The doctrine of states’ rights has returned to the American political scene. Leftist and liberal governors have been dusting off the arguments of John C. Calhoun and echoing the speeches of Strom Thurmond in preparation for their defiance of the national government. The battle is being fought on several grounds. In Massachusetts, the fight is over whether a governor can refuse to send his National Guard units to take part in exercises in Central America; in South Carolina and Nevada it is the shipment of hazardous wastes from other states that is at issue.

Conservatives are quick to point out the bad motives of liberal Democrats who can put up with the Sandinistas but are opposed to economic growth and nuclear energy. However, constitutional questions cannot be settled by the argumentum ad hominem, and if we really believe in the arrangements devised by our ancestors in 1787, then we should be willing to swallow hard and allow the peoples of the several states to make their own decisions.

Of course, any discussion of states’ rights is bound to be colored by the graphic film images of George Wallace standing in front of the University of Alabama to block the entrance of a black student. The Kennedy brothers very adroitly managed “little George” by calling out his own National Guard units against him. For some reason, Ross Barnet’s stand at Ole Miss is forgotten, even though the student there was James Meredith, the first black to break the color line at a Southern state university.

As a student in an unintegrated semiprivate institution, I remember the events of those days very well, and my own recollections are very hard to fit into the neat categories of bigot and martyr, redneck past and progressive future. The Jim Crow laws, for example, were still in existence and many of them were enforced. On the other hand, I used to ride in the back of the bus, just to be obnoxious, and there were many black people who rode in the middle or even toward the front. Nobody minded. People of different races were generally polite to each other, although it was not always wise to invade the other turf. There were bars and jazz clubs for blacks that ordinarily welcomed a sprinkling of whites. On the wrong night, however, you could run into trouble. In this respect, little has changed since the 60’s, except that the danger has increased.

For many people of that time, integration per se was not so much an issue as forced integration. A Southern city like Charleston was nothing like Chicago, where blacks and whites could spend their lives successfully avoiding one another. There was some neighborhood segregation in the suburbs, but not in the city itself. Black and white neighbors generally knew each other and managed to get along, and in the course of time the institutions of separation were eroding beneath a tide of prosperity, interstate commerce, and liberalization. But the Supreme Court put a stop to this natural evolution and reduced a variegated tangle of human relations to a simple case of black and white. For many people, that meant, in effect, choosing between local community and a distant, oppressive national government. In that context, even Ross Barnet could seem like a hero.

What I best recall of the Mississippi case was a petition circulated in my dormitory, congratulating Governor Barnet on his heroic stand. Not long after, the same boys recorded a tape of a black woman calling in to a radio show to protest lunch counter segregation. They played the tape back endlessly for several days. “Why can’t I or my child eat in the same store we’re shopping in. There ain’t no damn body better than me.” They didn’t know what to think but were clearly troubled by what they heard. 

We were all as confused as a student from Summerville, who used to drive his big Oldsmobile down the street threatening to run over every “n-gger” he saw, but when he walked into his daddy’s business, he embraced and kissed the black men working there. Nobody pointed out the contradiction, because it was all too familiar. I was 17 at the time, with no fixed opinions. 

As my student years rolled by, I did become involved on the fringes of the civil rights movement and came to meet some of the people involved in voter registration efforts in the South Carolina Lowcountry. I knew none of them well, but they were all connected, in one way or another, with the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee. High lander was a seminarium of leftist activity throughout the South, and its head, Miles Horton, was commonly accused of being a Communist. The charge was to some extent unfair, since Horton is said to have been under instruction from the Party not to become a member. It was the people at Highlander who put together the movement version of the gospel song, “We Shall Overcome.” Pete Seeger generally gets credit for the piece, but my impression is that various verses were done by Guy Carawan, a wonderful folksinger with a voice remarkably like Elvis, his wife Candy, Septima Clark, a black schoolteacher in Charleston, along with Miles Horton and his wife Ziphalia. 

At one time or another I met all the authors of the anthem, except for Mr. Seeger. The Carawans lived on Johns Island, where they were collaborating with a local black businessman, Esau Jenkins, in organizing something called the Progressive Club. From what I could gather, the club was supposed to serve both as a cooperative store and a voter registration headquarters. However, for the few white college students who occasionally showed up, the principal attraction was the strange and powerful music of the Moving Star Hall Singers, a church singing group that performed the ancient songs and stories of sea island blacks with few of the European embellishments that make “gospel” music at tractive to middle-class Americans. 

