The Day They Came to Arrest the Book (6 page)

“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.”

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.

“Yet I would wager that every person in that audience considered himself or herself”—Griswold nodded at Kate, who was not looking at him—“a true supporter of individual freedom. That freedom to question, to examine, that Mr. Dickinson described so beautifully, so stirringly, as the essence of being an American. It
is
a marvelous vision. But are those who hold it out to you being honest about themselves? Do they really want you to think for
yourself!
Or is it possible that they are as rigid, as prejudiced, as intolerant as Mr. Dickinson says groups with Morality and Decency and Americanism in their titles are? Is it possible that while they sing you songs of freedom, they are actually preparing you for their own orthodoxy, their own standard time to which everybody must march?”

Kent Dickinson was looking at Griswold with puzzlement. Nora Baines was watching the tall, stooped man with reluctant admiration.

“My assignment in this debate”—Griswold looked around the audience—“is to persuade you that individual freedom has gotten out of hand. Well, my concern is not quite that. It goes deeper. I put it to you that freedom has become less and less
individual
. Instead of people who are distinctively, proudly individualistic, we are increasingly turning into herds. Can you imagine a herd of independent sheep? Let me be more specific. Let us focus on sex.”

Matthew Griswold paused, correctly anticipating a certain quickening of attention in the auditorium. “If George Mason High School is like most other high schools in the country, some of you go to bed on occasion with others. Usually others of the opposite sex. On the part of the young women involved, despite the independence movement among women in recent years, how much of that sexual activity is really a matter of
individual
choice? Or is not a good deal of it coerced by the herd? By fear of being considered old-fashioned, narrow-minded, out-of-it, by your contemporaries? Is this individual freedom or is it just a new way of covering up traditional female subjugation?”

“What if a girl really wants to?” a male voice shouted from the back of the hall. “Would you approve of
that?”

“No,” Griswold said. “But I would have more respect for her if it really was a free choice. That it was not
a better choice I would say was due to the failure of the school and of the young woman’s parents to teach her self-restraint. To teach her that while part of each of us is animal, the more civilized among us do not eat off the floor or yield to every urge to copulate.”

Groans, male and female, in the audience.

“Are those noises disapproval,” Griswold asked, “or mating sounds? Anyway, I would rather this debate had been called: ‘Is False Freedom Giving True Freedom a Bad Name?’ Let me give you another example of what I mean. Mr. Dickinson listed among the enemies of individual liberty those who are trying to bring God back into the public schools. I am one of those. Does that make me a friend or an enemy of free choice? Think about it. Can you be free if you are ignorant of the choices you have? Imagine yourself back in kindergarten, and the teacher gives you a yellow crayon and a purple crayon. Just the two of them. And the teacher says, ‘You may draw with whatever colors you like.’ Is that freedom?”

Once more, Griswold paused. “This is a country,” he went on, “in which there are no penalties for not believing in God, for not attending church. And I would not have it any other way. However, if someone who has spent his childhood and adolescence in the public schools decides that he is an agnostic or an atheist, is that really a
free
choice? Or is it similar to the child in kindergarten who has been given only two crayons? How can anyone intelligently, individually, reject God without ever really having had a chance to know Him?”

Dickinson was now writing furiously all along the edges of his newspaper.

“Mr. Dickinson, and people like him,” Griswold continued, “accuse people like me of wanting to indoctrinate people like you, and he says that is why I am working to get God back into the schools. Has it ever occurred to you that you are
already
being indoctrinated, and have been since your first day in kindergarten? You are being indoctrinated with secularism. Godless secularism. How could it be any other way so long as there is a total absence of God in the public schools?”

“Why does God have to be in school?” Barney asked. “There are churches out there.”

“Good question,” Matthew Griswold said. “The answer is that school is just that—the place of learning. And no matter what happens or does not happen in your life outside this building,
here
is where you should be exposed to the most meaningful of man’s accumulated experiences—and that includes faith as well as science. Otherwise your education is incomplete. Remember, I am not talking about conversion to or immersion in any particular faith. I am saying that at the very least, you have the right to experience prayer, which may or may not then take you to some particular faith.”

“What if I prefer not to?” said Luke. “By saying I won’t pray, why should I have to expose myself as an atheist if I don’t want people to know what I think about religion?”

