Introduce our speaker for this evening. Professor allen guelzo. Professor guelzo is a teacher, hes a professor, and he is one of the leading historians in a variety of disciplines, early american history, religion, and cultural history. But he is, perhaps, best known as one of the most prolific and important historians of the american civil war. And, of course, Abraham Lincoln. Hes received numerous prestigious awards including the lincoln prize, the Abraham LincolnInstitute Book prize, and he authors regularly a number of articles that are published in leading newspapers, usa today, the wall street journal, Washington Post and hes featured regularly on television and radio programs such as nprs weekend edition. He is the henry luse professor of civil war era at Gettysburg College where he serves as director of the civil war era studies program. However, he is on sabbatical from gettyburgs college this year and serves as the william g garwood visiting professor in the James Madison program of american ideals and institutions at Princeton University. You can learn more about allens work either by visiting his website, allenguelzo. Com, but perhaps most importantly, allen is a regular speaker at the union league of philadelphia and for the Abraham Lincoln foundation. He is also a member of the union league of philadelphia. So, please join me in welcoming our distinguished speaker, dr. Allen guelzo. [ applause ] what a pleasure it is to be introduced by joan carter. Always the most gracious of introducers. And to be invited to speak in this series which memorializes jack templeton, whom i remember as both a physician and a friend. So, there is privilege on all points to be enjoyed as participating in this series. What we know today as the First Amendment to the federal constitution originally appeared in the form of a resolution, attached by the Virginia State ratifying convention to its approval of the new constitution in june of 1788. That resolution declared that the free exercise of religious worship cannot be canceled, abridged, restrained, or modified by the new congress which was being created by the constitution. Nor can any other essential rights among which were listed, the liberty of conscience and of the press. This resolution was taken up by James Madison and then rewritten and adopted by the senate in september of 1789 and finally ratified by the states on march 1st, 1792, in this form. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. Madison was confident that the freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment were the source for all the triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity over error and oppression. Even so, there were frequent backslidings in american political life. Starting with the alien and sedition acts in 1798 which attempted to criminalize seditious libels uttered about president john adam and that was followed by mob assaults on political speakers in the streets of new york and baltimore in 1804, in 1810, in 1811 and 1815. In 1835, alone, there were 147 political riots in the United States, leading to the deaths of 63 people. A riot, in fact, in alton, illinois, in 1837 ended in the death of the abolitionist editor, elijah lovejoy, and prompted the first great political speech of the up and coming illinois lawyer, Abraham Lincoln. Not until after the First World War did the u. S. Supreme Court Finally and unambiguously declare the triumph of madisons doctrine, saying in abrams versus United States that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market. And not the action of a mob of the sanction of a magistrate. And yet, nearly 250 years after James Madison hailed the First Amendment as the triumph of reason and humanity, we once more find argument after argument being deployed and especially in University Environments to overthrow that triumph and silence free speech. But this overthrow comes not in the old guise of brute tyrannical force but in the new clothing of cultural sensitivity. And it involves an argument against free speech which arrives in two stages. That first of all, culture is distinct from the political, and, therefore, does not enjoy the protections of free speech and that all political speech is really cultural and so no speech deserves protection. Let me give you some examples. In her Constitution Day lecture at Princeton University on september 20th, carolyn rouse, the chair of princetons anthropology department, dismissed any idea of an absolute liberty for free speech. After all, rouse argued, nowhere are people allowed to say whatever yay want in any context with no social, economic, legal or political repercussions. There are, in other words, some varieties of speech that nobody tries to invoke the First Amendment to protect. What then does rouse believes serves to distinguish the speech that does from the speech that doesnt deserve the shield of the First Amendment . Rouses answer is, culture. Culture, she says, is what helps us determine the appropriateness of speech by balancing our rights as enshrined in the constitution with understandings of context. And in a commonplace way, this seems to be true. Since no one suggests that cultural vulgarity or profanity or simple bad manners are things that the First Amendment is designed to protect. The problem is that by culture, rouse does not actually mean inhibitions on vulgarities or bad manners. What she calls culture is, in fact, politics. Only now by calling