Posted on Tue, May. 17, 2005

Unwelcome in the best places

By Don Erler

Special to the Star-Telegram


Dissenting in the case of "In re Anastaplo" (1961), Justice Hugo Black noted that "this country's freedom depends upon adherence to our Bill of Rights" and observed that George Anastaplo, by refusing on First Amendment grounds to disclose his political affiliations to the Illinois bar, "took too much of the responsibility of preserving that freedom upon himself."

Black concluded: "We must not be afraid to be free."

Anastaplo's difficulties with the bar began largely by chance. Having passed the bar exam after finishing at the top of a distinguished class at the University of Chicago's law school, the 25-year-old World War II flying veteran expected perfunctory questioning by the bar's Committee on Character and Fitness.

The initial interview was conducted by two of the full committee's 17 members. One asked Anastaplo whether he had an opinion about whether a member of the Communist Party should be able to practice law.

Anastaplo, who already had interviewed at some of Chicago's top law firms, anticipated a lucrative legal career. Had he simply told the tiny subcommittee that he had no opinion, the matter probably would have been dropped. After all, not a single person has ever suggested that the patriot was a dangerous subversive.

Instead, Anastaplo responded: "I don't see why not." So the subcommittee probed more deeply, asking whether the applicant believed in the right of revolution.

"Don't we all?" responded the young man, citing the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and others.

Throughout his interviews with the committee, he refused to disclose his religious leanings or political affiliations.

So began a legal process of challenges to the committee's negative vote that culminated in the Supreme Court's 5-4 holding against Anastaplo and, because he had represented himself at all stages of that process, his announced retirement from legal practice three weeks shy of his 36th birthday.

In Dallas to address the Patrick E. Higginbotham American Inn of Court last Wednesday, Anastaplo was introduced by a lawyer-writer who is likely to make the relatively obscure Chicago law professor into a household name. Mark Curriden, author of the bestseller Contempt of Court, will publish his book on Anastaplo later this year.

Curriden told me that his provisional title is Afraid to be Free, from Black's dissent. He has worked on the Anastaplo book for three years and noted, in introducing him to the Dallas legal professionals, that some of Anastaplo's prominent classmates (including Judge Abner Mikva) think that their brilliant colleague was the only one of them who answered the committee's questions "the right way."

Anastaplo changed careers, earned a Chicago Ph.D. and has lived the life of one of America's most prolific scholars, which is how I first came to know him decades ago. As he told Chicago's Hyde Park Historical Society 18 months ago, "I have always been concerned that things be published as I have written them," which is why he has "withdrawn articles from several of the best law reviews in this country when editors have insisted on doing things 'their way.'"

Now 79, Anastaplo will, he estimates, "be leaving in print the equivalent of about 40 volumes," most of which I have read. (Full disclosure: He wrote the foreword to my own 2002 book.) In fact, it was he -- a student of Leo Strauss -- who taught me how to read the best authors, who, like Anastaplo, wrote with a subtle precision now almost extinct.

Anastaplo restated for the Dallas lawyers a number of his somewhat "liberal" political positions, several of which I find dubious. But as to his principled resistance to improper official actions, he seemed to persuade most of the audience that C. Herman Pritchett, former president of the American Political Science Association, was right when he wrote:

"In 1960 [Anastaplo] was expelled from Soviet Russia for protesting harassment of another American, and in 1970 from the Greece of the Colonels. As W.C. Fields might have said, any man who is kicked out of Russia, Greece and the Illinois bar can't be all bad."

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“Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction. No universal selfishness can bring social good to all.” —Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois

This guy had a great deal of personal conviction and courage. I look forward to this book.

I wonder what he would say about the fact that we have gone from a belief society (a society that wills itself to progress through integration) to an ownership society again--different levels of feudalism and colonization are now emerging.

Nice post.

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Those who define have the power. http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/...heney.ssl.html

We already live in a society of ownership. To set things right we need socialism.

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“Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction. No universal selfishness can bring social good to all.” —Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois

I think the all-out ownership of runaway capitalism will transcend and destroy any kind of representative governing we might have a chance at...but I do not agree with all-out socialism.

I think MM Bakhtin has some interesting ideas in "Art and Answerability" and in "Dialogic Imagination."

He seemed to believe that socialism is what is left when you take the "social" out of interaction. He was big on ethical communication and aesthetics. I learn something new from him each time I read his work.

Anyway...

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Those who define have the power. http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/...heney.ssl.html

Try some Marx, Lenin, or Mao.

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“Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction. No universal selfishness can bring social good to all.” —Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois

Etc... I guess I am fairly moderate and relate more to Bakhtin.

Just got finished with intense discourse research which addressed a full spectrum of thought on politics and identity.

Interesting stuff. Marx is nice to talk about--but I am not sure how practical his ideas are--
However--there are some interesting theorists who are reworking much of what Adam Smith talked about. Much of the runaway "free markets" which shut out so many while privileging only a few was what Smith warned about in the 1700's....even so, he is quoted by current free market theorists and taken out of context.

American Mania is an interesting read--Peter Whybrow parallels scarcity response with consumerism that has boomeranged.

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Those who define have the power. http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/...heney.ssl.html

Smith is good but I feel that Marx puts in more detail and planning(Capital for example). Lenin's State and Revolution also fills in the blank that Marx left when he died.[/i]

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“Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction. No universal selfishness can bring social good to all.” —Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois

Participatory democracy has always been my thing....I am concerned right now about corporate transcendence of the political. Am heading into the greeks---NOT Plato though-

What short readings do you suggest?

So your signature says Socialism or Death...what is that about?

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Those who define have the power. http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/...heney.ssl.html

The Communist Manifesto is pretty good as far as pamphlets go but I'd recommend "Dictatorship and Democracy, and the Socialist Transittion to Communism" by Bob Avakian.

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“Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction. No universal selfishness can bring social good to all.” —Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois

I'm curious why you think this. Laissez-faire capitalism means not only private property and the rule of objective law but the complete separation of the state from economic activity. Since these conditions do not exist in any country in the world, how will they destroy representative government?

Further, since such a system theoretically holds that the only legitimate function of government is to protect the rights of the individual, why do you believe that it would be destructive to those rights?