The Day They Came to Arrest the Book by Nat Hentoff Read Free Book Online Page B

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 nota 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