it culture, she no longer considers herself guilty of suppressing speech protected by the First Amendment. A Climate Change skeptic, she explained, is not actually a political dissident, but an offender against a received culture, and as such has no right to make claims about Climate Change as if all the science discovered over the last x number of centuries were irrelevant. And not just Climate Change. In december 2016, rouse organized a walkout by students on a lecture at princeton by sociologist Charles Murray, charging in a flier that murray represented the normalization of ra racism and classism in academia. This is the same Charles Murray who enthwas then shouted down a physically attacked on march 2nd by student activists at Middlebury College who were also offended by murrays departures from their culture. In a even more sensationen confrontation on may 23rd, authorities refused to protect biology professor Brett Weinstein from physical threat by angry student activists after weinstein questioned the wisdom of a day of racial absence that excluded white students from the evergreen state campus. In a foreshadowing of rouses Constitution Day rationalization, the evergreen state activists insisted that weinsteins questioning violated the norms of evergreens cult e culture. He has incited White Supremacists and he has validated White Supremacists and nazis in our community and in the nation, complained one activist, and i dont think that should be protected by free speech. By redefining political speech as culture, the speech silencers are allowed to claim that your speech is not really political. Instead, it is offensive or threatening to my whiteness or blackness or gender or values. And is, therefore, outside the protections afforded to political speech. We may laugh at this as yet another example of the old shell game, in which political censorship is simply called by another name. Nevertheless, shell game or not, this is why the numbers of University Students who told a Brookings Institute survey that they do not believe the First Amendment protects offense if speech, now outnumber those. Who believe that it does by 44 to 39 . And why fully a fifth of those students believe it is acceptable to inflict physical harm on those who are deemed to have made offensive and hurtful statements. Because its all culture, not politics. Even though it isnt. So what James Madison worked to attain in the name of reason and humanity now yields the dictatorship of politics masquerading as culture. As though the nation and its institutions were a tribe rather than a republic. Any unapproved remark understood as a defection from an established cultural order. There may be some relief in realizing the attacks on free speech in the name of cultural have a history of their own. A history which from time to time gained add measure of temporary credibility only to have its underlying foley pull it back out to sea. The puritans of Massachusetts Bay were confident enough of their culture to insist that any deviation from it was simply a departure fromming ing accepted. Among the true believers who needed no further truth. He that is willing to tolerate any religion, wrote nathanial ward in 1647, or discrepe pant way of religion, unless it be in matters merely indifferent, either doubts of his own or is not din sere enougsincere enoug. Supporters of the alien and sedition acts were no less confident. Likewise felt no need to learn anything from what they regarded as palpable error. Truth has but one side, and listening to error and falsehood is, indeed, a strange way to discover truth, wrote the pennsylvania lawyer, alexander addison. In what might have passed for a parody of rouses princeton lecture. Contempt and fear of free political speech were also the principle characteristics of american slaverys defenders who also believed that they represented a cultural of sorts based this time on race. In 1835, postmaster general amus kendall yielded to demands by slave holders to censor abolitionist materials from the u. S. Mail. And justified his decision by appealing to Cultural Values over political liberty. We owe an obligation to the laws kendall said but a higher one to the community in which we live. And if the former be perverted so as to destroy the latter, it is patriotism to disregard them. So what we deal with today in the confusion of politics and culture as an excuse for suppressing speech is not new, but todays culture despisers of free speech are not merely victims of a semantic confusion of culture and politics. And this is what leads to the second stage of this new strategy of overthrow. A second stage which says that there is nothing which is legitimately political anymore, that all political speech really is cultural, and thus, can be severely regulated without any reference to the First Amendment. In it fact, the First Amendment becomes a dead letter. The genealogy of this second stage is long and begins with carl marks or rather with the italian marxist antonio gramsky. Gramsky believes marks missed an important detail in describing how the working class should one fine day overthrow the capitalist ruling class marx described the working class as oppressed by the political and economic power of the european ruling classes. Gramsky, whoufr, beliehowever, was worse by that. The working class is suppressed by the political and economic power of the european ruling classes but by rulingclass culture which entices