On free speech (regarding the NYT editorial on 18 March)

I do not care for the framing of the New York Times editorial "America Has a Free Speech Problem" (18 March 2022). I find it self-contradictory and not advancing understanding of free speech.

It opens by claiming that "Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned" (emphasis mine). This doesn't seem accurate. Yes, people should have the right to voice their opinions in public; this is what is meant by "free speech." But we can't prevent them from "being shamed or shunned," since that would involve restricting someone else's freedom of speech to respond to them.

To more precisely address the Times' claim, we can't promise people they can live "without fear," since they could feel afraid for any reason or no reason at all, and they will have to address their own feelings. Here, I'm digging into a rhetorical flourish, perhaps a bit unfairly. Usually when people defend a right to live free of fear of X, they mean they want to change the world such that there is no longer any significant probability that X could harm them. They mean they want X not to pose any real threat so that no one can have a rational fear of X in their daily life. They do not mean in a literal way that society ought to somehow manage the contours of their private emotional world and apply a magic potion to remove their fears (both rational and irrational) so they can live unafraid.

But the word "fear" occurs six times in the editorial, plus once in the opinion poll they commissioned that is cited in the editorial. I think, then, they do mean to emphasize the importance of certain people being able to maintain a certain emotional baseline.

The Times says there is a "social silencing" that amounts to a "depluralizing of America." "However you define cancel culture, Americans know it exists and feel its burden," they say. They describe cancellation as a real thing: "People should be able to put forward viewpoints, ask questions and make mistakes and take unpopular but good-faith positions on issues that society is still working through — all without fearing cancellation." Again, "fear of retaliation or harsh criticism" is presented as the problem.

A flourishing individual life involves "the confidence to take risks, pursue ideas and express thoughts that others might reject," the Times writes. Fine — but this axiom reflects, first, a real possibility "that others might reject" one's ideas, absent which there would be no need for "confidence" at all. If the world became so thoroughly safe and affirming that we could be sure we'd never be shamed or shunned no matter what we said, speaking would incur no social "risks" and thus personal "confidence" would become a useless trait.

The Times says that, when we allow our own ideas to "go unchallenged by opposing views" and simply shut up or exclude those who air other ideas, our own ideas become "weak and brittle" and society as a whole forgets how to "resolve conflict" and may descend into "political violence." To some extent, this is true, although it depends what the ideas are and what the argument is about. This also seems to contradict the Times' original concern. When is a verbal challenge a form of healthy conflict, and when is it a form of unnecessary shaming and shunning? They simply switch gears without trying to locate the difference.

This sentence seems not correctly formed:

• "But the old lesson of 'think before you speak' has given way to the new lesson of 'speak at your peril.'"

I don't see how one gives way to the other, falls short, or is abandoned. Rather, the two adages are complementary: think before you speak, and then speak at your peril. 'Speak at your own peril' might something like accept the reasonable consequences of your own words, including that people might not like what you say. The inevitability of consequences of some kind is the reason why we should think before we speak. Hey, and to add a third adage: if they have personal confidence with which to face that peril, they are living a flourishing human life, right?

If, by contrast, the Times meant to say that some consequences are unreasonable or disproportionate and thus that 'speak at your peril' amounts to a hostile threat, that claim needs to be better supported. They refer to "fear of retaliation" [emphasis mine] and interactions that "can result...in the loss of livelihood" [emphasis mine] but these hypotheticals don't clearly state nor demonstrate that any retaliation ever occurs at all, still less that it would be unreasonable or disproportionate if it did happen.

And it conflicts with another sentence:

• "Many know they shouldn’t utter racist things, but they don’t understand what they can say about race or can say to a person of a different race from theirs."

If someone doesn't know how not to sound racist or offensive in other ways, it could well be because they haven't thought very much about their own speech, and thus they have not even tried to live up to the adage 'think before you speak' and accept the consequences of their own words. Certain people don't really believe in the value or use of thoughtfulness. Some perils can never be avoided and can only be prepared for, but insofar as their own speech imperils them, it's because they didn't think first and insisted on talking anyway.

