In 1977, a few years after Erwin Knoll had moved to Madison, Wisconsin, to become editor of The Progressive, a volunteer host at WORT-FM, the local listener-sponsored community radio station, announced plans to interview, live on air, a spokesperson for the American Nazi Party.
On the day of the intended broadcast, a group of demonstrators broke into the station and smashed a window and some equipment, preventing the interview. Knoll headed over to WORT to discuss the incident on air; he would later recall, “I found myself facing a young man from one of the self-designated ‘revolutionary’ groups on campus, who said, ‘The only answer to Nazi speech is a lead pipe to the skull.’ ”
Knoll told the young man, and his radio audience, that “this was Nazi talk if ever I heard any.”
Knoll would know. He was a survivor of the Holocaust, having fled his homeland in Austria as a young boy after the Nazis came to power. One of his first memories was watching a local synagogue burn to the ground. He saw the “Für Juden Verboten” (“Jews Forbidden”) signs go up in public places. Members of his family died in the camps. He understood as acutely as anyone the power that hate has to move people to do terrible things.
And yet, there was never a fiercer advocate for protecting all forms of speech, including hate speech, nor a firmer opponent of violence, than Erwin Knoll, the magazine’s editor for more than two decades, until his death in 1994. This often put him at odds with many others on the left, who were willing, as most people are, to find some violence justified and some speech too awful to be tolerated, especially when it involves intolerance.
Yet Knoll’s absolutist position has been integral to the mission of The Progressive throughout its 113-year history. This magazine’s founder, Robert M. “Fighting Bob” La Follette, gave a stunning speech in 1917 from the floor of the U.S. Senate titled “Free Speech in Wartime.” He said that “if every preparation for war can be made the excuse for destroying free speech and a free press and the right of the people to assemble together for peaceful discussion, then we may well despair of ever again finding ourselves for a long period in a state of peace.”
In my five years as editor of The Progressive, I always felt that I had no greater or more sacred trust than to be a defender of those unpopular absolutes: free speech and nonviolence. I think I did a middling job at it. During my tenure, the magazine, over the objections of some staff, did run “Comment” articles opposing the violence that ensued after the police murder of George Floyd and cautioning against regarding as just the shedding of any blood in Ukraine.
But there were other times where I chose not to fight for what I believed to be right. One of those times happened this spring, involving a web post by regular columnist Mike Ervin.
Ervin’s piece, “Exercising Free Speech to Be Free from Hate,” which ran on Progressive.org in April, was about how a group of students at Yale heckled a speaker, Kristen Waggoner, who is general counsel for the conservative legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom and potentially had distasteful things to say about LGBTQ+ people. Here’s how he began the piece:
“I was heartened to see that college students are continuing to exercise their free speech rights by heckling and trying to shout down dubious speakers who are invited to their campuses. It gives me hope for the future.”
In the editing process, I cut the phrase “trying to shout down” so the column didn’t expressly advocate for more than heckling, which is arguably a kind of speech. But I let it run without further comment, which I regret. I believe shouting down speakers like these is, first of all, exactly what they want, and secondly, conveys that the things they have to say are so powerful and compelling that others cannot be trusted to hear and evaluate them.
Most people are willing to find some violence justified and some speech too awful to be tolerated, especially when it involves intolerance.
While Ervin’s column, which would never have gotten by Knoll, got by me, it did draw two critical responses, which appear as comments on the piece. One, from Timothy Nelson, chided Ervin’s crack about how, when people have awful things to say, “our proper response should be to engage them in civilized discourse?”
“Yes, Mike. That’s the way it works in a civilized society,” Nelson wrote. “You argue, oppose, and counter the ideas. You don’t bully or threaten. The speakers in question didn’t adhere to the correct agenda. They were not calling for violence against anyone. It is the mob that threatens violence—directly or tacitly.”
Free speech, Nelson continued, “is the natural right for everyone—not just the people I agree with or happen to like.” When the mob decides who can be heard, then “you have declared that those speaking have no right to speak and those attending have no right to form a judgment of their own.”
The second commenter, Gordon Burghardt, a professor and subscriber to The Progressive for more than fifty years, wrote to “strongly disagree that disruption of speakers is appropriate on college campuses,” which are supposed to be spaces where differing views are aired. “What is unpopular changes over the years, of course, but the commitment to open discussion needs to be preserved in an open society.”
I asked Ervin, whom I consider to be one of the best writers I have ever worked with, about these letters. He told me he thinks “their perspective comes from a very privileged position. My guess is that they’ve never been asked to politely sit by while their very humanity was being debated. It’s very insulting to be put in that position.”
Ervin told me that people with disabilities, like himself, “are made to feel by the tyranny of politeness that they shouldn’t feel angry about how they are mistreated. Nonsense. The first step toward ending that mistreatment is to justifiably feel angry about it and to express it loud and clear to those responsible.” In his view, the Yale students in this case are “not limiting the boundaries of free speech. They’re expanding them.”
I agree that the worst possible response to bad speech is silence. But the next worst response is keeping others from being heard.
In fact, as was also the case in a 2016 campus protest of an appearance by conservative provocateur Ben Shapiro that I wrote about for The Progressive, the Yale demonstrators didn’t actually stop the speakers from being heard; they just made it a little harder.
Still, I think, as a strategy, speech interruption is a bad idea. In the case of the Yale event, Waggoner was given sufficient cause to allege that some of the protesters “refused to allow others to speak.”
And that’s a talking point the right loves to have.
While the nonviolence embraced by figures such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. was integral to their success in helping bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice, there are signs that it has fallen out of fashion on the left, as it has long been on the right.
I have been told that it is not my place to tell others how to protest. I’ve heard it said that some speech does not qualify for protection, a trick accomplished by contending that “it’s not speech, it’s hate.”
I disagree. While speech does sometimes spur violent action—just look at what happened on January 6, 2021—I believe the two things do need to be treated separately. That’s what it means to have an absolute commitment to freedom of speech.
It’s not easy to defend the right of others to say hateful things or to tell someone that violence is never justified even if violence is rained upon them, but that is what this magazine’s tradition, and Knoll’s example, compels us to do—to say “no” with no exceptions. War is never just. Killing is never the right thing to do. Suppressing speech is always wrong.
Those of us who consider ourselves “progressives” should be telling the people on our side, at every opportunity, that if they lack the self-control to go to a talk without shouting others down or to a protest without breaking things and hurting people, then they should stay home.
I am calling this new column “First Things First” because that is the title of the chapter in my 1996 biography of Erwin Knoll, An Enemy of the State, about his absolute commitment to free speech. It noted that, in his standard First Amendment speech, he’d ply his audiences with examples.
“Can you honestly say you haven’t encountered a news story or an editorial or an opinion column that you wouldn’t gladly have suppressed if you have the power to do so?” he’d ask. “I’m glad you don’t have that power. I’m even more glad that I don’t have that power.”
But, in fact, we all do have the power, in some circumstances, to shut down the expression of others. To use this power and to abuse it is the exact same thing.