CONSTIUTION
DAY, 17 SEPTEMBER 1988
Remarks at the U. S. Commission on Civil Rights[1]
by
W. B. Allen
Chairman
What do Conservatives
care about civil rights? That question occurs to me today because of the
significant implication of Constitution Day, which we shall mark tomorrow. On
each renewal of this case we echo the claims of the past on our future—looking
back, now 200 years, to find our way forward. Looking back to the constitution
is conservative, in the way Lincoln defined it, namely adhering “to the old and
tried, against the new and untried [?],” when, as he said, “we stick to,
contend for, the identical old policy. . which was adopted by ‘our fathers who
framed the Government under which we live;’...” Today many say that the Framers
had no regard for civil rights, rightly construed. Civil rights, they insist,
is about changing the face of America, and therefore cannot be about the old
look of things. It therefore becomes a serious question whether those who stick
by the Framers, the Conservatives, care anything at all about civil rights.
Our work in this
Commission is to superintend change in our nation—change in our laws and in our
practices. It is a work which has been made necessary by our past shortcomings
regarding some important dimensions of American life, and of those none more
important than the guarantee of equal rights of citizenship. The general name
for this valuable work has been “civil rights” for at least thirty years now.
That is why this is called the United States Commission on Civil Rights.
Thirty-one years ago
President Eisenhower recommended and the Congress acted to create the United
States Commission on Civil Rights. In an atmosphere tense with suspicions of
forced integration and recognition that America faced perhaps its greatest
challenge since the War of American Union in the need to correct injustices
inflicted on blacks by state and federal policies of discrimination, President
Eisenhower recommended a “reasonable and moderate response,” designed to
provide a means of resolving “a great educational problem that involves a
moral” principle. The Commission was to assist in identifying the
responsibilities “not of Massachusetts or Mississippi but of the United
States,” to “bring about better understanding and not to persecute anybody.”
Since that positive and
creative decision in the depths of the “bad old days,” Congress has from time
to time resolved, and the President proclaimed, our country’s dedication to the
attainment of truly equal rights of citizenship.
Here we have a bedrock
conservative issue if ever there was one. Living as we do in an era when some
believe civil rights to be the privileged preserve of some, but not all
Americans, we have cause to recover Eisenhower’s vision. The Preamble to our
Constitution was drafted by Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania. But Morris’s “We
The People” was more than one man’s idea. As Patrick Henry correctly remarked,
Morris did not speak merely in his name, nor in the name of the thirteen
states, but in the name of all the people of the United States. “We The People”
made pledges and promises to be redeemed
not by special interests but by
all the individuals comprising this great society. It must be the work of this
Commission to remind us of those pledges and promises, and that civil rights
are the benchmarks not of oppression but of American citizenship.
Since the preamble was
adopted, America has become a land of many races, and faiths. It remains,
however, a land of one right for all—where the rule of law benefits every one
and not one or some at the expense of others. Ours is a democratic land, where
the idea of majority rule encompasses “justice for all.” The majority is a
sacred republican expedient, not a class or a caste. When Americans begin to
speak of the majority, not as the voice of republican liberty, but as one group
in opposition to other groups in our society, they are perverting our heritage.
When defenders of a quota-ized society scornfully reject the claims of “the
majority,” they turn an icon of republicanism into a mere racial epithet. They
pit race against race, men against women, faith against faith, without any
means of reuniting them.
President Eisenhower
said that his objective “was to prevent anybody illegally from interfering with
any individual’s right.” His Commission was to contribute to this end by
representing “the spectrum of American opinion,” and would consist of persons
of such character and “national reputation that their opinions, convictions,
and findings of fact will be respected by America.” Nothing less could provide
a proper emphasis for the American principle that every individual’s rights are
precious.
To keep America on the
track of its ancient pledges and promises, we need to keep the spirit of Civil
Rights for all alive. That is a worthy Conservative goal, for nothing should so
roil a Conservative’s soul as to notice that Americans’ civil rights are
jeopardized by governmental indifference to the rights of individual Americans.
If Conservatives sleep now, while a Civil Rights Commission true to
Eisenhower’s vision is being destroyed, we will awaken later, not to find that
there is no longer a Civil Rights Commission, and all Americans secure in their
constitutional rights without distinctions of race, gender, or class. We will
awaken to a new Commission on Civil Rights bent on dividing and punishing our
Country until one day no one remembers, we were once “We the people of the
United States.”
That is why I address
myself particularly to this question, what do Conservatives care about civil
rights? The answer must be everything, for not otherwise can conservatives
carry out their proper task. This must mean, then, that Conservatives do not
contribute enough, when simply reminding their countrymen of the preferred
solutions to the problems of our day. They must go beyond, and apply their
convictions to practical wants, thereby demonstrating that civil rights
properly understood answer to the needs of all.
We find no fitter
example of this challenge to pending review of its decision in the case, Runyon
v. McCrary. Speculation has it that the Court will overturn that decision’s
novel application of the original Reconstruction civil rights statutes. Such a
result would be a lamentable mistake, for what the Court requires rather to do
is to clarify and extend that ruling.
Conservatives do not err
when they remark that it is unjust to empower a private individual to force
another private individual into a contractual relation against the will of the
latter. That, however, is the misapplication of the Runyon ruling and not its
essence. Conservatives ought to notice still more how essential it is to bar
private or public third-party interference in the right to make contracts. That
is the legitimate civil right claim the legislation was aimed at. It is a means
to spell out limits to contracts which confine their obligations to the
contracting parties, as well as a means to protect the crucial entrepreneurial
ambiance which alone renders the right of contract meaningful. Because
Conservatives care enough about civil rights to insist upon clarity in their
expression, they should urge the extension and clarification of Runyon,
including providing due emphasis on damages (compensatory and punitive) over
regulation and bureaucracy as the appropriate remedy for force and fraud
injuries.