The editorial continues:

"You can’t consider yourself a supporter of free speech and be policing and punishing speech more than protecting it. Free speech demands a greater willingness to engage with ideas we dislike and greater self-restraint in the face of words that challenge and even unsettle us."

Here, "policing and punishing" goes undefined, as does "protecting." Exactly how does an individual person go about "protecting" someone else's right to speech (especially if the speaker isn't currently facing any specific threat) and do so in a measurably greater way than they are "policing and punishing" (i.e. criticizing?) what the speaker is saying? The conundrum is clear when we consider that giving ourselves permission to challenge an idea with which we disagree is a way in which we exercise, and thereby protect, our own freedom of speech. When we challenge or otherwise express disagreement with someone else, we are not necessarily "policing" nor "punishing" them.

The Times recognizes that "the full-throated defense of free speech" has historically involved allowing individuals to express their of conscience, free from "the power of the government" (emphasis mine). Surely this does not mean that individuals need to avoid criticizing each other.

The Times says that only "a closed society" routinely sees the "attacking" of people "who express unpopular views from a place of good faith." I believe they mean verbal attacks here, since the editorial does not address physical violence, material damage, or threats thereof. And whether a view is popular or unpopular is, I believe, irrelevant to this discussion. I am not worried about the words "attacking" or "unpopular"; instead I want to focus on the phrase "from a place of good faith." How do we know whether a person really means what they say, and why should that give them more leeway to say it louder? If they say something offensive and they really mean it, doesn't that make it worse and more deserving of shaming and shunning? How did we move from think before you speak to speak from a place of good faith, the latter arguably a watered-down version of the former, accepting emotional intent as a substitute for intellectual effort?

Also perplexing is this: "Free speech is predicated on mutual respect — that of people for one another and of a government for the people it serves." That I have respect of some kind for someone else's existence does not mean I agree with everything they say, that I can ethically let it pass without comment, or that I can tolerate them saying it loudly over and over. Similarly, that I have respect of some kind for the government's existence does not mean I never criticize the government. In fact, I have to criticize a democratic government if I want it to continue to exist as a democracy, since without my criticism, our shared ideas ecome "weak and brittle" and society as a whole forgets how to "resolve conflict" and may descend into "political violence," as previously pointed out by the Times.

The Times ends on this note:

Every day, in communities across the country, Americans must speak to one another freely to refine and improve the elements of our social contract: What do we owe the most vulnerable in our neighborhoods? What conduct should we expect from public servants? What ideas are so essential to understanding American democracy that they should be taught in schools?

If this referred to an idealized society where everyone agreed on certain underlying principles, I'd agree. The problem in the actual USAmerican society is that many USAmericans believe that vulnerable people should be eliminated, that political leadership is about Twitter trolling rather than any meaningful kind of public service, and that fascism would be better than democracy. We do not agree on the basic principles so we are not able to have good-faith, informed debates about how to apply those principles.

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For more, see this long Twitter thread (this is only one tweet from it):

The editorial is not a defense of free expression. It's an attack on it, and a harmful one in a precarious historical moment.

— Angus Johnston (@studentactivism) March 19, 2022

Also this:

One thing I think about a lot is the great Cat Calling Discourse of 2014.

Men, apparently, had been going about their merry way for years, assuming that women enjoyed it when they yelled "Hey toots, nice rack" at them while they were walking down the street.

— Robyn Pennacchia (@RobynElyse) March 18, 2022

Many, I was led to believe, said they felt that this was their primary means of attracting a mate, and that without the ability to tell women they don't know that they're prettier when they smile, they'd be alone forever.

— Robyn Pennacchia (@RobynElyse) March 18, 2022

These men felt that their right to free speech was being violated by finding out that women did not in fact enjoy this at all, and would prefer they not do it. They had the expectation of being shielded from that information or from consequences for their actions.

— Robyn Pennacchia (@RobynElyse) March 18, 2022

And this, in a nutshell, is every discourse we have had about "cancel culture" since.