Griswold smiled with anticipation of his own answer. “Exactly the point made by my good friend Mr. Dickinson. If we had prayer in the schools again, the argument goes, those youngsters who would prefer not to pray would be too embarrassed to say so. Or if they did gather up their courage and leave the room, they’d be made fun of by their peers.”

Holding the lectern with both hands and leaning into the microphone so that he could almost whisper and still be heard clearly, Griswold said:

“Are we speaking about America? A nation created and nurtured in dissent? A land where, as Mr. Dickinson told us so eloquently, everyone is free to challenge the most deeply rooted beliefs and principles? Are you saying, is Mr. Dickinson saying, that the best way to educate the young people of this country in our tradition of independence is to coddle them? To say: ‘Oh, the poor dears are too soft, too weak, to stand up for what they believe in, and what they do
not
believe in.’

“Good gracious.” Griswold stepped back from the microphone and raised his voice. “What a marvelous way I am offering for a youngster to learn that he can cope with being a minority of one or two or three if he chooses not to pray. What a marvelous way for him to learn how satisfying it is to
openly
fight for his principles rather than slink away. So I tell you, young man, that bringing God back to the schools may not only greatly illuminate the lives of many students, but it may well greatly strengthen the dissenting spirit of others, who will
exercise their right to say
no
to prayer. And they will do so boldly, enjoying the feeling of being publicly courageous. You see, young man, nobody loses when God returns to the schools.”

Maggie Crowley leaned over to Nora Baines and whispered, “I see what you mean. I never saw curve balls like that. Your head could come off trying to hit them.”

“He’s a cutey, all right,” Nora Baines said. “I hear he may run for the school board.”

“Lovely,” Maggie Crowley said. “I always did want to be a cab driver.”

“Let me answer another point made by Mr. Dickinson,” Matthew Griswold was saying. “He tells us the Supreme Court agrees with both him and Thomas Jefferson, and not at all with me, that prayer can come into the schools without the Constitution crumbling into dust. Well, I would remind you that in the past the Supreme Court upheld slavery and then, after the Civil War, the Supreme Court upheld racial segregation. What I am saying, of course, is that the Supreme Court has sometimes been dreadfully wrong. And in time, it has recognized the error of its ways. So it will in regard to prayer in the schools. So long as the prayers are not of any
particular
religion and so long as no one is compelled to pray, God—as the Supreme Court will yet come to recognize—can lawfully coexist in our schools with Judy Blume.”

“What
about
censorship?” someone on the edge of the auditorium asked. “Where are you on that?”

“I mentioned before”—Griswold stopped for a sip of water—“that there is no true freedom without a prior knowledge of choices. Now that should lead me to say that you ought to have access to
every
kind of book there is—no matter how trashy, pornographic, racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, antifamily, sexist.

“But”
—he leaned forward again—“we must remember once more that
this
is a place of learning. And that means, for instance, that in order not to pollute your fine young minds with ignorance and superstition, your teachers do not tell you that the earth is flat or that two and two are nine or that Hitler was a terribly misunderstood man of enormous gentleness and compassion. No self-respecting school would teach any of that.

“Why, for another example, there are a number of books currently available that actually say there was no Holocaust, that there were no concentration camps, that no Jews were murdered by the Nazis. Under our Constitution, no one can stop such books from being printed or from being read. But
must
such books be taught in a public school? Is it unconstitutional for the school board to say, ‘No, these lies about the Holocaust will not be taught here.’ ”

In the first row Gordon McLean was saying, “Yeah, but they’re teaching some
other
lies here.”

“Let me make one obvious point,” Griswold said, “just so we’ll all be clear what the issue is. Your teachers, your principal, are
responsible
for what goes into your heads—at least in this building. Once you’re an adult, you can poison your mind any way you want to.
But so long as you are in this school, books must be selected for you. Or as Supreme Justice Hugo Black—one of Mr. Dickinson’s heroes—has said, students have not yet reached the point of experience and wisdom that enables them to teach their elders. Therefore, in teaching
you
, your elders are expected to show
their
experience and wisdom. But occasionally some teacher or librarian does make a mistake and selects a book that will miseducate you, that may poison you. And when that happens, those mistakes must be corrected. By members of the community, if need be.”