Kilpatrick – “Our Man at the Golliwog Lounge”

James J. Kilpatrick, “Our Man at the Golliwog Lounge”

National
Review, Spring, 1966, reporting on the Second National Meeting of The
Philadelphia Society, March 4-5, 1996.

“This year the Society’s theme was the civil rights
issue, and chiefly its economic implications.
The whole meeting would have been worthwhile if only to hear Chicago’s
diminutive Milton Friedman, his bald head nesting on the rostrum like a Chase
Manhattan egg, scolding his fellow conservatives: ëWe should have seized the
civil rights issue ten years ago.” His
point was that conservatives, arriving belatedly at the battle, now have a much
harder task of convincing the American Negro that the voluntary, pluralistic
society is his best hope—that coercive laws designed to impose economic
interventionism on the market place will not help the Negro.
They will hurt him.

Dr. W.H. Hutt, of the University of Capetown, a
silver-haired, leathery veteran of 38 years in South Africa, sounded the same
theme in a brilliant impromptu address Friday night.
He opposes the coercions of apartheid as passionately
as he believes in the freedoms of the market place.
Here, in the economic sphere, he insists, South Africa must
find an answer. And American
conservatives have the same opportunity to resolve the race problem here.

This was also the theme of Benjamin A. Rogge, of Wabash
College, whose dispassionate paper on Saturday afternoon was perhaps the best of
the lot. By Southern definitions,
Rogge, in the awful word, is an ëintegrationist.”
He has only contempt for the coercion of segregation.
Yet he brilliantly developed the argument that the principal instruments
of the welfare state are designed not to life up the Negro, but to hold him
down. Behold the stark tragedy, he
remarked: The innocent Negro picketing for a $2 minimum wage.
On the grim record, the alliance of the Negro with organized labor has
proved a disaster to the Negro; and this must continue to prove a disaster to
him, so long as it results in laws that fail to penalize those merchants and
employers who act upon their prejudices. Such
programs as rent control, he observed, have the ironical effect of depriving the
prejudiced property owner of the penalties of discrimination; the pervasive
influence of organized labor has deprived the Negro of the opportunity to move
into skilled trades; and such catchword enthusiasms as urban renewal have
resulted chiefly in Negro removal. If
the free market were permitted to operate color-blind, and if the poor were
helped simply as the poor and not as the Negro poor, and if the Negro were set
free to sell his labor and to buy his needs without the blighting oppressions of
his benefactors—so Rogge developed his theme, in the provocative discourse of
a man who has sought the truth the hard way.
And it was good to hear him.

Roger A. Freeman of Stanford had developed this theme also,
and James W. Wiggins of Converse College and Nutter himself.
But the moral and legal implications of ëcivil rights” had not been
neglected. For a quiet hour, J.V.
Langmead Casserley, of Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, had dwelt upon the
ethical aspects of the problem; and Ernest van den Haag, of New York University,
had expounded the intricate anti-theses of the freedom to associate and the
freedom not to associate; and Harry Jaffa of Claremont had compelled a fresh
consideration of the civil disobedience.”