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.

But the worst may be over for the A.C.L.U. A four-page letter by David Goldberger, 36, the lawyer who argued the Skokie case for the A.C.L.U. has calmed members' visceral dislike of the Skokie stand and helped drum up nearly $500,000. A National Convocation on Free Speech last week in New York, along with a $150-a-plate dinner addressed by liberal Senators Jacob Javits and Edward Kennedy, may raise $250,000. At the convocation, few questioned the Nazis' rights. Yet the social cost of defending those rights stirred debate. "Expression and dissemination of ideas, no matter how heinous, hateful, debatable, detestable, deplorable, banal, or provocative, must be totally unfettered," acknowledged Radical Attorney William Kunstler. But why, he asked, should a liberal organization defend the free-speech rights of would-be tyrants, when right-wing extremists crush free speech the moment they get power?

First Amendment rights are also easier to guarantee in theory than in practice, especially in a deeply divided society. "I'm not interested in court orders," snapped J.D.L. Leader Rabbi Meir Kahane, who has promised to have 3,000 supporters on hand if the Nazis do picket in Skokie. "If necessary, violence will have to stop it." Even if fighting does break out, the slurs of the antagonists will probably come under constitutional guarantees of free speech. The courts have upheld the right to use the most provocative slogans and symbols in public demonstrations. Only direct insults from one person to another are regarded as what the Supreme Court calls "fighting words" and not covered by the First Amendment umbrella.

Frank Collin and his brownshirts have said that they would be willing to "forget about Skokie" if they are able to demonstrate on their home turf in Marquette Park, a blue-collar enclave in Chicago. In three summers of racial assaults and rioting in Marquette Park, Chicago authorities have tried every legal device to deny the Nazis a parade permit. The latest, requiring a $60,000 bond to pay any damages caused by street fighting, is being challenged this week by the A.C.L.U. in a hearing before a federal court.

Meanwhile, Skokie waits nervously. The town's 140-man police force will be bolstered by units from nearby towns and the Cook County sheriff's office. Several hundred state troopers will be on hand, backed by National Guard units on alert --heavy precautions to protect Frank Collin and his sorry crew. But as the A.C.L.U. has learned this year, principle has a price.

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