The Cultural Limits of Bigotry
I am not racist.
—Diane Fedele, president of a Republican women’s club in California
D
avid Marsters, a retired police officer, was fed up with Barack
Obama. “One man ruined the whole country,” Marsters declared by
phone a few days after being interrogated by the Secret Service. “I
voted for him the first time. He’s conned everybody in the nation that
he’s gonna change this or change that.”
But the only change that Marsters saw from his rural town in Maine
was a shift toward the revolting, which he watched through the peculiar
lenses of Fox News, Glenn Beck, and other rightwing polemicists.
“It’s getting disgusting, the whole country,” Marsters said. “He’s given
away the country—food stamps, all that. Nobody wants to work
anymore. He always blames everybody else.” And Obama “was
blowing smoke from marijuana” during the first presidential debate in
2012, Marsters imagined. “He was high as a kite. With Romney. That’s
what I feel. I got a right to my feelings.”
Indeed he does. He also has a right to his speech, which he exercised in
a galvanizing way in late August 2013. As the rest of his disgusting
country was marking the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washing
ton and hearing again the ringing cadence of Martin Luther King Jr.’s
inspiring call, “I have a dream,” a different phrase altogether came to
David Marsters, and he did not keep it to himself.
Before his line is quoted, Marsters should be allowed to make his case:
“I’m not prejudiced against blacks or anything. We have many black
friends.” A black Baptist church was his place of worship, in the
Roxbury section of Boston, before he and his wife moved to Maine.
“We traveled twenty miles to go to church,” he said, and loved it, at
least as a social spectacle. “The service would last four to five hours, all
great people. They had a band there, jambalaya, dancing around. They
knew how to live. Their kids were very well trained, sat there for four
or five hours, all well dressed.”
This shield of nonracism did not protect him. It was quickly pierced by
three words, which he posted on his Facebook page with a link to a
Republican congressman’s call for Obama’s impeachment. “Shoot the
nigger,” Marsters wrote. Imagine. While much of the country was
thinking, “I have a dream,” Marsters was typing, “Shoot the nigger.”
The landscape of free speech is vast in America, but there are bound
aries, often invisible to the unwitting, who trip over the unseen taboos
and then fall, bewildered, into disrepute. The list of the selfwounded is
long enough, and prominent enough, to suggest that despite all that the
society has learned about the traditional patterns of stereotyping, there
are plenty of tonedeaf Americans. They do not hear themselves. They
do not recognize the old, unpleasant discords of prejudice in their
remarks, their jokes, their accusations. They surely believe what they
say: that they are not racist, not antiSemitic, not biased along the lines
of ethnicity or religion. Often they are sincerely stunned when their
innocent words, lighthearted words, strong words, yes, but principled
words of legitimate criticism, are turned around and used to brand them
as bigots.
Marsters felt the repercussions immediately. He was a relative new
comer who had come just three years earlier, at the age of sixtyfive,
from Malden, Massachusetts, to the village of Sabattus, which straddles
the Maine Turnpike south of Augusta. He noticed, with annoyance, that
Sabattus residents who were not willing to serve in town offices were
nonetheless “the first to bitch,” so he volunteered and was seated on the
Ordinance Review Committee, the Budget Committee, and the Charter
Commission.
Amid a rash of home breakins, he made a stir by proposing a law that
would have required every household to own a gun; it was voted down.
He also set his sights on a run for selectman. All this made him a quasi
public figure, ripe for unwelcome press coverage, all the way from the
Bangor Daily News to the New York Daily News, when his terse
remedy for the Obama problem went up on Facebook.
First, the local government forced him to resign from the commit tees,
with the town manager, Andrew Gilmore, calling his Facebook remark
“deplorably hateful, dangerous, and exactly opposite of all this country
and the town of Sabattus stands for.”
Then, Marsters recalled, “My police department where I live called me
up and [said], Dave, come down at two o’clock. We want to talk to you
about it.” When he walked into the office, in the onestory, cream
colored municipal building, he saw “a guy there with civilian clothes
on. I knew he was Secret Service. I’m a retired cop, and I can smell
’em a mile away . . . He’s a young kid, fresh out of the academy,
stationed up here in Maine.”
