Pink suits, golf balls and civil liberties

From a speech given at Maret School, Washington DC, in 2006

Sam Smith - As I watched our graduation ceremony, my mind drifted back to the first meeting I attended at Maret. The speaker was the headmaster, Peter Sturdevant, an amalgam of Orson Welles and Rodney Dangerfield. He lumbered up to the stage and leaned into the microphone and began to speak. His first words to the new parents were these:

“Maret doesn’t have a dress code . . . Let me tell you why Maret doesn’t have a dress code. I used to teach at the Landon School. One day the headmaster sent us a memo saying that the boys could not wear tight jeans . . . Some of us in the faculty sent him one back in which we asked, ‘How do you define tight jeans?’ He replied that tight jeans were those where a golf ball could not be dropped between the waistband and the body and have it fall out at the ankle. We wrote back: “An English or an American golf ball?” . . . That’s why Maret doesn’t have a dress code.”

Part of America’s long struggle over civil liberties can be described as being between those who favor the pink suit principle and those who prefer the golf ball rule. Since I suppose some teachers would prefer I use a more elegant metaphor, let me also cite David Hackett Fisher who, in the book Albion’s Seed, describes the differences in four strains of early American settlement from the British isles. In the matter of civil liberties he notes that in New England, freedom was defined by the community. As long as you played by the community’s rules you were free. If you didn’t you either suffered punishment or, like Roger Williams, had to leave town and go found your own colony. 

In the frontier communities, Fisher notes that there was a sense of natural liberty – or what we might call libertarianism. It was personal freedom taken as far as possible. This spirit is still at home in much of America and tends to be conservative in economics and progressive in personal liberty. And you’re theoretically so free that the government isn’t meant to help you get out of trouble.

The third view of liberty – what Fisher calls hegemonic liberty – is based on power. This was found among the elite of early Virginia where the more power you had the more freedom you got. If you were a slave you had no freedom, if you were a tradesman you had more, but if you were a cavalier you had virtually unlimited liberty. This is the idea of liberty that we see with increasing frequency today at the top levels of business, sports, entertainment, and politics. Again, drawing a political division doesn’t really help. For example, both Bill Clinton and George Bush considered their power as a license of liberty in ways that the more restrained Jimmy Carter and Dwight Eisenhower never would have.

Finally, in the mid-Atlantic states, with no small help from the Quaker influence, you found what can be called a sense of reciprocal liberty, which is to say that I can’t be really free unless you are as well. You are entitled to your freedom as long as it doesn’t hurt mine. Thus, we must constantly negotiate the terms of our mutual freedoms.

Note that two of these forms of liberty – that defined by the community and that which is the privilege of power – are inherently unequal while other two strive for equality. And guess which two predominate in America today?

Sadly, the weakest form is reciprocal liberty. Both left and right seem to have forgotten that America is about sharing spaces with others who may have quite different views of the world. While writing one of my books, I asked my friend, the black journalist Chuck Stone, to give me a one sentence description of how to get along with people who are different than yourself and he immediately replied, “Treat them as a member of the family.”

Being the third of six kids, I appreciated that. And I recalled my father saying from time to time, “You don’t have to like your relatives, you just have to be nice to them.” It works for other Americans, too.  MORE