Free Speech For Me - But Not For Thee: How The American Left and Right Relentlessly Censor Each Other.

• Author: Hazlett, Thomas W.

When it comes to literary censorship, Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, published in 1884, is probably the American heavyweight champion. In its early days it was banned by prudes offended by its vulgarity. In 1885 the Concord, Massachusetts, public library expunged the book, calling it the "veriest trash," and in 1902 the Denver public library did likewise, decrying it as "immoral and sacrilegious." In modern times, politically correct Americans have been outraged by Twain's novel, which employs the term nigger some 300 times. New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois, banished the tome in 1976 upon finding that it was "degrading and destructive to black humanity." The book now faces virtually constant attack from do-gooders across the fruited plain.

Left, right, and center, Americans have not been shy about censorship. Yet under whatever banner, book burning is itself offensive and insensitive to the values of a free people. As Nat Hentoff tirelessly details in his brilliantly argued, documented, and written book, Free Speech for Me--But Not for Thee, neither does censorship do justice to those it purports to protect. The black school children who are spared the jarring confrontation with Huck's friend, Nigger Jim, will be less well-armed to surmount the travails of racism in real life. In fact, the censors generally seem to miss the whole point.

With Huckleberry Finn, the speech regulators miss the mark by an incredible margin: Twain's aim was to ridicule racism. And not just with some sterile, academic diatribe, or with some drippy account of victimization, but from the perspective of a white boy who figures out the stupidity of bigotry all on his own. Hentoff quotes Russell Baker's description of Huckleberry Finn's moral: "The people |Huck and Jim~ encounter are drunkards, murderers, bullies, swindlers, lynchers, thieves, liars, frauds, child abusers, numb-skulls, hypocrites, windbags and traders in human flesh. All are white. The one man of honor in this phantasmagoria is black Jim, the runaway slave. 'Nigger Jim,' as Twain called him to emphasize the irony of a society in which the only true gentleman was held beneath contempt."

Ah, good point, Mr. Twain. But just a tad insensitive for our young scholars, don't you think? OK, maybe it's not a bad book; Ernest Hemingway did say that "all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn." But that word nigger is so hurtful! The black parents object...