The fledgling agent was obviously interested in only one of the two
components of the Facebook post—not the racist epithet, but the appar
ent threat. “It’s against the law to threaten the president of the United
States,” Marsters acknowledged. “People took it as a threat. I talked to
many people who didn’t take it as a threat,” and he said he didn’t mean
it literally. He meant “do something about it. Impeach him . . . They’ve
been trying to get rid of him. They’ve been talking about it for two
years now.” In the immediate clarity of hindsight, he called his typed
sentence a “slip of the finger.”
The agent issued Marsters the Miranda warning about his rights to
silence and counsel and asked Marsters for his name, his date of birth,
his children’s names and addresses, his educational background, and
his military service. “Have you ever been to Washington, D.C.?”
Marsters remembered being asked. “Did you ever go to any rallies for
Obama?” No. “Ever go to rallies around here for Obama?” No. He took
Marsters’s picture and asked for consent to search his house for
weapons.
The retired cop knew the routine very well, and he gave consent,
thereby waiving his Fourth Amendment right against a search without
probable cause, which would have required the agent to get a warrant
from a judge. Marsters told the agent up front that he had one weapon,
a handgun. “I showed it to him before he searched the house,” Marsters
said, and then, accompanied by local police, “he searched the house for
more weapons.”
He found nothing else and left the gun. “I had a concealed weapons
permit,” Marsters said. “Three days later the chief of police wrote me a
letter and revoked it, said I was not of good character.”
The Secret Service agent interviewed his wife and neighbors and
required Marsters to sign an affidavit stating that he had not been
hospitalized for mental illness and was not taking drugs for any
psychological ailment. He told Marsters that the agency would check,
and “if you lied, we’ll come back to you again.”
As a former law enforcement officer, Marsters voiced no complaint.
“They have to do their job, that’s how I figure,” he said. “They took it
as a threat. The town manager took it as a threat, the police chief took it
as a threat, the sheriff took it as a threat.” But Marsters wasn’t worried.
“They can’t find a black mark against me. I never had a parking ticket,
haven’t been arrested, was a cop, thirty years in the military.”
Under federal law, it takes less to activate an investigation into threat
ening words against the president than it does, say, against your boss or
your neighbor. Pure speech, even ugly speech, is protected by the First
Amendment unless it crosses limits into criminal conspiracy or incite
ment. So police departments usually don’t act on stated threats alone
without accompanying action that rises to the level of harassment or
imminent danger.
The president, however, enjoys special protection under the statute,
which states, “Whoever knowingly and willfully [makes] any threat to
take the life of, to kidnap, or to inflict bodily harm upon the President
of the United States . . . shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not
more than five years, or both.”
But what constitutes a threat? The Secret Service uses a threepronged
test before bringing charges: Agents must determine that the person in
question actually made the statement, did so “knowingly and willfully,”
and meant it as a true threat. No proof is needed that the individual
intended to carry it out.
“The Secret Service is interested in legitimate information relating to
threats, plans or attempts by individuals, groups or organizations to
harm Secret Service protectees,” the agency says on its website.
“However, the agency does not desire or solicit information pertaining
to individuals or groups expressing legitimate criticism of, or political
opposition to, the policies and decisions of the government or
government officials.” Marsters portrayed himself as fitting into that
second category. “It wasn’t very appropriate,” he admitted, but he
wasn’t really calling for violence. The Secret Service didn’t seem to
think so, either, because in the following months—after the agent told
him that a report would be made to higher officials in the agency—no
further questioning occurred and no charges were brought. “They’ll be
keeping an eye on me,” Marsters figured. “They’ll watch me for a
while.” Would it affect his behavior? “No, I say what I want.” And he
didn’t feel alone, because he’d tapped into a small subculture of like
minded Americans, some of whom had called him from far and wide
offering to donate to his defense fund, should he need one. “These are
high people, too,” he said cryptically, refusing to name them.
Excerpted from FREEDOM OF SPEECH by
David Shipler. Copyright © 2015 by David
Shipler. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a
division of Random House LLC. All rights
reserved. No part of this excerpt may be
reproduced or reprinted without permission in
writing from the publisher.