Denying the Holocaust
Page 25
At the University of Michigan the saga of the ad had a strange twist. Smith mailed camera-ready copy directly to the Michigan Daily. According to the paper’s business manager, the ad “slipped through without being read.” When it appeared the business staff was appalled to learn what they had allowed to happen. On the following day they placed a six-column ad in the paper apologizing for running Smith’s ad and acknowledging that its publication had been a mistake. They declared it a “sorrowful learning experience for the staff.”26 The manager told the Detroit Free Press, “We make mistakes like any organization.”27
The story might well have ended here—an example of faulty monitoring by a segment of the staff of the Michigan Daily—but the issue became more complicated when, despite the fact that those responsible for running the ad acknowledged doing so as a mistake, the editorial board attempted to transform a blunder into a matter of principle. They recast a snafu as an expression of freedom of speech. On the same day that the advertising staff published its apology, the front page carried an editorial explaining that, though the editors found the ad “offensive and inaccurate,” they could not condone the censorship of “unpopular views from our pages merely because they are offensive or because we disagree with them.”28 Editor in chief Andrew Gottesman acknowledged that had the decision been in his hands, he would have printed the ad. He argued that rejecting it constituted censorship, which the editorial board found unacceptable.29
The following day a campus rally attacked both Holocaust denial and the paper’s editorial policies. Stung by student and faculty condemnations and afraid that its editorial was being interpreted as an endorsement of CODOH, the editorial board devoted the next issue’s lead editorial to the topic. Condemning Holocaust denial as “absurd” and “founded on historical fiction and anti-Jewish bigotry,” they dismissed it as irrational, illogical, and ahistorical propaganda. The editors accurately assessed the ad as lacking intellectual merit. Nonetheless, they continued to support its publication. Their powerful condemnation of Holocaust denial in general and Smith’s ad in particular appeared under a banner quoting Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black’s opinion on free speech: “My view is, without deviation, without exception, without any ifs, buts, or whereases, that freedom of speech means that you shall not do something to people either for the views they have or the views they express or the words they speak or write.”30
The strange set of circumstances at Michigan—snatching a constitutional principle from the jaws of a mistake—was further complicated by the entry of the university’s president, James Duderstadt, into the debate. In a letter to the Daily he declared the ad the work of “a warped crank” and proclaimed that denying the Holocaust was to “deny our human potential for evil and to invite its resurgence.” But he, too, defended the paper’s decision, which was more of a nondecision, to run the ad. The president asserted that the Daily had a long history of editorial freedom that had to be protected even when “we disagree either with particular opinions, decisions, or actions.” Most disturbing was Duderstadt’s elevation of Smith’s prejudices to the level of opinions.
There was no doubt about the message the editors and the president were trying to convey: As absurd, illogical, and bigoted as the ad may be, First Amendment guarantees were paramount. The dictates of the American Constitution compelled the Daily to publish. None of those involved seemed to have considered precisely what the First Amendment said: “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech or of the press.” Those who argued that free speech guarantees acceptance of the ad ignored the fact that the First Amendment prevents government from interfering in any fashion with an individual’s or group’s right to publish the most outlandish argument.31 The New York Times made this point in an editorial when it adamantly repudiated the notion that this was a First Amendment question: “Government may not censor Mr. Smith and his fellow ‘Holocaust revisionists,’ no matter how intellectually barren their claims.”32
To call rejection of the ad censorship was to ignore the fact that, unlike the government, whose actions are limited by the First Amendment, these papers do not have a monopoly of force.33 If the government denies someone the right to publish, they have no other option to publish in this country. But if a paper rejects someone’s column, ad, or letter, there are always other publications. The First Amendment does not guarantee access to a private publication. It is designed to serve as a shield to protect individuals and institutions from government interference in their affairs. It is not a sword by which every person who makes an outlandish statement or notorious claim can invoke a Constitutional right to be published.4* Nor did the Michigan Daily seem to notice how Justice Black, whom they quoted, framed it: “you shall not do something to people. . . .” No one was advocating “doing” anything to Smith.
