An Inquiry for Dr. Kanelos Part 2: George Bush Chastises Michigan

One week later, if anyone asks, I am continuing the research I started in a previous post. In that post, I looked at Dr. Pano Kanelos's announcement of the new University of Austin and his hope that historians would investigate how universities have come to be bastions of intolerance and conformity rather than open inquiry. I challenged the evidence he used to argue that this was indeed the case, and proposed instead that his idea is largely a fiction, but one that seems widely believed. Being unable to investigate something that is not the case, instead I will be looking at how the media narrative of political correctness came to be and then came to dominate so much political discourse. Rather than answer this question completely in one post, I'll be breaking it up over several. This is in part because there is a lot of evidence to consider and I don't want to write a book (here). This is also in part because the time it will take to find, assess, and evaluate every source is far longer than I want to wait to follow up on my initial post.1

We will start with a speech that then-President George H.W. Bush gave to the University of Michigan in 1991. In his speech, Bush attacked what he called political correctness. As the Baltimore Sun reported:

The president attacked what he called the “notion of 'political correctness,' ” saying it had led to “inquisition,” “censorship” and “bullying” on some college campuses. “Ironically, on the 200th anniversary of our Bill of Rights, we find free speech under assault throughout the United States, including on some college campuses,” Mr. Bush told 8,300 graduates and more than 55,000 others gathered in the University of Michigan football stadium. “The notion of 'political correctness' has ignited controversy across the land,” he said. “And although the movement arises from the laudable desire to sweep away the debris of racism, sexism and hatred, it replaces old prejudices with new ones. “It declares certain topics off-limits, certain expressions off-limits, even certain gestures off-limits. What began as a cause for civility has soured into a cause of conflict and even censorship.” Mr. Bush's speech, his first on an issue that has divided campuses around the nation, reflected the influence of his new head speech writer, Anthony Snow, a former editorial writer for the Washington Times, who was hired to bring a harder edge and ideological spirit to the president's speeches as he moves toward the 1992 election. White House officials said it fit into a pattern of presidential positions on civil rights. For instance, in opposing the congressional measure that would have made it easier to sue employers for job discrimination, Mr. Bush said the government should fight bigotry but not if that meant court-imposed quotas for women and minority members. At Michigan yesterday, Mr. Bush said that Americans should be alarmed at the rise of intolerance and bigotry but that they should also be alarmed at the “growing tendency to use intimidation rather than reason in settling disputes.”

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Much of what the President said will be familiar lines of attack: political correctness has a good goal, but a bad execution; political correctness is censorship; political correctness is stifling discussion and expression on college campuses; political correctness is “intimidation” and eschews “reason.” Also familiar should be that attacks on the discourse of “political correctness” coincides with reactionary laws. Not only women and minorities were affected by such legal changes, however. In the same speech, Bush also attacked President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs targeting assistance to those in poverty.

The hypocrisy of attacking political correctness for threatening free speech while simultaneously seeking to restrict free speech is quite plain as well. As the article notes, President Bush had proposed a constitutional amendment seeking to outlaw the burning of the American flag. This proposal was made to circumvent the Supreme Court ruling in Texas v. Johnson. In that ruling, the Court declared that the burning of the American flag as political expression is protected speech under the First Amendment.3 Bush, with strong support in Congress, passed a law meant to get around this ruling, but it too was struck down.4 His support for a constitutional amendment, which would render the ruling void, was, nonetheless, criticized. One such critic was Democrat Ted Weiss of New York, who said, “In the 200 years since the adoption of the Bill of Rights, the Constitution has been amended only 16 times, mostly to expand our rights. It would be tragically ironic if in this year of its celebration, we were to adopt an amendment weakening the Bill of Rights,” Weiss said. “We have nothing to fear from the flag burners. We have a great deal to fear from those who have lost faith in the Constitution.”5 You'll note the nearly identical invocation between Bush's “200th anniversary of our Bill of Rights,” and Weiss' “In the 200 years since the adoption of the Bill of Rights.” Now with the bicentennial in 1991, I'm sure this language was commonplace, but nonetheless Bush not only hypocritically invoked the First Amendment after stomping on it just two years prior, he did so using similar language to that with which he was critiqued.

Bush expressed anti-free speech sentiments on more than just this one occasion. During his 1988 campaign, he attacked his opponent Democrat Michael Dukakis for being a member of the American Civil Liberties Union, an organization which was founded to protect free speech rights during World War I, specifically citing the group's defense of flag burning as legal political expression.6 He further attacked Dukakis for vetoing legislation that would have mandated the saying of the Pledge of Allegiance in schools, a law which, if enacted, would have been unconstitutional under Barnette v. West Virginia.7 Indeed, he made the Pledge of Allegiance a central campaign issue.