IF MOB RULE TAKES HOLD IN THE UNITED STATES

RICHARD NIXON U.S. News and World Report, 1966

Former Vice President Richard Nixon set out in 1966 to recapture the Republican nomination for president in 1968. Nixon had lost a razor-thin election to John Kennedy in 1960 and watched Barry Goldwater lose overwhelmingly to Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Considered finished in American politics after losing the race for governor of California in 1 962, Nixon would ultimately triumph. Part of his revived viability came from the harsh "law and order" positions he took. While appearing to take the high ground against "mob rule " Nixon's words were subtly coded appeals to those fearful of student and minority unrest.

The recent riots in Chicago, Cleveland, New York and Omaha have produced in the public dialogue too much heat and very little light. The extremists have held the floor for too long.

One extreme sees a simple remedy for rioting in a ruthless application of the truncheons and an earlier call to the National Guard.

The other extremists are more articulate, but their position is equally simplistic. To them, riots are to be excused upon the grounds that the participants have legitimate social grievances or seek justifiable social goals.

I believe it would be a grave mistake to charge off the recent riots to unredressed Negro grievances alone.

To do so is to ignore a prime reason and a major national problem: the deterioration of respect for the rule of law all across America.

That deterioration can be traced directly to the spread of the corrosive doctrine that every citizen possesses an inherent right to decide for himself which laws to disobey and when to disobey them.

The doctrine has become a contagious national disease, and its symptoms are manifest in more than just racial violence. We see them in the contempt among many of the young for the agents of the law-the police, We see them in the public burning of draft cards and the blocking of troop trains.

We saw those symptoms when citizens in Chicago took to the streets to block public commerce to force the firing of a city official. We saw them on a campus of the University of California, where students brought a great university to its knees in protest of the policies of its administration.

Who is responsible for the breakdown of law and order in this country? I think it both an injustice and oversimplification to lay blame at the feet of the sidewalk demagogues alone. For such a deterioration of respect for law to occur in so brief a time in so great a nation, we must look to more important collaborators and auxiliaries.

It is my belief that the seeds of civil anarchy would never have taken root in this nation had they not been nurtured by scores of respected Americans: public officials, educators, clergymen and civil rights leaders as well.

When the Junior Senator from New York (Robert Kennedy) publicly declares that "there is no point in telling Negroes to obey the law," because to the Negro "the law is the enemy," then he has provided a rationale and justification for every Negro intent upon taking the law into his own hands....

The polls still place the war in Vietnam and the rising cost of living as the major political issues of 1966. But, from my own trips across the nation, I can affirm that private conversations and public concern are increasingly focusing upon the issues of disrespect for law and race turmoil.

The agonies and indignities of urban slums are hard facts of life. Their elimination is properly among our highest national priorities, but within those slums, political phrases which are inflammatory are as wrong and dangerous as political promises which are irredeemable.

In this contest, men of intellectual and moral eminence who encourage public disobedience of the law are responsible for the acts of those who inevitably follow their counsel: the poor, the ignorant, and the impressionable.

Such leaders are most often men of good will who do not condone violence and, perhaps even now, see no relation between the civil disobedience which they counsel and the riots and violence which have erupted. Yet, once the decision is made that laws need not be obeyed-whatever the rationales contribution is made to a climate of lawlessness.

To the professor objecting to de facto segregation, it may be crystal clear where civil disobedience may begin and where it must end. But the boundaries have become fluid to his students. And today they are all but invisible in the urban slums.

In this nation we raise our young to respect the law and public authority. What becomes of those lessons when teachers and leaders of the young themselves deliberately and publicly violate the laws?

There is a crucial difference between lawful demonstration and protests on the one hand-and illegal demonstrations and "civil disobedience" on the other.

I think it is time the doctrine of civil disobedience was analyzed and rejected as not only wrong but potentially disastrous.

If all have a right to engage in public disobedience to protest real or imagined wrongs, then the example set by the minority today will be followed by the majority tomorrow.

Issues then will no longer be decided upon merit by an impartial judge. Victory will go to the side which can muster the greater number of demonstrations in the streets. The rule of law will be replaced by the rule of the mob. And one may be sure that the majority's mob will prevail.

From mob rule it is but a single step to lynch law and the termination of the rights of the minority. This is why it is so paradoxical today to see minority groups engaging in civil disobedience; their greatest defense is the rule of law....

Civil disobedience creates a climate of disrespect for law. In such a climate the first laws to be ignored will be social legislation that lacks universal public support. In short, if the rule of law goes, the civil-rights laws of recent vintage will be the first casualties.

Historic advances in civil rights have come through court decisions and federal laws in the last dozen years.

Only the acceptances of those laws and the voluntary compliance of the people can transfer those advances from the statute books into the fabric of community life.

If indifference to the rule of law permeates the community, there will be no voluntary acceptance. A law is only as good as the will of the people to obey it....

Across this nation today, civil disobedience and racial disorders are building up a wall of hate between the races which, while less visible, is no less real than the wall that divides freedom and slavery in the city of Berlin.... Continued racial violence and disorders in the cities of the nation will produce growing disenchantment with the cause of civil rights-even among its staunchest supporters.

It will encourage a disregard for civil rights laws and resistance to the legitimate demands of the Negro people.

Does anyone think that progress will be made in the hearts of men by riots and disobedience which trample Upon the rights of those same men? But then it is not enough to simply demand that all laws be obeyed?

Edmund Burke once wrote concerning loyalty to a nation that "to make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely." There is an analogy in a commitment to the rule of law. For a law to be respected, it ought to be worthy of respect. It must be fair and it must be fairly enforced.

It certainly did nothing to prevent a riot when Negroes in Chicago learned that while water hydrants in their own area were being shut down, they were running free in white neighborhoods just blocks away.

Respect for the dignity of every individual is absolutely essential if there is to be respect for law.

The most common and justifiable complaint of Negroes and members of other minority groups is not that their constitutional rights have been denied, but that their personal dignity is repeatedly insulted.

As an American citizen, the American Negro is entitled to equality of rights, under the Constitution and the law, with every other citizen in the land. But, as important as this, the Negro has the right to be treated with the basic dignity and respect that belong to him as a human being.

Advocates of civil disobedience contend that a man's conscience should determine which law is to be obeyed and when a law can be ignored. But, to many men, conscience is no more than the enshrinement of their own prejudices.... But if every man is to decide for himself which to obey and which to ignore, the end result is anarchy.

The way to make good laws is not to break bad laws, but to change bad laws through legitimate means of protest within the constitutional process.

In the last analysis, the nation simply can no longer tolerate men who are above the law. For, as Lincoln said, "There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law."