Raw Footage of a Speech by Henry Steele Commager at the 1979 Copeland Colloquium, Part 1

But we in committee Welcome to the opening session of the 1979 open colloquium. The subject for this year as you know is the can't hear anything well. Well it's a question then of raising one's voice I think. And not behaving as though one knew what to do. I did start again. And keep your voice up. Welcome to the Copeland colloquium. This subject I'm sure you're aware is the future of voluntourism new structures of power that's supposed to be said with a rising inflection. At the end signifying the existence of a question and the need for clarification on a variety of

people will be on campus over the next 10 days attempting to provide answers and clarification and at the end of this time the ground for Regarding the question as partner and interesting should be clear. That is our prayer. With luck the colloquium will succeed in turning this idea. Volunteerism. Like a coin in the hand to something that you can see around you can see what constitutes it. You can see ground for reviling it as a concept. You can see ground for fearing it and you can see ground for rejoicing in

it. In other words you can see inside this idea like other ideas as that which threatens and that which. And Hansis. Being from the first there was never any question in the mind. I can speak of a committee having a mind and some say nay. There was never a question in our mind about who the perfect keynoter for this occasion would be. The Simpson lecturer at the college in his early and generous agreement to serve was at the start. And is at this moment still immensely heartening to all of us. There were several reasons why we knew nobody else could do it. The most obvious was the distinction of his work as a scholar

a preeminent historian of politics and culture in America less obvious though I think familiar to everybody who knows mystic homage or is his exceptional worth. And wit. It's wonderful as we all know to be able to rely on the truth of what a teacher tells you. But it's twice wonderful to rely on the possibility of a human with the truth. And in Mystic colleges case it's a splendidly resourceful humor indeed. I remember a piece of his during the war. I hope you'll forgive me for reading a remark. In. Which he commented on some of our woes in a CIA sponsored film called Why Vietnam.

Some of ours that we intend to convince the Communists that we cannot be defeated. This has Mr. Comedy you wrote at least the merit of frankness. We are fighting a war to prove that we can't be defeated. Then he added This is the resourceful bit I think. It's all a little like William James Italian woman who stood on a street corner passing out cards that said she had come over to America to raise money to pay our passage back to Italy. But it's not good. It's not so amusing. And finally not to overextend this introduction which I must admit this evening's speaker said was overlong when I suggested it extended beyond the sentence. We knew he had to be our choice because he's not

only been our teacher. That's to say the college's teacher but TEACHER TO THE NATION. I think a voice of incalculable influence in your time speaking to students and in mine for the good upon the course of this nation. It's a great privilege to introduce my colleague a most exemplary American volunteer bus and resteal Thomas reap. Repeat performance of the modern ladies and gentlemen addressing myself to Mr demat. It was not quite fair to suggest that this was a humorous subject in that I would deal with it with the with an abundance of wit. It is not a humorous side to the Torah as a very serious one. Aside

from that I am not to address myself to the new structures but chiefly two old structures and some of the deterioration that is entered into them. And we may start in any consideration of the voluntary association of America. Let me start historically with the Mayflower Compact and with its long antecedents in this 16th and early 17th century English history the antecedents as it is of the Come-Outers of various kinds of those who insisted that men could indeed make their own churches and need not rely upon a state church. And the implication of the application of that the institutionalization of that. In the Plymouth Colony all we might start philosophically with Tocqueville's interpretation

of this whole institution of voluntary associations. Let me start with that philosophical interpretation. In no country in the world Tocqueville wrote in his great book on democracy in America has the principle of association been more successfully used or more and sparingly applied to a multitude of different objects then in America. And he added perspicacious claim that for ever at the head of some new undertaking you see a government in France or a man of rank in England in the United States you'll be sure to find an association. It is I think a characteristic of our own history that this institution of the voluntary association should be a product of history and of philosophy. And then it should be a combination of old