One of the most ardent advocates of the free-speech argument was the Duke Chronicle. In an editorial column the editor in chief, Ann Heimberger, justified the paper’s decision by acknowledging that while the paper knew it could reject the ad, it “chose” to accept it as an expression of the paper’s desire to “support the advertiser’s rights.” The editorial board believed that it was not the paper’s responsibility to protect “readers from disturbing ideas,” but to “disseminate them.”34
Echoing his Michigan colleague, Duke University president Keith Brodie repeated the free-speech defense in a statement that, though it contained a strong refutation of the ad, was more vigorous in its support of the Chronicle’s publication of the ad. To have “suppressed” the ad, he argued, would have violated the university’s commitment to free speech and contradicted its “long tradition of supporting First Amendment rights.”35
When the Cornell Daily Sun ran the ad, the editors justified the decision in an editorial statement warning that “page twenty will shock most readers” but proclaimed that it was not the paper’s role to “unjustly censor advertisers’ viewpoints.” Echoing their colleagues on many of the other campuses that printed the ad, the editors declared that they decided to print it because the “First Amendment right to free expression must be extended to those with unpopular or offensive ideas.”36 Neeraj Khemlani, the editor in chief of the Daily Sun, said his role was not to “protect” readers.37 Cornell president Frank H. T. Rhodes joined his colleagues at Duke and Michigan in defending the paper’s decision.38
The University of Montana’s paper, the Montana Kaimin, also used the First Amendment to defend its publication of the ad. The editor contended that it was not the paper’s place to “decide for the campus community what they should see.”39 The University of Georgia’s paper, the Red and Black, expressed the hope that publishing the ad would affirm America’s unique commitment to “allowing every opinion to be heard, no matter how objectionable, how outright offensive, how clearly wrong that opinion may be.” After the ad appeared the paper’s editor defended the decision by describing it as “a business decision,” arguing that “if the business department is set up to take ads, they darn well better take ads.” Given the juxtaposition of these two explanations, there was, as Mark Silk, an editorial writer for the Atlanta Constitution, pointed out, something dubious about “this high-minded claim.”40
After an extensive debate Washington University’s Student Life decided to run the ad. When the ad appeared in the paper, Sam Moyn, the opinion editor, was responsible for conveying to the university community the reasoning behind the staff’s “controversial action.” The editors, he wrote, conceived of this as a free-speech issue: “The abridgement of Mr. Smith’s rights endangers our own.”41 The St. Louis Post Dispatch defended the students’ actions. Declaring the ad “offensive, provocative and wrong,” it praised the student newspaper’s courage to print it and stated that its actions strengthened the cause of freedom of speech.42 The University of Arizona also depicted its actions as protecting the First Amendment. The editor in chief, Beth Silver, proclaimed that the mission of student newspapers is “to uphold the First Amendment and
run things that are obviously going to be controversial and take the heat for it.”43 This attitude—we have to do what is right irrrespective of the costs—was voiced by a number of papers. Ironically, it echoed a theme frequently voiced by the deniers themselves: We will tell the truth, the consequences notwithstanding.
At Ohio State University the decision-making process was complex. The Lantern’s advertising policy is in the hands of a publications committee comprising faculty, students, editorial board members, and the paper’s business manager.44 University policy requires committee approval before acceptance of an ad designating a religious group. The committee voiced five to four to reject CODOH’s submission.45 But the story did not end there. Enjoined by the committee’s decision from running the ad, the Lantern’s editor, Samantha G. Haney, used her editorial powers to run it as an op-ed piece, explaining that the paper had an “obligation” to do so.46 This decision gave Smith added legitimacy and saved him the $1,134 it would have cost to place a full-page ad in the paper.47
A lengthy editorial explaining the Lantern’s decision condemned Bradley Smith and his cohorts as “racists, pure and simple” and the ad as “little more than a commercial for hatred.” Nonetheless the newspaper had to publish it because it could not only “run things that were harmless to everyone.”48 Haney and her staff rejected the suggestion that they turn to the Ohio State History Department to “pick apart” the ad fact by fact. That, they explained, might suggest that the ad had some “relevancy” and some “substance,” which they were convinced it did not. Given that one of the rationales the Lantern offered for publishing the article was that “truth will always outshine any lie,” its refusal to ask professional historians to elucidate how the ad convoluted historical fact seemed self-defeating.49 It seemed to reflect an understandable reluctance to accord denial legitimacy. There is no better example of the fragility of reason than the conclusion by these editorial boards that it was their obligation to run an ad or an op-ed column that, according to their own evaluation, was totally lacking in relevance or substance.
In contrast to the position adopted by James Duderstadt at the University of Michigan, Ohio State’s president, Gordon Gee, attacked the decision to give Smith space in the newspaper, declaring the deniers’ arguments “pernicious” and “cleverly disguised” propaganda that enhanced prejudice and distorted history.50
When this issue was being debated at Ohio State, a CBS reporter came to that campus to film a segment on Holocaust denial for a network show on hatred and extremism in the United States. Alerted in advance to the pending controversy, the cameras were conveniently present when the editor received a call from Smith congratulating her for running the ad and standing up for the principles of free speech and free press. When Haney hung up, the television reporter, who was standing nearby, asked how she felt. She turned and somewhat plaintively observed that she thought she had been had.