And now, if only they
will listen—and I know not why they shouldn’t—I would address a few words to
the liberal, civil rights elite.
I would say to them:—You
pride yourselves a reasonable and a just people; moreover, I do not doubt that
you possess in general talents for reason and justice in proportion as others
do. Nevertheless, whenever you speak of Conservatives, and Republicans, you do
so only to wield the whip of “racism,” using even the flimsiest of pretexts to
hound us out of polite society as if we were no better than outlaws. Indeed, it
often appears that even outlaws—murderers, muggers, and perverts—would sooner
be received into your company than a Reagan Conservative. You grants us no
hearing at all, while assuring them every consideration. Even when you cannot
agree among yourselves, you can always restore harmony by starting up a
condemnatory hymn of “Reagan Racism”—you use it as a secret password by which
you give leave to one another to come and go. I beg you to think, though, how
unjust this is to us—and indeed even to yourselves! Do indict what you perceive
as our shortcomings; but then wait, at least long enough, to hear our account.
We insist on taking the stand in our own defense; permit us to deny or justify.
We ask no more.
The Commission on Civil
Rights has been locked in a stranglehold by the liberal civil rights elite.
Slowly, the past four years, they have been choking off its life and in the
coming year threaten to kill it. Why do they in 1988 act the part of the
obstructionists of 1957? Two words: Ronald Reagan. While the President is in
office, they cannot reserve the Commission to their own uses. Unlike
Eisenhower, they believe Civil Rights are not for all Americans but only for
those interests who will push a liberal agenda. In 1957 the obstructionists
forced a black woman to the back of the bus. In 1987 the obstructionists force
even young black children to the back of the classroom, just to be able to save
their notions of quotas and group interests for America. The Commission on
Civil Rights would tell the truth about the liberal agenda. That is why the
obstructionists attempt to cut off funding and silence the Commission.
And what is that truth?
Namely, that policies touted as successful have consistently failed. This week
the Equal employment Opportunity Commission had to request a federal court to
hold United Airlines in contempt for failing to abide by a nearly fifteen year
old settlement and, indeed, perverting its terms to the benefit of white males.
The Airline had agreed to apply a 2:1 quota in its hiring arrangements,
consistent with the reasoning of that era; it promised a court that it would do
so. The truth is, however, that it did not.
Similarly, a spokesman
from Asian Americans for Affirmative Action appeared before the Commission in
its Los Angeles forum only last week, there to complain that affirmative action
arrangements in universities and elsewhere were operating as effective devices
for screening out American Asians. He expressed some surprise that a device so
well suited to that precise operation would in fact be used that way.
At that same forum,
three manifestly capable, intelligent black university professors—each from a
different institution, in different fields, and doubtless of different moral
and political inclinations—brought before us a tale of an affirmative action
underworld, where black professionals are kept circulating from institution to
institution through revolving door processes which provide steady statistical
reports for the institutions but no absolute improvement over time in their
hiring patterns.
The most gruesome aspect
of each of these stories is that they point out how thoroughly those who have
acquired reputations for fairness in matters of race have in fact become the
new custodians of an old-fashioned Jim Crow regime. The strongest architects
and defenders of affirmative action, as often as not, are its chief
violators—not least of all on Capitol Hill itself.
No one at this late date
requires to hear rehearsed the sheer destruction and brutalization of education
which this country has suffered through a mindless pursuit of chimerical goals
without regard for individual accomplishments. For that is how all too many
black children, suffering integration in school buildings distant from their
homes, nevertheless receive a segregated education within classrooms and school
buildings stratified by race.
Put these stories
together, along with the mounting carnage of failed urban policies, and the
watchful citizen can arrive at no conclusion short of horror for the evil that
has been wrought. Nor is it necessary to deny that America has changed in
numerous and valuable ways since August, 1964. There has been honest progress
in the country, even while there is much room to speculate whether that
progress has not consisted almost exclusively in the immediate changes effected
by the passage of the historic civil rights laws. Where abuses have been
legislated out of existence, the attainments have been real and palpable. By contrast,
in almost every aspect of our lives where we have tried to manage our civil
rights relations we have failed. voting rights until recently has been a
notable exception; that is, not only did citizens come to participate at a
vastly improved rate in the governance of the community, but the complexion of
the corps of office-holders in the country changed by several orders of
magnitude (at least in municipal politics).
Now, though, we prepare
to sail off into a brave new world, in which voting rights must be managed as
thoroughly as our schools were—like our schools, presumably, managed into
worthlessness. At every turn in our historic civil rights travail, we have been
bedeviled by the penchant of the state to intrude itself between citizen and
citizen—the reluctance to entrust to Americans themselves the management of
their peaceful relations. Yet, nothing can be more clear than that, ultimately,
no other solution will honestly fulfill the promises and pledges of America.
Laws and strict enforcement are required to set the boundaries of our social
and political life. Nevertheless, the complexion of the intricate and manifold
relations of that social and political life must necessarily result from the
particular negotiations of individuals wending their way into the future.
The liberal civil rights
elite seems never to have understood this basic truth. They have confused the
power to remove petty apartheid from American life with a power to govern in
all things. They revile Conservatives because Conservatives seek to remind them
of the limits of their power. Conservatives do not begrudge them their just
desserts and proper recognition. Conservatives seek only to remind them that,
though, indeed, they changed the face of America, they have left its soul untouched.
Conservatives care enough about civil rights to wish to redeem a nation’s soul
through the promises of its Constitution.