world antecedents and a new world. The cess of these. It is needless to remind you it is a necessity which chiefly dictated and guided the institutionalization of voluntary association. It is the philosophy which however which gave a special form the special character and rationalisation to that process. The explanation of this is elementary enough and familiar to all of you. In the old world one may say in Emerson's worlds that history had baked their cake. The institutions were there. Everything had pretty much been arranged over the centuries. The Crown had its duties the aristocracy had its duties. The Church had its responsibilities and military was there. The guild system is

there the apprenticeship system is there. The family was there as it were the community was there. Everything had been already organized and taken care of in advance and there was relatively little. Or little room for innovation. Little for the new energies to irradiate as it were. The situation in the New World. Everything had to be done. Those who came were brought with them of course. There you hear me all right. They brought. With them their institutions have brought with the backgrounds but they had no comparable institutions. There was no church there was no state there was no military. There were no economic institutions as yet there were no universities or colleges or students or institute or teachers

or schools. Everything from the ground up had to be created and created a new and had to be created in a new environment in what was true in the Jamestown Colony and into Plymouth and the Boston colonies remain true on trunks here after front here after frontier all through our history up until the era of the eighteen seventies and the 1880s when men in the mining front here in the in the cattle country had to come together and create their own institutions to deal with their special problems. It was necessity that dictated the voluntary solution the voluntary organisation that solve problems. It began in the church and we must begin indeed with the church. The most striking single example of the role of the

voluntary association in America is of course in the realm of religion. In the old world churches were established as a still are to a large degree in Western Europe. You were born a Catholic in France you were born a Lutheran in Prussia you were born a Lutheran in Denmark you were born Church of England it was taken for granted that you had no role whatever to play in this matter of your relation to God or your relation to a church. That remain true. May I remind you well into the 19th century as late as 1867 no student could go to Oxford or Cambridge University unless you were a Church of England. No one could teach at Oxford or Cambridge unless you were a member of the Church of England and could subscribe to the Westminster Confession. You were in a sense not a full fledged

citizen unless you subscribed to the Established Church beginning in 16th century England and carried through above all new America. The notion that men could come together and make a church the most revolutionary notion perhaps in the history of the Anglo-American peoples because it spread into every other area. If men could come together and make a church they can come together and make a state they come together and make a government. They do not need authority from a ball but can do it on their own. This is what. The Pilgrims what the Puritans. But a hundred other denominations learned in America. It is what the Huguenots brought with him it is indeed why they left the old world because there was no room for them in their own country when they came to the new world. They could create their own churches and in New England above all churches take Ruutu sides of the same coin and those who could make a church could make

a state as well. The first voluntary associations were therefore those which created the town. Those Street created the colony government. Such creations as that extraordinary and touching creation in the in the Connecticut Valley which we are connected with here when the inhabitants of three of the Connecticut Valley towns came together in sixteen thirty nine and drafted under the great oak and elm trees just as Rousseau later was to imagine and drafted the fundamental orders of Connecticut which was the constitution of that colony and that state up until eighteen hundred and thirty two. In the new world in other words everything had to be done. It had to be done at once. There was very little time for going back to London for permission. It had to be done

now and the result was from the very beginning a burgeoning of voluntary organisations and associations in every conceivable arena in the church in the state for the creation of the towns and the creation of Colony governments were of course out of voluntary associations. The creation indeed of the first national government was voluntary. Interestingly enough the First National. We may say national governments 1774 was simply called the Association. It was the association that drew up the rules which were to be imposed upon the American people in their effort to justify and vindicate their rights and indeed the Continental Congress had no authority except that given to them by voluntary associations of one kind or another. It was true in the realm with religion in the realm of government. It was true in the realm of

law itself. For. Every front here society had to make its own laws as best it could. On one front here after another all the way from the Kentucky and Tennessee front here is out to the California front here and back to the mining frontiers of the 1850s and 1860s man got together and drew up their own systems of law and organized their own justice. There is a rather touching and not an amusing example of this in the in the the decision of one of the squatter governments in early Iowa in the 836 where the local authorities called a horsethief or some other felon and condemned him to death. And he pled that they had no legal justification for this. It's a very law abiding and law minded they took this under