It was at a “folk concert” at the Progressive Club that I first began to be aware that law and the police were not always on my side. Inside, the little hall was filled with local black people with a sprinkling of reds, including the Hortons and song-collector Allan Lomax who had come to tape the evening. Lomax, who was very drunk, stood up to make a little speech in which he declared his solidarity with the oppressed peoples of the world. “When I was a boy, my daddy took me aside and said, ‘Son, us Lomaxes is nothin’ but white trash and you can’t get no lower ‘n that.'” 

Despite the forced double negatives and the maudlin sentimentality, Lomax was wildly cheered. Outside, it was a different story. An unfriendly group of Charleston County policemen were there just in case anything got out of line. When I asked one of them what he expected, he informed me that the entire event, by bringing this large a number of blacks and whites together, was illegal, and if I so much as spat, he would haul me in. Strange to say, he chose not to notice the fact that he was arguing with a nineteen-year-old with a drink in his hand. 

Well, Charleston police were generally not bad guys—venal, perhaps, but not mean. In fact, the whole state is remarkably easygoing. When Clemson University was faced with integration, they simply accepted the rather well qualified black student, Harvey Gant, when he applied. Perhaps the state’s lawmakers still remembered General Sherman, who torched Columbia as a consolation prize, when he had to bypass Charleston. 

In my own little college, events did not proceed so smoothly. Our president was a vitriolic anticommunist, who regarded the John Birch Society as a society of weak sisters and formed Charleston Alert, a group that was supposed to ferret out all the “Commonists” in the area. If you’ve ever been to Charleston, even recently, you will realize how hilarious this must have sounded at the time. I knew all the reds in Charleston County, and all told they could barely have fielded a baseball team. Besides, they were mostly well-intentioned people with nice manners, a few of them connected with the best families in the city. (I still remember the Carawans with affection and was delighted to hear Guy perform on A Prairie Home Companion.)

Faced with an intransigent president, who apparently preferred extinction to integration, the liberal editors at the college newspaper decided to poll the students and their families. We asked two very basic questions: were you in favor of integrating the college, and if the answer was “no,” would you still oppose integration if it turned out that all federal funds, including student loans, would be cut off? As I recall, about three-fourths answered “no” to the second question. When the president got wind of the results, he summoned the editor into his office to tell her that if she published the poll or leaked it to the press, the entire editorial staff would be expelled-and not because of the poll. He would concoct charges of moral turpitude that would embarrass both us and our families. 

In the meeting we held to discuss the matter, I argued enthusiastically for publishing the poll and for telling the whole story to the press. As I figured it, we would all get free rides at any number of liberal colleges in the Northeast. We’d be martyrs. The editor, however, was a graduating senior and a liberal Democrat who wanted to make her way in the local party structure. She was and is a very bright and able woman, who probably made the best decision, although I still regret that I never had the chance to be a hero of our time. 

In any event, I should have made an unlikely Tom Joad or Mother Jones. Even on the question of civil rights, my views could only make enemies. Voluntary integration by state and city agencies and private institutions seemed to me an obviously good idea. I was not so sure about federal marshalls and activist judges. As little as I liked the Governor of Alabama, it seemed an outrage that his own state militia should be used against him. In his defense of ordinary people and their communities, no matter how mean-spirited and cynical, Wallace was clearly on the right track, which just as clearly the rich and arrogant Kennedys were not. By all accounts, Wallace was a man of low character and few principles, but even the illusion of honesty may have been enough to get him shot. Why, by the way, are there conspiracy theories about the shootings of Lincoln, John Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, but not George Wallace?

I felt, then as now, that the best thing that government can do for us is to leave us alone to settle our problems by ourselves. Even in clear cases of right and wrong-rare enough in politics-there is an ancient principle that virtue cannot be coerced. The task for blacks and whites, in the North as well as in the South, was to work out ways of living together. The fulfillment of that task is still in the future. Not only did the civil rights movement succeed in thrusting a tyrannical national government upon school districts, businesses, and local governments, it also deliberately destroyed the then-existing networks of power in the black community. Older black leaders who knew how to deal with city governments were stigmatized as Uncle Toms, and even Roy Wilkins, head of the NAACP, was ridiculed for his decent manners and his willingness to seek accommodation. 

