A Mencken Log

right-to-work laws. No mention will be made of court decisions opposed to a dialectic thesis; judicial opinions supporting the rights of restaurant owners as opposed to the privileges of “sit-inners” will not even be treated in footnotes. It is the end that counts; never mind the means: The Fourteenth Amendment “may or may not have been conceived and begotten in constitutional sin”—Professor Konvitz does not care. Disagreement is banished: A privately owned restaurant is “obviously” not a place where a property owner may assert his racial prejudices. Mr. Justice Harlan will be praised for his dissent in Plessy (1896), but Mr. Justice Harlan’s opinion in Cummings (1899) will not be touched at all.

Happily, the First Amendment still protects a man’s right to write books that are biased, prejudiced, and filled with discrimination, and to trot them forth under the saddle blankets of the Columbia University Press as works of objective scholarship. The Liberal authors of this volume have abundantly exercised this right; and they have abused it, too.

JC

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John Abbot Clark

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right-to-work laws. No mention will be made of court decisions opposed to a dialectic thesis; judicial opinions supporting the rights of restaurant owners as opposed to the privileges of “sit-inners” will not even be treated in footnotes. It is the end that counts; never mind the means: The Fourteenth Amendment “may or may not have been conceived and begotten in constitutional sin”—Professor Konvitz does not care. Disagreement is banished: A privately owned restaurant is “obviously” not a place where a property owner may assert his racial prejudices. Mr. Justice Harlan will be praised for his dissent in Plessy (1896), but Mr. Justice Harlan’s opinion in Cummings (1899) will not be touched at all.

Happily, the First Amendment still protects a man’s right to write books that are biased, prejudiced, and filled with discrimination, and to trot them forth under the saddle blankets of the Columbia University Press as works of objective scholarship. The Liberal authors of this volume have abundantly exercised this right; and they have abused it, too.