consideration and wrote to President Jackson back in Washington said What shall we do. And President Jackson wrote back and said I don't care what you do do what you think best so they hanged him in. The. But this going through this that the formals of abiding by law which think themselves had made and they had made out of necessity. Later. When the legal situation was pretty well crystalized the voluntary association became effective in any number of other areas. So many that one scarcely needs elaborate upon them voluntourism in practically every field of politics of labor society of religion of education. This college for example is a monument to voluntary association with the farmers of this area getting together and building the buildings here and

setting up the institution itself. And so many of our colleges and universities indeed art.. In a sense buther tourism is a tribute to our innocence that we were able to take the right of association for granted take it so completely for granted that it did not even to appear need to appear in the Bill of Rights. None of the bills of rights of state and not the federal protects a right of voluntary association not because it was not regarded as a fundamental right but because it was taken so completely for granted that it did not the need to be designated. But needless to say without such freedom the freedom unknown elsewhere in the 18th century there could be no such voluntary associations of tall. When

these were later challenge and I still speak of this later on this evening when the relator challenge during the McCarthy era and so forth. The right of voluntary association was interesting and I've indicated by indirection not by direction vindicated as so necessary in essential the right that it underlay all other rights. Monetary Association has been particularly important in the realm of politics. We sometimes forget that the major voluntary associations in America are first religion. All churches are voluntary. Second labor unions all voluntary associations and third political parties unknown interest me enough even to law in the nineteen hundred seven unregulated until the 1930s following the decision of us are says classic and various other decisions which insisted that the primaries

must be open to blacks as well as to whites in in the south. And. How interesting it is to consider the development of the political party the origin of the political party it was as you know or should know an American invention I say should know because some scholars in English history insist rather perversely that there were political parties in Britain there were not there were factions there were there there were groups or where the king's friends or the Bedford gang or something of that kind. But the political party. As we know it and as the rest of the world knows it today the merriest in the United States in the seventeen hundred and ninety days. And emerged and has remained a product of voluntary associations and of this more later

because one of the great problems confronting us today is whether the activities of some of our voluntary associations will undermine and subvert the principle and the policies of political parties. Tocqueville observed among other things that when some when some organizations are a primitive and others were not permitted all would dry up. That to discourage voluntary association in one area what ever doubly discourage it in all areas. Now there is little danger of this in the nineteenth century. It remained for my generation. Yours is inherited it to react to the voluntary association much as old world governments had traditionally reacted namely to look upon them with grave suspicion to challenge

their validity especially in the political arena. All through the 18th and even most of the 19th century voluntary associations existed at the crypt permission of government. In most European countries and for that reason were confined for the most part to the realm of charity or the realm of religion or something of that kind excluded from the realm. Of politics. In the American scene there were no limits whatever placed upon the voluntary association. In the course of the 19th century though here and there there were gestures in that direction. Some of you may recall that Washington was very disturbed by the so called democratic societies of the 70 hundred 90s

and then he warned against the farewell address as he warned against political parties in that address. But by and large the voluntary association was left undisturbed. It is only in the 20th century and particularly in the period after the first and the Second World Wars. That government began to challenge the validity of private voluntary associations that state's past criminal syndicalist laws as he did all through the 20s limiting or purporting to limit what radical organizations which were always called communist might do and again in the late 40s and the 1950s the McCarthy era. When government this time the federal government even more than the states

began to challenge the validity of the activities of the talent of many of the private voluntary organizations. The purging of legislatures with the challenges to and to membership in suspect organizations with the influence of the Attorney Generals list which listed some two hundred and fifty dangerous organizations including I might remind you the Unitarian Church and the American Civil Liberties Union and others which were suspect. It began to get what the old world had long known. A list of dangerous organisations which the government and I took might to put down or might in any event regulate. And this of course raises very interesting problems of the extent to which.

