George Will and the Lester Maddox Question

George Will recently appeared on C-SPAN’s "In-Depth" series to discuss his writings. The Washington Post columnist commented while discussing his 1968 dissertation at Princeton, Beyond the Reach of Majorities: Closed Questions in the Open Society:

When you [Brian Lamb] and I were young people in college, it was an open question whether states had a right to force public accommodations – Lester Maddox’s Pickrick restaurant in Georgia – to take all comers…Well, 50 years later, that’s a stone, cold, dead, closed question, and aren’t we glad? That’s progress. In that sense, we’re less tolerant, but who cares?

First, an historical overview. Atlanta-native Lester Maddox was born in 1915 and opened a grill in 1944. He opened another restaurant, the Pickrick, in 1947. The Pickrick became popular and underwent several expansions, seating 400 people at its peak.

Only whites could eat at the Pickrick, though. This led to a conflict when Lyndon Johnson signed 1964 Civil Rights Act, Title II of which forces "public accommodations" to admit patrons regardless of race, religion, etc.

Maddox ejected blacks who attempted to eat at the Pickrick after Title II’s enactment. Rather than comply with Title II, Maddox closed the Pickrick.

Maddox responded when asked in 2000 if he regretted his position, "No, sir, I've never had a second thought about it. I still believe that constitutionally, without the right to private property, we can't be a free republic…Private property ought to belong to the people who own it." (Maddox also served as Georgia’s governor from 1967 to 1971.)

Will’s remarks about Maddox reiterate what he wrote in Statecraft as Soulcraft (1983):

One of the most defensible, indeed most unmixedly good, deeds of modern government was in taking away one of the rights Maddox valued most…The right he was exercising was a real right – an enforceable entitlement, and an old one: the right of a proprietor to restrict his custom. In many times and places the right was, and is, acceptable. But in the United States it had too often been exercised in a way that affronted an entire class of citizens. And in the United States in 1964 the right had become intolerably divisive. So Congress undertook a small but significant rearrangement of American rights. It diminished the rights of proprietors of public accommodations, and expanded those of potential users of those accommodations. In explaining why this rearrangement was necessary, Lyndon Johnson said it was because "a man has a right not to be insulted in front of his children"…Congress was coming to the conclusion that a right exercised meanly, with ugly consequences, should yield to another, better right.

Note that Maddox "affronted an entire class of citizens," as opposed to "aggressed against an entire class of citizens." Since when is a free society supposed to criminalize affronting people? (Shall Burger King now be indicted for affronting an entire class of citizens, i.e., vegetarians?)

The "better right" Wills mentions is a fiction. When people enter a restaurant or residence without the owner’s consent, it’s called trespassing.

This doesn’t mean every exercise of proprietary discretion is admirable. Owners can exclude obnoxiously, and that’s why boycotts exist.

But obnoxious isn’t synonymous with criminal, and tyranny begins when this differentiation dissolves.

Will often cites Thomas Jefferson in Statecraft as Soulcraft and elsewhere. Here’s what Jefferson had to say about political authority: "The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others." Not acts that affront others or are mean to others.

And even if one believes in coercing owners, the federal government wasn’t empowered to nationalize this policy, just as it isn’t empowered to nationalize policy on burglary or prostitution. As Jefferson wrote:

I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground: That "all powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States or to the people." [10^th Amendment] To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specifically drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition.

When Will cites Lyndon Johnson in defense of Title II, he implicitly recognizes Title II’s polarity from Jefferson’s vision. Indeed, to endorse Title II necessitates the coarsening of the historical sense (to use a Will-esque phrase).

Lester Maddox’s policy may have been lousy, but his premise remains indispensable: Private property is the oxygen of freedom, and with its diminishment so diminishes freedom.

November 14, 2002

Myles Kantor [send him mail] is a columnist for FrontPageMagazine.com and president of the Center for Free Emigration, which agrees with Frederick Douglass that "It is a fundamental truth that every man is the rightful owner of his own body."

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