To the Editors of the Crimson:

The notion of defending to the death the rights of swine to swinish, so long as they keep it verbal, is a notion which did very well for the period of English quietism in which it was most popular, but in rough times like the present it is too often an excuse for nonparticipation in public life. The common-garden myth of toleration goes about like this: permitted to express themselves, "extremists" "blow off steam," and are consequently less dangerous; the "extremes" neutralize each other in some way and serve as a means of locating the current Middle Ground, where the commonsensical common man will always ultimately take his stand. The trouble is that certain fascist "extremes" have lately had a curious way of coming to power and hence locally ceasing to be extremes. Liberal Germans have testified that they found the early Hitler quite the same sort of unpromising lowbrow crank as the Crimson evidently imagines Gerald Smith to be. Well, the Reverend Smith is not even now an ineffectual angel; he is held by many, and with reason, to have been the main organizer of the wartime Detroit race-riot. This would suggest that there is a nonacademic quality to Smith's oratory, that his propagation of racial and religious hatreds is closely allied to non-verbal political activity, that a speech by Gerald Smith might safely be defined in advance as incitation to violence. But Americans are rightly averse to any abridgement of the Bill of Rights; we had rather stretch the point and let Smith hire a ball, than set a precedent of suppression from which worthier minority voices might suffer. Smith may hire the Old South Meeting House, then: but any man who hires a hall is taking a stand, as your editorialist puts it, in "the marketplace of political discussion." We are all in that marketplace; there is a certain physical distance between Cambridge and the Old South, but we hear such a man as Gerald Smith nonetheless, unless we are stone deaf. The man needed answering last Sunday, and since Smith's writings and speeches are uniformly studded with such phrases as "to hell with democracy" and "when chaos comes, I will be the leader," it was quite reasonable that he be answered before he spoke at all. The Crimson editorialist fails altogether to grapple with the main question raised by the outshouting of Smith, which is: is it a denial of free speech for the audience to be rather louder than the man who is addressing it? Precedent is altogether in favor of the right to boo; hissing-down is a hoary Parliamentary tradition; if it appears indecorous, not cricket, or "rowdy," as your editorialist put it, pray recall that generations of English Lords have been experts at all manner of sibilances and razzberries. The demonstration was not really rowdy anyway: it was incredibly well-organized, although motivated by genuine indignation: nobody got hit; nobody said anything stronger than "drat." It is not true that the "zealots," as you call them (we imagine you are probably against "hysteria," too), played into Smith's hands and gave him good publicity; it would seem on the contrary that the occasion proved that there are at least 700 people in the Boston Area--who won't stand for Jew-baiting, Negro-baiting and the rest of Smith's bag of tricks, and this ought to be good news. The only people who have played into Smith's hands are such members of the national and collegiate press as have encouraged the untruth that the resistance to Smith was disorderly and primarily Communist. If Communists were among the demonstrators, good for them. It all went like water-music, and the singing of the National Anthem at the end was not merely for publicity. Richard Wilbur   Andre du Bouchet   Thomas W. Wilcox   William B. Whiteside