People may organize in areas which might be indeed suspect organize for activities which might indeed be considered illegal even Tocqueville who was passionately committed to the principle of the voluntary organization. I did observe that you could go too far that it was a nice question whether organizations should be permitted in the political arena. Whether the government should not indeed act as a re st upon such organisations for they might in danger. The stability of government and of society. We did not need to worry about that. On the whole in the 19th century don't want to get I may remind you that in the south abolitionist organizations were

not permitted anti-slavery organization or not. Indeed even religious organizations that threaten the institution of slavery were looked upon as suspect and the ante bellum south put down all such organizations and all such individuals exercised censorship over them. It is however really only in our own time that the question of the validity of organizations that might appear to threaten the stability or the integrity of government or society came to the fore. This is part of the reaction against internal organizations like who Klux Klan and the National Association for the protection of Colored People and was part of the Cold War. This problem of the extent to which government may permit the

activities of all organizations is still very much with it with us. Let me call your attention to four. Antecedents which are by no means harmonious in their conclusions. Early in the nineteen twenty days governments faced the question of the Ku Klux Klan was a Ku Klux Klan such an organization as might indeed enjoy the privileges of private voluntary organizations and go unregulated a number of states including New York held that it was not. That is record of lawlessness and violence and subversion was so grave that it was proper to regulate. The Ku Klux Klan and to require publication of its activities and of its membership. And that question came up early in the courts. The

course sustained in a very famous case of Brian Priss Zimmerman. Two seventy eight U.S. Sixty three very interested. Sustain the right of New York and other states to regulate the Ku Klux Klan on the grounds that the whole of his past history indicated that it was designed to subvert the rights of blacks that its activities had long been illegal and therefore. Some degree of regulation namely the requirements of the publication of membership lists was justifiable. But if you could regulate the New York could regulate the Ku Klux Klan. Could Alabama regulate the NAACP. An interesting question this Alabama and other southern states did precisely that they said look the NAACP is a dangerous

organization designed to subvert our social system and we have the same right to know about its membership and its activities. That that to say New York has to know about the membership and activities of the Ku Klux Klan and they therefore passed a law as other southern states did require in imposing these regulations on the NAACP. The case again was struck to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court said that's different. The NAACP does not have illegal objectives as the Ku Klux Klan had. There is no evidence whatsoever that it ever engaged in subversive activities indeed it is engaged in activities designed to vindicate constitutional rights to publish membership list of the NAACP. NAACP would expose all of its members to retribution in every Southern states. They would lose their jobs and would be driven out of their

communities. Therefore they have a right to immunity from any such regulation and supervision. What an extraordinary problem this however did raise. If the NAACP had immunity from governmental regulation. What about the Communist Party here. Ambivalence enters in as so often enters in in American constitutional history in the great Dijon versus Oregon case. Supreme Court held that membership in the Communist Party was like membership in any other organization government could not penalize it in could not regulate up to and in so far as members were not to be presumed to subscribe to all the principles of communism. In so far as none of the overt principles of that party

were in themselves illegal as a party it self was not illegal. So that the effort of Oregon to regulate into punish membership in Communist Party was struck down. But then we come to Dennis vs. United States a great Minnesota case where the Supreme Court in effect reversed itself though that institution rarely admits had reverses itself it distinguishes of course and held that membership in the Communist Party. Which consisted of conspiratorial activities could be made illegal. The conspiratorial activities in that instance itself and I refer again to the case 341 us in the conspiratorial activities consisted in meeting in reading passages from Marx and Engels and Kropotkin and other literary

sponsors of communism. Nevertheless carry to the first to the district court and then to the Supreme Court. The court held that this constitutes a conspiracy against the interests of the United States a violation of the Spirit act and so forth and sent all of those involved to jail for the proper number of years. This may stand. It has a double double quality. The worst decision ever made by that very great jurist learned hand. In the District Circuit Court and the worst decision of modern times in the Supreme Court the decision which applies the notion of conspiracy not to any acts but to the consideration of the potential of the potentiality of some act sometime in the future not to any illegal

activity but to conjuring up a situation in which an illegal activity might conceivably take place. Yes a conformable footnote.