For white and black radicals alike, the 60’s and 70’s were a second Reconstruction, and the entirely predictable effects were the same in both cases. The fruits of the first Reconstruction of the 1860’s and 1870’s were Jim Crow laws, the Ku Klux Klan, and a corrosive legacy of bitterness that still lingers on the tongue as a sour aftertaste. The second Reconstruction of the 1960’s and 1970’s is only now abating, and what splendid triumphs we can record for it: the shambles, literally, we have made of our urban school systems, a black population that is not only reduced to what could be permanent peonage to the federal government but is also subject to high rates of violent crime (as perpetrators and victims), drug abuse, bastardy, and AIDS. 

The triumph is even greater, if we take into consideration the increased racial polarization that has afflicted the nation. Do not be fooled by polls or pieties. Racial attitudes are harder and meaner than they ever were. Most whites are more willing than ever to accept middle-class black neighbors and colleagues, but their basic reaction to poor blacks is fear, loathing, and resentment. Decent people generally did not tell race jokes in the old days, or if they did it was in the same social context that permitted off-color stories. Now it seems impossible to escape racial humor of the worst type, and what is worse, students tell them to their teachers, children to parents. o one wants to hear this, anymore than they want to hear about the competition between low-income blacks and Hispanic immigrants. Open-borders advocates like Julian Simon are heard denouncing all immigration restrictions on Third World countries as racist, but they are curiously silent on the depressing effect, of immigrant labor on black wages. Could this be “insensitivity”?

Our experiment in government-imposed civil rights has been an unmitigated disaster for everyone except the bureaucrats, social workers, and affirmative action appointees who are its principal beneficiaries. But we as a nation seem incapable of deriving any lessons from the experience, and we go on creating new minorities and inventing new civil rights as if we had not caused enough mischief already. Part of our failure to learn stems from our collective refusal to recognize what we have done. We still talk about progress in civil rights and devote whole seasons to the Reverend Mr. King. We celebrate the election of each master of chicanery who rides a tide of 99 percent black voters into a mayor’s office and tell ourselves things are getting better. Even among conservatives one hears this humbug language of democratic progress from the “I think I can” wing of the Republican Party. 

But the problem goes deeper than mere self-deception. Many Americans, and nearly all of our leaders, really want to believe that government exists to solve problems, that given the right sort of regime any people will live in peace and plenty and govern themselves by Robert’s Rules of Order. This faith in good government as the solution underlies the optimism with which we have greeted the recent upheaval in Eastern Europe. One wishes these people nothing but the best, it goes without saying, and one cannot help admiring the dignity with which Vaclav Havel has conducted his campaign in Czechoslovakia, but it will be a long time before we can speak confidently of anything like democracy in Bulgaria or even Poland. 

Because, as every American ought to know, democracy in America was not something created by our Constitution or even our independence. We had acquired the habits of self-government the only way they can be acquired: by painful experience. The brilliance of the Constitution and of the Federalist consists in their recognition of how Americans lived and, outside places like New York and Washington, continue to live. 

Those habits of self-reliance, voluntarism, and local government are largely absent from Eastern Europe, as they have been largely absent from even Western European countries, including Sweden. From all that one can gather, recent events have moved these oppressed peoples in the direction of consumerist social democracy on the Swedish plan, and if that is what they mean by “democracy,” then even communism -with its unrealizable dreams of a just social order-seems preferable. 

Responsible self-government, as the Greeks understood it and as Americans have understood it, is not something that can be created by a revolution. The French and the Russians both tried and failed miserably. Democracy in this sense is an affair of the heart; it is the willingness to trust people to make their own mistakes. I strenuously object to gun control and would not live in a town that had outlawed handguns, but if the scatter-brained liberals in a Chicago suburb want to run such risks, who am I to stand in their way? The NRA, it seems to me, is entirely wrong in introducing the Second Amendment into the debate. The Bill of Rights was never meant to bind the states, much less local governments, and we are forced to use the Supreme Court’s despotic interpretations of the Fourteenth Amendment if we wish to apply the guarantees of free speech and the right to bear arms to anything but the national government. 

I am fond of quoting Sam Ervin’s observation, that “the Constitution gives every man the right to make a damn fool of himself.” It is a dictum that can be applied to communities as well as to individuals. The virtue of a government lies not so much in what it does as what it does not do, or as Tacitus summed it up, “omnia scire, non omnia exsequi“: to know everything, but not to follow up on it. Give us Lincoln’s government of the people by all means and even government by the people, but from government for the people, from government that compels us to act out some other man’s fantasy of the just life, good Lord deliver us.