Heckler's Veto

Nat Hentoff's reply:

23 January 1999

I didn't believe I would ever think of doing such a thing, but I once tried to call the cops to stop an audience from drowning out a speaker so thoroughly that he could not be heard. The silenced speaker was Robert Casey, then the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania. The forum was Cooper Union in New York, where Abraham Lincoln, running for the presidency, once complained that there were sections of the nation where he was shouted down when he tried to talk about slavery. But he was able to speak freely and at length at Cooper Union.

Casey, a liberal, was pro-labor and had the best record of any governor of the time on services to women and children, particularly children of the poor. However, he was also pro-life, and a phalanx of pro-choicers had come to stamp out his heresy.

Also present were supporters of Mumia Abu-Jamal, who had been convicted of murdering a policeman and was facing a death sentence in Pennsylvania. As the moderator that night, I was going to urge Casey to review the trial record, which was the very prototype of denial of due process. That second squadron of ceaseless shouters was condemning Casey for not immediately freeing Abu-Jamal.

The two groups were so determined to hear only themselves that after half an hour I told Casey that we should not surrender to the veto power of these hecklers. But he would not let me call the cops because, as governor of Pennsylvania, he would not relish a front-page photograph back home of his detractors being dragged out of a hall at his command.

I thought of that evening when I saw a letter from Post reader Molly Klein ["Free to Be Unruly," Free for All, Jan. 9]. She objected to my citing the hecklers' veto in the Dec. 28 column on Columbia University essentially shutting down the second day of a conservatives' conference last November. The university took that action because the night before, students had tried unsuccessfully to shout down the speakers; university administrators apparently feared more furor.

Molly Klein pointed out accurately that the Constitution does not guarantee anyone "a quiet and polite audience." However, the conservative speakers at Columbia, including Ward Connerly, knew this very well, having been hooted at, rebuked and scorned at many of their previous appearances elsewhere. Contrary to Molly Klein's assumption, they fully expected to face the clangor the next morning at Columbia. All they wanted was to be able to be heard amid the din. Two other Post readers responded; they understood the point [Free for All, Jan. 16].

So it was not the speakers who expected quiet and politeness. It was Columbia University that panicked and proactively surrendered to the mob. The controversial speakers and their retinue of disrupters went off to an adjoining park the next morning.

Since I apparently did not sufficiently clarify the difference between the right to boo and otherwise harass a speaker and the right of an audience to hear the speaker, I tell here what happened to Gov. Casey at Cooper Union.

At some of my own speaking engagements, members of Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam have tried mightily to shout me down, and I enjoy the challenge. They might have succeeded, but each time, members of the audience who wanted to argue with me on their own terms shouted down Farrakhan's followers. That seemed to me -- as I cheerfully continued to speak -- a fair exchange of hostile free speech.

Molly Klein is entirely right that a public speaker should have no expectation of a silent and intent audience. Boisterous rejoinders are part of our legacy, from Samuel Adams and his colleagues to the present-day clamorous school board meetings across the land. But the audience for every speaker -- including Minister Farrakhan's cohorts -- has a right to get a sense of what's being said.

The clearest illumination of the rights of free speech -- and their limit in public meetings -- was written in 1975 by a Yale University task force on free speech chaired by historian C. Vann Woodward. In the immediate preceding years at Yale, some acutely controversial speakers had been prevented by a righteous number of students and faculty from even beginning to speak. Among them were Gen. William Westmoreland (Army chief of staff during the Vietnam War) and William Shockley (a Nobel laureate inventor and a believer in the genetic inferiority of black people).

C. Vann Woodward's committee concluded that curtailing free expression is a grave violation of intellectual freedom. Even deeply offensive speakers should be heard. But actual disruption of a speech -- depriving listeners of their right to hear it -- "is a very serious offense against the entire university and may appropriately result in suspension or expulsion."

I should have called the cops that night at Cooper Union.

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Heckler's Veto

Nat Hentoff's reply:

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