We suppose that we should, regrettably, address the use of the word "nigger" in Mr. Sandburg's rendition of the "Boll Weevil Song", utilizing the original lyrics as found by John Lomax in his tour of the South for the sake of preservation of American folklore in song and story during the first half of the 20th Century. Mr. Sandburg was a poet, folklorist and historian, whose multi-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln is regarded as one of the better works on the 16th President—who, as we recently pointed out, as highlighted in The Congressional Globe record of Congressional debate in 1868, had, in 1858 in his Illinois debates with Senator Stephen A. Douglas, stated a position, in opposing the spread of slavery into the Western states and territories, which included a gratuitous statement of white superiority regarding blacks, no doubt intended to placate his audience of listeners in his run for the Senate by separating himself from those "rabid" abolitionists of the North who did advocate social and political equality, i.e., the right to vote as citizens and run for office. Mr. Sandburg's recorded version of the song was released in 1951, but that is irrelevant at it is an object of folklore preservation, in this case from circa 1914, without which knowledge of the past, every individual is lost on the road to the future, as not having any idea how one got to the present, thus not knowing at all or having any perspective on where one is or was in time. Many other versions of the song, such as that for a tv performance by Tex Ritter sometime in the 1950's and other variant versions by Pete Seeger and numerous other folk and country singers have altered the ending lyric to eliminate "nigger" in favor of "farmer" or "dark complected man" or other such substitute lyrics, which is fine. To say "n-word", which did not come into vogue until about 20-25 years ago among tv broadcasters, would be ludicrous, of course, making the thing sound as a complete joke, just as these silly broadcasters who use that euphemism thereby plant the idea of "nigger" firmly in the brain, quite as equally absurd as the use in print of "n*****", connoting thereby a five-star "nigger", or a three-star "f***", by nincompoops who count themselves "journalists", but who never met a controversy they liked unless safe and popular to pursue, "cool" or "not cool" being the operative criterion.

Context is everything and using such words in an ironic sense or from a quoted passage serves to teach, rather than obfuscate and attempt to sweep the past under the rug, as does the obscurantist, whether on the right or left of the political spectrum. Obscurantism is an evil which leads to suppression of ideas, freedom of speech, and freedom of thought, ultimately to suppression of freedom, itself, or perception of same, with consequent reaction bred in response. And by active suppression of the use of such language, deemed offensive to the self-appointed language police, by trying to harm or get fired persons who use the word in such innocent contexts, the obscurantist weaponizes the word or phrase, not against actual racists usually but against those who would seek either merely to explain history in its proper context for better understanding of same, to defuse the explosively self-certain unfact-checked historiraptor seeing things only from within the myopic lens of self-identity as the oppressed sole of history by history made against his kind, or who would use it ironically, to try to dispel the power of certain words as used by some invidiously against others, whether the word be "honky" or "cracker", "nigger" or "coon", or some other word or phrase carrying with it invidious baggage from an earlier era of routine discrimination. The word itself becomes an obsessive focus, apart from context, leading to ridiculous mental contortions to label someone a "racist" merely for its utterance, communicating the hint that the obsessive focus is, by design, an attempt to eliminate competition within the marketplace of ideas or the marketplace generally, rather than truly being "offended" or "hurt" by the use of the word in a context which is plainly intended as antithetical to racism or other discrimination, in short a grab for power to lord over another and thereby feel empowered in the process.

Was the musical "Hair", when it hit Broadway in 1968, just 25 days after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., racist for utilizing such words in the lyrics and title of "Colored Spade"? Was Bob Dylan racist for his use of the term "crazy nigger" in "Hurricane" in 1975? about the imprisoned middleweight boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, convicted of a 1966 robbery of a bar and triple murder in Paterson, N.J., based on questionable eyewitness accounts, including that of an ex-felon who was caught trying to rob the cash register of the bar immediately after the killings, convictions finally overturned by the U.S. District Court in 1985 on habeas corpus, after the convictions, following a second trial in 1976, were affirmed by the New Jersey Supreme Court. Was the BBC broadcaster recently displaying racial insensitivity by reading a quote ascribed to John Wilkes Booth, containing the word "nigger"? Was F. Lee Bailey, in 1995, in cross-examining Los Angeles police detective Mark Fuhrman, who became in consequence the darling of the racists, showing a hidden racist streak by repeatedly asking Mr. Fuhrman about his repeated use of the word "nigger", in a plainly racist or at least frustratedly uncolor-blind context—the mirage born of disproportionate crime developing out of lower socio-economic circumstance that it is the police v. color—, rebutting his claim never to have used the word, from a tape recording made surreptitiously by a female instructor at the North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem some years before People v. O. J. Simpson became a national pastime and, for racists, who fancied themselves quite objective on the subject, a virtual obsession to get that "nigger" for killing the "white girl"? Was Mr. Dylan trying to suggest himself, either consciously or subconsciously, as the enemy of the "nigger" in the song "Boll Weevil" when he said in his 1988 song "Silvio" that he was "an old boll weevil looking for a home"? Was Mr. Lincoln a racist in 1858 for favoring racial superiority of whites and being against racial social and political equality?

