douglas Wixson, Jack Conroy and the Tradition of Midwestern Literary Radicalism, 1898-1990 (University of Illinois Press, 1994)

Indiana Magazine of History, June 1995

Jack Conroy’s literary reputation rests primarily on one novel and his editorship of three short-lived, small-circulation, Depression-era magazines. In terms of quantity, this output would hardly seem sufficient to justify such a massive biography. But as Douglas Wixson argues, Conroy’s importance far exceeds his specific literary production. As editor of Rebel Poet, Anvil, and New Anvil, Conroy fostered the growth and recognition of a wide range of midwestern and southern worker-writers, including Erskine Caldwell, Richard Wright, Meridel Le Sueur, and Nelson Algren. In his autobiographical proletarian novel, The Disinherited, Conroy drew on “the subliterary traditions of orality and worker expression” to capture brilliantly the working-class culture of midwestern mining communities and factories. Finally, Wixson demonstrates the way in which Conroy symbolized a broad-based, midwestern radicalism that has been largely overlooked by historians.

In using the label “worker-writer,” Wixson emphasizes that Conroy viewed his literary career and proletarian labor experience as mutually reinforcing. Unlike most writers from worker-class backgrounds, Conroy did not see his talents as a means of escaping into the middle class. Rather, he made a conscious decision to remain a worker and use his writing to convey working-class experience. Conroy viewed literature as a weapon in the class struggle, necessary, as Wixson says, “to reproduce from the fragmented evidence of a confused and broken reality a coherent narrative that remains true to the heterogeneous cultural diversity and irregular textures of the original experience.”

Drawing on recent literary theory, Wixson traces the wide range of influences on Conroy’s writing that enabled him to transform his personal experiences into the story of an entire class—the economically dispossessed workers during the Depression. “In place of strong authorial discourse and carefully delineated psychological characterizations,” Wixson comments, “Conroy’s writing in this period explores the intertextual relations of his experience and reading, crossing the line repeatedly between oral and literary, folk vision and social history.” This intimate familiarity with proletarian culture also made Conroy an outstanding folklorist when he worked for the Illinois Writers’ Project in the late 1930s.

The book’s greatest strength is in the way it recaptures the socioliterary culture of midwestern radicals in the 1920s and 1930s. Often ignored in histories of the American left, midwestern radical thought tended to be much less ideological and more individualistic and eccentric than the east coast variety. Wixson recaptures not only the spirit and character of this culture, but also the processes by which it was disseminated. Because of the vast geographical distance separating them, midwestern radical intellectuals often communicated through letters for years before actually meeting. In this way, an extensive epistolary network was established, connecting various isolated radicals into a grass-roots network. Out of this community of correspondents—nearly all of whom, like Conroy, were “worker-writers”—emerged the journals which Conroy edited. Wixson also discusses in great detail the problematic relations between this group of organic intellectuals and the Communist party, which always distrusted the individualism of the midwesterners. But as Wixson makes clear in this fine biography, the same elements that made Conroy such a suspect Communist—his belief in democracy, decentralization, and grass-roots activism—made him an effective spokesperson for the “disinherited.”