Fourth of July

I wonder if anyone remembers a Frenchman, or a Franco-American, I guess, industrialist named Charles or 'Charles' Bedaux. His was an ugly story and I won't dwell on it.

He invented, before the Second War, something called the Bedaux Stretch System which was a way of getting the most labour out of his workers in the least time. It was greatly admired by what, before the war, were called 'efficiency' experts, not least by the Nazis. Charlie Chaplin had it in mind in the opening sequence of 'Modern Times' in which he's one of a team of men tightening bolts on an assembly line whose speed is gradually quickened so that Charlie, at the end of his stint, is left with a permanent twitch. 

Well, such Dickensian tortures are long gone in any industrial country we know and in this country, certainly, there is a generation of men – and I have in mind particularly labour contract advisers – who would simply fail to believe that any group of workers would have tolerated the Stretch system for more than a week. This nasty memory came back to me this week, the week of the Independence Day holiday, as a reminder of how far we've come in 30,40 years in humanising conditions of work. 

This time, Independence Day fell on Tuesday with the strange result that from Friday on, New York, at any rate, was about as busy as an open grave until the following Wednesday. New York – Manhattan – is an island and close to the ocean so the traffic jams started on the Thursday evening, mounted to a mass exodus on Friday and lots of employers – guessing correctly that people would either feign sickness or simply not bother to come back for the one day of Monday work – just called it off. So most office workers, I'd guess, had a four-day holiday. 

This sort of indulgence is fairly new in this country. I don't know what it signifies but it did remind me of England last Christmas when the impression, on a visitor at least, was that Christmas was a ten-day feast. I just remark on this new labour phenomenon and pass on. 

I happened to have a spate of things to catch up with and went into reverse so to speak, leaving the country on Sunday morning and getting in some fine uninterrupted licks of work through Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. The city was marvellously quiet since about a quarter of a million people were missing. Only on Tuesday, Independence Day itself, there was a strange, new noise punctuating the silence at about one-minute intervals. It sounded rather like London on the Queen's birthday with the salute booming away. 

As the day went along, it reminded me more of old folks I knew who lived in Dover during the First War and went about their business to the distant clap and rumble of the guns in France. Happily, there was no gunfire here. It was fireworks. They banged and crackled all day long and lit up the sky at night which had cleared after a ferocious one-day nor'easter. 

There have always been certain well-worn ways of celebrating the Fourth of July – peanut roast in the South, clam bakes at the shore, parades in old, colonial towns with jolly, sporting types picked to dress up as the defeated British. There was a time, too, when every politician worth his pay got up on a soap box in his hometown and made a ringing, patriotic speech up against the American flag. These homely rituals seem to have gone the way of the Norman Rockwell magazine covers that celebrated them. 

This year, one of the television networks picked what it decided were typical 1978 ways of celebrating American Independence. A bicycle race for three-year-olds, a six-mile jog involving, it seemed, the entire population of Atlanta. In California, a play-off series of pillow fights between teams of two people on a log, the loser collapsing into a muddy river. Washington, which you'd expect to stage the most traditional sort of celebration, did just that. 

For the past several years, the one dependable July 4 tradition has been a mass demonstration outside the White House of 'yippies' demanding the legalising of marijuana. They were out in vast numbers on Tuesday staging their annual smoke-in, or smoke-out. The difference this year was that the cops stood by and just watched. In fact, they announced that they would not arrest anybody for simply smoking pot, no matter how conspicuously, even though it's still a crime. But the crowd was too boisterous, too feisty to be worth bating, so the smoke and its acrid smell drifted out over the White House grounds. One or two of the more belligerent types got nasty and got arrested. Otherwise it was a jolly, loud, typical Independence Day scene in what the television commentators like to call 'the nation's capital.' 

The one American institution that came through in its usual busy style was the United States Supreme Court which always tries to clear its docket and produce a flock of decisions before it recesses for the summer. And, after all the fluff and fatuousness of some other celebrations, it was a great relief to see that, on the morning of 4 July, the New York Times had four, big, separate stories on four decisions handed down in the nick of time by the Supreme Court. 

Now any court of appeal could, after a strenuous bout of work, hand down decisions in one day on a variety of topics. The thing to remember about the Supreme Court is that it agrees to hear cases – it is the final court of appeal – only cases which affect the liberty of the subject. Every single decision is given on the appeal of a citizen or two against somebody he, or she, maintains is depriving him, or her, of rights set down in the Constitution of the United States, first adopted in 1787 and expanded with amendments ever since. 

Strangers are apt to suggest that the eighteenth-century constitution must be a handcuff on the modern growth of the law, but this is very like saying that the Old and the New Testaments have little to teach us about human behaviour. The men who wrote the constitution had no more, but no less, experience of life than their counterparts in England. 

What they had more of was a very lively knowledge in the flesh of all the ways in which an arbitrary power – whether it was a governor, a king, a tax collector, a soldier, a trading company, a colony, a prison official, you name it – the ways in which such a person could deprive the ordinary citizen of certain rights which the Founding Fathers, so-called, laid down as the essentials of liberty. Such as the right to a speedy trial, the right to free speech, the right not to have your house searched, the right to enjoy the same protection of the laws as every other citizen. 

It's always one person who brings a test case and the defendant may be another person, or a firm, an industry, a bus line, a theatre, a policeman, one of the states of the Union, the Department of Justice itself. Even the case may be brought, as we may remember three years ago, against the President of the United States. So there is almost no conflict you can dream up as between two people or two groups or one person versus his employer, or the state he lives in, that doesn't come up sooner or later for a final word from the Supreme Court. The cases with which the court finished its 1977/8 session offer rousing examples. 

Ohio. Two men claimed that an Ohio law severely restricted the sort of evidence a defendant might bring up to avoid the death penalty. The court agreed with them and saved them from execution, thereby calling into question the validity of laws in 20-odd other states which have people on appeal on Death Row. 

In a New Mexico case, the court decided against the government of the United States which claimed a right to siphon off water from a national forest to help a recreation area to bloom. This meant that the law which set up the national forests can appropriate water only to protect timber but not for – and I quote – 'aesthetic or environmental purposes'. 

In a third case, a government agency brought suit against the American Telephone and Telegraph company to allow it to raise its rates only if the money went to give $15 million in back pay and $23 million in pay increases to women and to blacks and other minorities, who had had to work for lower rates than men and whites. This was retroactive by five years. The court upheld the settlement that did this. 

In the fourth case, a comedian who had broadcast a talk, a record, on 'seven dirty words in common use' offended a father who was listening with his son. The Federal Communications Commission said 'he must not broadcast those words again'. The comedian sued the FCC. The Supreme Court ruled that the freedom of speech clause in the constitution allows the government to bar the use of words that are 'patently offensive' even if they fall short of any constitutional definition of obscenity. This, by the way, is only one of many cases pending in which the First Amendment to the constitution – which guarantees free speech – is being claimed as protection for behaviour, speech, movies, books, demonstrations, massage parlours, that would certainly set the Founding Fathers revolving in their graves. 

Which reminds me of another celebration of Independence Day, I forgot to mention. New York City, which is always in the van of liberty movements, staged a philosophical celebration of the Fourth. While the fireworks were crackling away in other parts of town, a television girl interviewed not seven dirty words, but four naked men. And don't think they were old-fashioned nudists or streakers or plain slobs! They had a message for all of us and especially for Americans who may have forgotten what Independence Day is really about. 

I quote their earnest spokesman: 'We want to celebrate true independence. The body is an integral part of our culture. It is sculpture in the truest sense. We want people to appreciate the real symbol of Independence.' Ah, so!

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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