— Robyn Pennacchia (@RobynElyse) March 18, 2022

To read more on this topic, please see "Two Things 'Cancel Culture' Refers To", a 6-minute read. Or, try "What We Can Learn About Helen Joyce in Two Sentences", a 5-minute read. Those stories are on Medium, which lets you read a certain number of stories for free every month. You may also consider a paid membership on the platform.

Donald Sutherland acting in Invasion of the Body Snatchers

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If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium. There, readers with a paid membership don't have to worry about the paywall.

An inscribed book of children's poetry: Did E. D. Cumming know Lincoln Kirstein?

One of the things about writing a biography is knowing when to stop. I published Ten Past Noon: Focus and Fate at Forty in 2020, but I keep learning things about Edward Dilworth Cumming.

Image by noriyuki yagi from Pixabay

George Miller Cumming (1854–1927) graduated from Harvard College in 1876. He studied at Harvard Law for a few months in the fall of 1876 but then switched to Columbia Law. From 1877-1879 he traveled and studied in England, France, and Germany, and he was admitted to the New York Bar in 1881.

I have just found that George's son, Edward — "Ned," born 1901 — once owned a book of children's poetry and stories in German, Schnaken & Schnurren, by Wilhelm Busch and published in München in the 1860s-1870s. Ned's name was written inside it, along with the place name "Irvington." Eventually, the collection ended up in the hands of Lincoln Kirstein, born 1907, and who donated it to the Morgan in 1979. It's still available to see at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City today.

I don't know if the two of them knew each other as children (though they were six years apart) and exchanged the book then, or if they did it later as adults, or if the two of them never knew each other at all and the book passed through a used bookseller — or, possibly, through their fathers.

The Cummings spent time at their Irvington home especially around 1915, though the home may have been in the family earlier than that. Ned may have been reading the children's poetry as a teenager to practice German.

Screenshot of the library catalog listing of Schnaken & Schnurren from the Morgan.

The question interests me because, while Cumming was a private person and I know nothing about his personal relationships, Kirstein was more prominent and knew famous people. While a Harvard undergraduate, Kirstein was a cofounder of the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, along with his fellow undergraduates Edward Warburg and John Walker and a twentysomething PhD candidate, Alfred Barr, a bisexual man who was already lecturing on modernist art at Wellesley College. (This detail on Kirstein comes from Bad Gays: A Homosexual History.)

Rachel Maddow wrote about Lincoln Kirstein in her 2023 book Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism. Kirstein, she says, was "Harvard educated, independently wealthy thanks to his father, bisexual, an unflinching aesthete, and a budding arts impresario, just like his colleague Philip Johnson, who was "an almost exact contemporary." But Kirstein was Jewish, and Johnson was a Nazi sympathizer. Maddow writes:

"While at Harvard, Kirstein had founded the society for Contemporary Art on campus, as well as a literary magazine that published new poetry by e.e. cummings, T. S. Eliot, Edmund Wilson, and Ezra Pound — before Pound was revealed as a committed fascist himself. While Johnson spent the first years of his professional life introducing Europe's modern design and architecture to America, Kirstein was busy creating an American ballet troupe to rival the best in Europe."

This was the New York City ballet, co-founded with George Balanchine.

Kirstein's father, Louis E. Kirstein, was, according to Maddow, "close friends" with Felix Frankfurter, a professor at Harvard Law who "spent the 1933–34 academic year at Oxford" and who wrote to FDR (they were friends) saying that England had a "sober" feeling like that which "preceded 1914." The younger Kirstein, Lincoln, "could sense ill winds blowing across the Atlantic and into the kinds of upper-class salons of Manhattan that welcomed rich, influential young men like him and Philip Johnson." And in New York at the end of 1934, Johnson "was losing sway at the Museum of Modern Art, where Lincoln Kirstein had started warning its key trustees, including Nelson Rockefeller and his mother, that the museum was in danger of being 'tarred with the Fascist brush.' Kirstein's whispered misgivings had also helped scuttle the Art, Inc., concessions at Rockefeller Center. Johnson's standing in New York was at a low, and he was working himself into a full-on snit about it."

