Speech Is Costly, but Worthwhile

"The Privilege of The Grave"

by Mark Twain

as published in The New Yorker, December 22 & 29, 2008

Comments by Nate Segal

. . . there is hardly one of us but would dearly like to reveal these secrets of ours [certain views not suspected by his little world]; we know we cannot do it in life . . .

Mark Twain

I learned from our late parents to speak my mind freely, but I also learned some prices they paid.

Dad argued out loud, even with those who weren't interested, that the Cuban Revolution was good for the Cuban people. Overall, Cuba's elites – and American elites – exploited ordinary Cubans to the point of grinding poverty, he argued.

Our father was not afraid of Marxism in the third world. He seems to have not anticipated that Fidel Castro’s Cuba would support and promote unrest in Central America and in Southwest Africa (today's Namibia). And Dad spoke about this freely in a solidly Republican Congressional district.

Did our parents pay a price? He and Mom heard from neighbors that a man (or men) in suits visited neighbors and asked questions about our father. He believed that these were FBI men and that the FBI was conducting a low key investigation of our father for their files. Our father, however, only stopped talking about the Cuban Revolution within a few years when it became known that Castro was a vicious dictator.

I think that, overall, our parents didn’t pay much of a price for being outspoken. Mom and Dad grew up in Chicago, and we continued to live in Metropolitan Chicago. Unlike most people in Mark Twain’s time, Dad and our family could cultivate friends some miles away in various communities. Dad didn’t depend on serving only nearby people as their accountant either. America was also changing. Debates about Civil Rights and the Vietnam War were reaching us over the television and the less stuffy newspapers. By stuffy, I mean newspapers that espoused Twain’s idea of policy:

When an entirely new and untried political project is sprung upon the people, they are startled, anxious, timid, . . . they are waiting to see which is going to be the popular side.

Our father really paid very little attention to any price he paid by revealing his secret views. Neighbors rolled their eyes and generally considered Dad to be a harmless eccentric.

I believe that when I was growing up I came to believe, as Mark Twain notes, “Murder is sometimes punished, free speech always – when committed.” For a while, I was cautious about voicing opinions about politics and religion – two topics which Mark Twain mentioned in his article. But no longer. I also was and generally remain silent on the subject of money, but not because of what I learned from Dad. I believe that talking about my finances is liable to become embarrassing, either to the other person or to myself.

More or less, Dad let people know how well (or not well) he was doing. I chalk this up to our parents’ having grown up during the Great Depression. It was an expression of tranquility that any of their money concerns paled in the face of their privations during the Depression. It also seems to me that they were saying, to themselves as much as to anyone else, “We survived then; we’ll do fine now.”

Mom and Dad weren’t bashful to say, “We can afford to trade our starter house up to a larger and more expensive one, except that we might find ourselves ‘house poor,’” a hint of suspicion about how our former neighbors were living. Also, Mom and Dad said that they didn’t want to give up our yearly auto trip vacations. Eventually we visited most of the lower forty-eight states from the time I was nine years old until I graduated high school.

Keep in mind that our parents paid cash for everything. Credit cards (not revolving charge cards) were rare and unknown in our circles. Dad went to the bank once a year before the vacation and bought travelers checks, a sum that was immediately withdrawn from their personal bank account – and not a confidential amount, within the family.

So they courageously expressed what Mark Twain called “. . . unpopular convictions which common wisdom forbids . . . to utter.”

However, concerning political parties, Dad and Mom joined the Democrat Party with virtually no ongoing thought. Having lived through the Depression and benefitted from FDR’s New Deal, they expressed undying loyalty to President Roosevelt’s Democrat Party, no matter what policies the party adopted from the time of World War II through the time of Dad’s death in 2006.

In fact, Mom and Dad felt that I betrayed them when I voted for Republican candidates. (We had no sense of a “secret ballot” within or outside the family.) “Republican policies only benefit the rich. Republicans are selfish.” Mom and Dad certainly asserted their privilege of free speech, despite Twain’s maintaining that “[one] possesses it merely as an empty formality, and knows better than to make use of it . . .”

It was worth it to my sisters and me to hear our parents speak freely and frankly. I believe that it has served us well so we can engage in civil discourse and “agree to disagree.”