and persuades the working class to adopt the culture value and attitudes of their rulers. Political revolution, therefore, would have to be about the overthrow of that culture. First. Gramskeis ideas, among the new left in the 1960s. Under the plea of free speech, complained Herbert Marcuza of the new left, tolerance is expended to policies, conditions, and modes of behavior which should not be tolerated because the tolerance expressed in such impartiality serves to minimize or even absolve prevailing intolerance and suppression. This is practically indistinguishable from the plea of ward and addison and kendall, but it reclosed that plea in the more appealing garb of the oppressed and disadvantaged. The idea that all political speech really is cultural does, however, allow us to see a bright line connecting the attacks on free speech with the craze for monument removals that began in may in new orleans and has peaked since the Charlottesville Riot in august. On one level, rage against monuments may seem like an exercise in purely cultural criticism, especially if the monuments are examples of bad taste. Think of the rocky statue on the steps of the museum of art. But in in the world of marxist ideology after gramscei, culture absorbs politics. Hence, the confederate statues in new orleans and charlottesville which have been of the eye of the storm can not be merely statues or merely cultural artifacts in the sense of the word, culture. Confederate memorial on these terms were never and are never less than what one fervent professor at the university of North Carolina described as a campaign to paint the southern cause in the civil war as just and slavery as a Benevolent Institution and made a very pointed statement about the rule of white supremacy. No, actually, the monuments didnt do that. Actually, it was the laws of the jim crow era that did that. No one has yet shown that general lee descended from his monumental horse in charlottesville to burn crosses along the blue ridge at night. What is cultural only becomes literally threatening and what is offensive only becomes literally lethal when it is translated into regulations. By the same token, however, removals of offensive speakers or offensive public art become more than merely sympathetic and pitying responses to bad taste. They are a practical and aggressive strategy under the cover of appeals to cultural offense, for suppressing political disagreement. And since the goal of the dissent is the destabilization of a political order, it should come as no surprise that the cultural rage of the Confederate Monument activists often shades over into furious condemnations of the entirety of american history. It is not merely confederate generals who have become targets. Christchurch in alexandria, virginia, decided last month to remove the plaque marking the pew once occupied by George Washington because it might make some visitors feel unsafe or unwelcome. Student activists at the university of wisconsin at madison campaigned in 2016 to decolonize our campus around a statue of Abraham Lincoln, which was deemed belittling because lincoln, according to one of the organizers, owned slaves and ordered the execution of native men. Nor is it likely to stop even with american history. In may as the new orleans confederate statues were being brought down, even a statue of joan of arc was spray painted with tear it down. Joan of arc . This is to cloud understanding with words. It is to perform what miwas cald a moral inversion. An intellectual juggling act in which we invoke the language of cultural offense as a stratagen for silencing political dissent. Do not be deceived. Culture is culture and politics is politics, and we are in deep trouble when one absorbs the other. But let us not be simplistic. Carolyn rouse is certainly correct in one respect. Culture does influence speech. There is some speech which is rude and some which is foolish, and Cultural Values encourage borish people to censor their rudeness and their foolishness. Even Oliver Wendell holmes, the author of the abrams decision, recognized the serious public harm that can result from someone falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic. What rouse ignores is culture and politics really are two different quantities. Cultural inhibitions are vague and consensible and easily liable to shifting. Politics is about laws which involves crimes and punishments and which take time to implement and time to repeal. Again, cultural becomes lethal only when power is invoked to terminate the competition for cultural expression. Rouse is also correct to say that there are different arenas of speech. In the private sphere, one person can tell another person to stop gossiping or to stop demanding that the umpire be killed without that being a trespass on the First Amendment. While in the public sphere, a different standard applies. The problem rouse does not address is that the lines separating the private sphere where the First Amendment may not operate and the public where it does, is not always clear. For instance, rouse believes that hate speech has no place in the university because it violates the culture of the university. And she also believes that the university can act to suppress such hate speech without violating the First Amendment because the university operates within the private sphere. And can thus live by its own private rules. But the idea that the university as a private enclave th