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Big-Brain Nit-Pickers or Walt Whitman?

By Bradley R. Smith ∙ February 28, 1993

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The Eagle is the student newspaper at American University, a private institution in Washington. The Eagle, a weekly, has a circulation of 10,000.

In the 28 January issue we ran a one-column, four-inch advertisement for Arthur Butz's Hoax of the Twentieth Century. I paid up front for the ad to run for five weeks and intended for it to run on through April when the Holocaust Memorial Museum will open on the Washington mall. When the ad ran the first time, the backlash from The Lobby was so strong that the paper refused to run it a second time.

Contrary to last year, when advertising and editorial staffs thought they had an obligation to print CODOH ads on First Amendment grounds, this year it's different. Students and administrations both have been convinced that they should attend to the letter of the First Amendment but not its spirit.

I go at it the other way. My character is Whitmanesque. Whitman was queer, but he wrote a good book anyhow. A lot of my cultural heroes walked the crooked line. Whitman said his words mean nothing while the drift of them means everything. That's how I read the First Amendment. We all know what it really means. Even the Hillel rabbis.

  • Bradley R. Smith

    Bradley R. Smith was born in Los Angeles on February 18, 1930. At 18 he joined the army and in 1951 served with the infantry in Korea where he was twice wounded. After three decades of a variety of professional activities, it suddenly hit him: In 1979 he read a leaflet by Professor Robert Faurisson, "The Problem of the Gas Chambers." Then, Arthur Butz’s The Hoax of the Twentieth Century did it for him. He understood from the beginning that he would address the censorship, the suppression of independent thought, the taboo against publishing and debating revisionist arguments—not the arguments themselves. That has remained his position. In 1989, Smith founded Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH) dedicated to defending free speech and free inquiry into the Holocaust question. He handed over CODOH's helm in late 2014. He passed away on his 86th birthday, February 18, 2016. Read a series of obituaries here.

Bibliographic information about this document: Smith's Report, no. 13, January/February 1993, p. 5
Other contributors to this document: n/a
Editor’s comments: n/a

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