There was an evening soiree in 1934 "at a stylish loft on East Fortieth Street," Maddow writes, with a "bohemian hostess," at which a drunk "wealthy socialite" guest told a Jewish guest that his people were corrupt and should be genocided. Though Kirstein wasn't there, the hostess reported to him the next day what had happened, explaining that she feared that antisemitism of the German intensity "might happen here in America."

In late 1934, Johnson and Alan Blackburn left New York for Louisiana to work for Huey Long. Maddow writes: "Kirstein had managed to keep his sense of humor about their weird fascist buccaneering," even when "Blackburn asked for Kistein's latest address and then threatened to have him beaten up," but he always remembered "Johnson's nastiest remark to him." As he recalled in 1944 while serving in the Army: "He told me I was number one on his list for elimination in the coming revolution." However, as he continued in this letter, which was a character recommendation for Johnson, who was at risk of indictment for sedition: "Since being in the Army, I have seen Pvt Johnson frequently... I am convinced that he has sincerely repented of his former fascist beliefs, that he understands the nature of his mistake and is a loyal American." Maddow commented that this was "very generous," given that it would be "decades" before Johnson himself made "any statement of contrition."

In 1927, George Miller Cumming died, and around that time, his three surviving family members moved to the New York suburb of Scarsdale. Then, around 1937, when the owner of the house in which they lodged had a physical fight with the neighbors (political? we don't know), the three of them moved back to Manhattan. As I wrote in the book: "The Cumming family — Ned, his sister Emily, and their mother Lucy — had two apartments: West 116th Street and East 43rd Street. All three of them were associated with both addresses." I note the proximity of East 43rd Street to the party on East 40th Street where Kirstein's friends had gathered one night in 1934.

Though Louis Kirstein (1867–1942), who was born in New York, dropped out of school at 13, he later received honorary degrees from Harvard University and Boston University, and he became associated with Harvard Business School. His friend, Felix Frankfurter (1882–1965), who was born in Vienna, came to New York at age 12 and graduated first in his class from Harvard Law, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. He began working for a law firm in 1906. That firm was Hornblower, Byrne, Miller & Potter; he was the firm's first Jewish lawyer, but he stayed there only briefly. (At that time, Lewis Bartholomew Woodruff, who had begun his law studies at Columbia in the 1890–1891 academic year, was a lawyer there; Woodruff had "full charge of preparation of railroad mortgages.")

George Miller Cumming, who served as the president of various railroads, was a law professor at Columbia from April 1891 to June 1897, so it's possible he encountered the young student Lewis Bartholomew Woodruff in 1891.

Ned Cumming died in 1940. Lincoln Kirstein died in 1996.

About these historical people

You can learn more about George and Ned Cumming in Ten Past Noon: Focus and Fate at Forty.

You can learn more about Kirstein in Lincoln Kirstein: The Published Writings 1922-1977. A First Bibliography and in Martin Duberman's The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein. Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2008.

Maddow says: "In the 2014 film The Monuments Men, Bob Balaban's character, Preston Savitz, is modeled on Kirstein."

Who worked at the library

"Belle da Costa Greene...was appointed the director and inaugural librarian of the Morgan, which was founded by J. Pierpont Morgan — the American financier. * * * Greene’s mother, Genevieve Ida Fleet Greener, separated from Belle’s father, Richard T. Greener, the first Black graduate of Harvard College, in the 1890s. * * * Genevieve dropped the last letter of their family name and was lighter-skinned enough to pass as white, as were Greene’s siblings.

This opened doors for Belle da Costa Greene in segregated America, and she worked at Princeton before joining the research library. There she met a cousin of J. Pierpont Morgan, who at the time was looking for someone to organize his growing collection.

* * *

Being a woman librarian and director of a major institution was a big deal at the time. Greene was able to achieve what most women could not, especially during a time when they had just gotten the right to vote."

— The true story of a famed librarian and the secret she guarded closely, Jordan-Marie Smith, NPR, October 29, 2024

More about her:

About me

If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium. There, readers with a paid membership don't have to worry about the paywall.