Not all the papers subscribed to the First Amendment argument; indeed, some explicitly rejected it. The University of Tennessee’s Daily Beacon dismissed the idea that not running the ad harmed the deniers’ interests: It was not “censorship or even damaging.”51 Pennsylvania State University’s Daily Collegian, which had been one of the first to receive an ad from Smith, denied that the issue was one of free speech. After seeing student leaders and numerous individuals on campus inundated with material by deniers, the paper reasoned that those behind the ad had sufficient funds to propagate their conspiracy theory of Jewish control without being granted space in the paper.52
In an eloquent editorial the Harvard Crimson repudiated Smith’s claim to a free-speech right to publish his ad. To give CODOH a forum so that it could “promulgate malicious falsehoods” under the guise of open debate constituted an “abdication” of the paper’s editorial responsibility.53 The University of Chicago Maroon agreed that while the deniers “may express their views,” it had “no obligation at anytime to print their offensive hatred.”54
The argument that not publishing the ad constituted censorship was not only a misinterpretation of the First Amendment but disingenuous. The editorial boards that reached this decision ignored the fact that they all had policies that prevented them from running racist, sexist, prejudicial, or religiously offensive ads. (Some of the papers in question even refuse cigarette ads.) How could they square their “principled” stand for absolute freedom of speech with policies that prevented them from publishing a range of ads and articles? Why was Bradley Smith entitled to constitutional protection while an ad for an X-rated movie, Playboy, the KKK, or Marlboros was not? Recognizing this inconsistency, some of the boards tried to reconcile these two seemingly contradictory positions by adopting a stance that drew them even further into the deniers’ trap. They argued that Holocaust denial was not antisemitic and therefore not offensive. The Cornell Daily Sun editorial board determined that the “ad does not directly contain racist statements about Jewish people.”55 Valerie Nicolette, the Sun’s managing editor, told the Chronicle of Higher Education that the editors had evaluated the ad based on their standards of “obscenity and racism” and decided that it passed.56 When a group of Jewish students at Duke met with the editorial board of the Duke Chronicle to protest the running of the ad, they were told that the paper’s policy was not to run any ad that was “racist or contained ethnic slurs” but that this ad did not fall into that category.57
Andrew Gottesman, who vigorously argued that he could not condone “censorship” of Smith’s advertisement and whose Michigan Daily published its ringing denunciation of Holocaust denial under Justice Hugo Black’s interpretation of the First Amendment, admitted that there were ads he would not run in the paper. This ad, however, did not deserve to be “banned from the marketplace of ideas, like others might be.” Among those he would ban were a Ku Klux Klan announcement of lynching or a beer ad with a woman holding a beer bottle between her breasts.58 For Gottesman keeping such sexist and racist ads out of the paper would not constitute censorship; keeping Smith’s out would. When Washington University’s Student Life published the ad, an editorial explained that it did so in the interest of preventing “freedom of ideas from disappearing from its newspapers.”59 Yet the same paper includes the following policy statement on its advertising rate card: “Student Life reserves the right to edit or reject any advertisement which does not comply with the policies or judgment of the newspaper.”60
The claim that the rejection of the ad constituted censorship also revealed the failure of editorial staffs and, in certain cases, university presidents to think carefully about what their papers did regularly: pick and choose between subjects they covered and those they did not, columns they ran and those they rejected, and ads that met their standards and those that did not. The Daily Tar Heel, the paper of the University of North Carolina, proclaimed that as soon as an editor “takes the first dangerous step and decides that an ad should not run because of its content, that editor begins the plunge down a slippery slope toward the abolition of free speech.”61 What the Tar Heel failed to note was that newspapers continuously make such choices. As Tom Teepen, the editor of the Atlanta Constitution’s editorial page, observed, “Running a newspaper is mainly about making decisions, not about ducking them.”62 In fact the Duke Chronicle, whose editor had wondered how newspapers founded on the principles of free speech and free press could “deny those rights to anyone,” had earlier rejected an insert for Playboy and an ad attacking a fraternity.63
While some papers justified their decision by arguing that the ad was not antisemitic and others leaned on the censorship argument, an even more disconcerting rationale was offered by many papers. They argued that however ugly or repellent Smith’s “ideas,” they had a certain intellectual legitimacy. Consequently it was the papers’ responsibility to present these views to readers for their consideration. Those editors who made this argument fell prey to denial’s attempt to present itself as part of the normal range of historical interpretation.64 That they had been
deceived was evident in the way they described the contents of the ad. The editor in chief of the Cornell Daily Sun described the ad as containing “offensive ideas.”65 The Sun argued that it was not the paper’s role to “unjustly censor advertisers’ viewpoints” however “unpopular or offensive.”66 In a similar vein the University of Washington Daily defended giving Smith op-ed space because the paper must constitute a “forum for diverse opinions and ideas.”67 Ironically, six weeks earlier, when it rejected the ad, it had described Smith’s assertions as “so obviously false as to be unworthy of serious debate.”68 The paper insisted that the op-ed column it eventually published was different because it was Smith’s “opinion” and did not contain the “blatant falsehoods” of the ad. In the column Smith asserted that for more than twelve years he has been unable to find “one bit of hard evidence” to prove that there was a plan to “exterminate” the Jews, and that the gas-chamber “stories” were “allegations” unsupported by “documentation or physical evidence.”69
The Michigan Daily engaged in the same reasoning. It would not censor “unpopular views” simply because readers might disagree with them.70 In a show of consistency, two weeks after Smith’s ad appeared, the Daily supported the decision by Prodigy, the computer bulletin board, to allow subscribers to post Holocaust denial material. Prodigy, they contended, was similar to a newspaper, and like a newspaper it must be a “forum for ideas.”71 In another suggestion that Smith’s views were worthy of debate, the editor in chief of the Montana Kaimin argued that “this man’s opinions, no matter how ridiculous they may be, need to be heard out there.”72 According to the editor in chief of Washington University’s Student Life, the board voted to run the ad because “we didn’t feel comfortable censoring offensive ideas.”73