Posted on 11/18/2002 8:19:58 AM PST by Korth
George Will recently appeared on C-SPAN’s "In-Depth" series to discuss his writings. The Washington Post columnist commented while discussing his 1968 dissertation at Princeton, Beyond the Reach of Majorities: Closed Questions in the Open Society:
When you [Brian Lamb] and I were young people in college, it was an open question whether states had a right to force public accommodations – Lester Maddox’s Pickrick restaurant in Georgia – to take all comers…Well, 50 years later, that’s a stone, cold, dead, closed question, and aren’t we glad? That’s progress. In that sense, we’re less tolerant, but who cares?
First, an historical overview. Atlanta-native Lester Maddox was born in 1915 and opened a grill in 1944. He opened another restaurant, the Pickrick, in 1947. The Pickrick became popular and underwent several expansions, seating 400 people at its peak.
Only whites could eat at the Pickrick, though. This led to a conflict when Lyndon Johnson signed 1964 Civil Rights Act, Title II of which forces "public accommodations" to admit patrons regardless of race, religio n, etc.
Maddox ejected blacks who attempted to eat at the Pickrick after Title II’s enactment. Rather than comply with Title II, Maddox closed the Pickrick.
Maddox responded when asked in 2000 if he regretted his position, "No, sir, I've never had a second thought about it. I still believe that constitutionally, without the right to private property, we can't be a free republic…Private property ought to belong to the people who own it." (Maddox also served as Georgia’s governor from 1967 to 1971.)
Will’s remarks about Maddox reiterate what he wrote in Statecraft as Soulcraft (1983):
One of the most defensible, indeed most unmixedly good, deeds of modern government was in taking away one of the rights Maddox valued most…The right he was exercising was a real right – an enforceable entitlement, and an old one: the right of a proprietor to restrict his custom. In many times and places the right was, and is, acceptable. But in the United States it had too often been exercised in a way that affronted an entire class of citizens. And in the United States in 1964 the right had become intolerably divisive. So Congress undertook a small but significant rearrangement of American rights. It diminished the rights of proprietors of public accommodations, and expanded those of potential users of those accommodations. In explaining why this rearrangement was necessary, Lyndon Johnson said it was because "a man has a right not to be insulted in front of his children"…Congress was coming to the conclusion that a right exercised meanly, with ugly consequences, should yield to another, better right.
Note that Maddox "affronted an entire class of citizens," as opposed to "aggressed against an entire class of citizens." Since when is a free society supposed to criminalize affronting people? (Shall Burger King now be indicted for affronting an entire class of citizens, i.e., vegetarians?)
The "better right" Wills mentions is a fiction. When people enter a restaurant or residence without the owner’s consent, it’s called trespassing.
This doesn’t mean every exercise of proprietary discretion is admirable. Owners can exclude obnoxiously, and that’s why boycotts exist.
But obnoxious isn’t synonymous with criminal, and tyranny begins when this differentiation dissolves.
Will often cites Thomas Jefferson in Statecraft as Soulcraft and elsewhere. Here’s what Jefferson had to say about political authority: "The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others." Not acts that affront others or are mean to others.
And even if one believes in coercing owners, the federal government wasn’t empowered to nationalize this policy, just as it isn’t empowered to nationalize policy on burglary or prostitution. As Jefferson wrote:
I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground: That "all powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States or to the people." [10th Amendment] To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specifically drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition.
When Will cites Lyndon Johnson in defense of Title II, he implicitly recognizes Title II’s polarity from Jefferson’s vision. Indeed, to endorse Title II necessitates the coarsening of the historical sense (to use a Will-esque phrase).
Lester Maddox’s policy may have been lousy, but his premise remains indispensable: Private property is the oxygen of freedom, and with its diminishment so diminishes freedom.
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I do. The action against Maddox was unconstitutional as hell and enforced involuntary servitude upon Maddox and his employees. The idea of involuntary servitude where the rights of the individual have been sacrificed to servitude of society have since been expanded into politically correct insanity.
Nowadays, we'd be lucky if they would just acknowledge their children's existence and support them.
Johnson's Great Society can be thanked for that.
However, the "Dixiecrats" had created a de facto "nation" in the South, not unlike the Confederacy that denied a whole race of citizens the rights protected in the Federal Constitution. Segregation was a form of slavery, in a cold war fashion.
As one who has had business in the area of "public accommodation", I wish I cold have discriminated more than allowed, but more on behavior or ability to pay. Just like guns, it is not the average gun owner that will cause them to be eventually confiscated, but the Lester Maddox types, that will repeal other rights we now enjoy.
In 1964, some locales already had anti-discrimination laws, some had no laws on the subject and left it up to proprietors who to serve, but Georgia and other southern states had laws requiring racial discrimination.
Don't forget that.
Yup! I went home on leave with a "minority" fellow sergeant to a "deep South" city in the late 60's. The "Jim Crow" laws were so thick, you could slice them with a bayonet. (The Northern cities were just as guilty, in a different way.)
I seriously doubt that a black proprietor of a public business could have refused service to a "majority" person on the same private property grounds that Lester Maddox used to refuse service to "minority" people.
It is precisely this denial of the universality of the constitution that has enabled the Left to expand the Constitution beyond the intention of the Founding Fathers and the good health of this country. We are all the Chief Justice of our own Supreme Court regarding our own personal behavior toward our own fellow citizens.
This may sound "liberal' to some of you bigots, but it's the stuff of which Conservativism is made.
Just enough to get his attention.
Exactly. Without the Jim Crow South, there would have been no Warren Court, and possibly no Great Society either.
Amen. I like Will, but he is a typcial intellectual snob who has lived in the closeted world of academe & the media, and has had little contact with the "unwashed masses."
Great Quote!
It is patently unfair and, more importantly, WRONG, to paint conservatives as "racist" (it is also intellectually easy). We abhor rasicsm and in fact are the highest hope for minorities to throw off the mantle of victimhood and embrace individual responsibility. I suspect you are a liberal, self-hating victim lurker posing as a conservative on this post. We know what happened, we acknowledge Jim Crow and admit what happened in the past with all the comcomitant warts. The difference is we see where we have come, where we can go, despise anything less than seeing ANYONE and EVERYONE as an individual worthy of respect who whould only be judged by their respective actions. Today's conservatives fevrently believe in MLKs ideal of a person being judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin. Dems and liberals prefer the latter to continue to subsidize their political positions and jobs.
Step back a few squares and rethink... Unlike liberals, I think most of us will give you a "bye" and ask you to rephrase your post after some thought.
That's what people miss. Dragging a guy out and beating him because he sat on the wrong stool cannot be defended by anyone. And that's what happened during Jim Crow. Blacks were denied their civil rights and it wasn't a property rights issue.
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