In answer to all of those questions and a thousand others of the same variety, no, the only close call in that list, ironically, being that of Mr. Lincoln, whose view has to be forgiven by the times then extant and by his subsequent championing of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery, though not necessarily by the Emancipation Proclamation, promulgated in the fall of 1862 as an expedient device to try to induce the states in rebellion to renounce their secession and return to the union or else have their slaves declared by the President free on January 1, 1863, but having no practical effect in fact, other than instilling hope in the slave population of a better day on the other side of the Jordan, where Joshua fought the battle of Jericho.

It is not a matter of interpretation, but rather of common sense. It is not a matter of defiance of social manners or social conventions, but rather about context, justice and truth in relating history. To suggest nonsensically such usage as racism is to ignore context, to ignore history, both of the moment and of the time and times, and ultimately to favor obscurantism over truth, leading down the path to totalitarianism, where some authoritarian dictator, or someone who dreams of becoming one, determines words and phrases which can be used and those which are verboten, just as Senator Joseph McCarthy was seeking to do with "Communist" or "Communist-sympathizer" as the label applied to his "enemies" in 1953, to try to ban those authors and journalists who disagreed with him and openly criticized his Machiavellian ways, not unlike Mr. Nixon, both as a Congressman and as President.

Some of the claimed hurt feelings or offense at the use of such words in those innocent, truth-seeking contexts are often simply the product of becoming inured to censored tv speech over the decades, non-introspective, unquestioning viewers growing up to believe that such as they see and hear on the tv, in polite happy-happy talk or, by turns, after the commercial and another hit of make-up to the face, morose sad-sad talk, should be the norm for everyday parlance, leading to a nation of mindless manipulanda, incapable of thinking outside the box or flat panel in their living room or den. It should not be so, lest we lose freedom of speech and thought, and, with it, our history and identity as individuals and as a people.

Then, in a message to the American Library Association, the President had said that the country had to be alert to the "fanatic cunning of communist conspiracy" as well as to the "grave dangers in meeting fanaticism with ignorance". He said that to fight totalitarians who exploited freedom to serve their own ends, there were some zealots who would adopt "a strangely unintelligent course", trying "to defend freedom by denying freedom's friends the opportunity of studying communism in its entirety—its plausibilities, its falsities, its weaknesses." He stated his belief that the libraries ought remain the homes of "free, inquiring minds" such that all citizens could "freely seek the whole truth, unwarped by fashion and uncompromised by expediency."

It indicates that the statement clarified the matter for domestic policy, but that the President and Secretary of State Dulles needed to dispel the confusion with regard to how U.S. embassies around the world should treat the subject. A New York Times survey had found that different embassies abroad had interpreted differently the Administration's directives on published matter to be retained in Information Service libraries. It suggests that the President had to decide whether foreign libraries were to be propaganda devices or whether they would show the world that a democracy had nothing to fear in controversial ideas being circulated among the people. In either case, it favors a clear directive being issued to leave no room for "ludicrous interpretation by ever-anxious information specialists abroad".

"Consistency" indicates that several lawyers with whom it was acquainted had expressed the belief that Justice William O. Douglas ought be impeached for granting the stay of executions in the Rosenberg case at the last minute, and some had said they had written their Congressmen so expressing their opinion. It wonders whether it would also not be consistent for them to move to disbar the Rosenbergs' defense counsel, Emanuel Bloch, for his oration at the Rosenbergs' funeral, in which he said that the executions had amounted to "an act of cold, deliberate murder", and that "America is living under the heel of a military dictator garbed in civilian attire", wondering if the statements were within the canon of ethics.