The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

Such episodes showed the double-edged nature of civil rights. The major leagues established an affirmative action program within days of Campanis’s disgrace and hired a sociologist to lead an executive search. Retired first baseman Bill White became the first black president of the National League. The young ABC producer who had first booked Campanis, while admitting to feeling “slightly tinged by guilt,” consoled himself that all this activity on behalf of diversity was “not a bad legacy.” That is uncertain. The price of that legacy was a system of censorship. People resisted calling it by its name, but censorship it most certainly was—government censorship, adapted for an age in which all sorts of government functions, from troop provision to prison construction, were being outsourced to private entities. It worked through a civil court system that had seen its scope and punitive capacities enhanced by civil rights law. Litigation could make it embarrassing, expensive, and potentially fatal to an organization like the Los Angeles Dodgers or CBS to have anyone in their employ speculating, woolgathering, or talking off the cuff. It was an institutional innovation. It grew directly out of civil rights law. Just as affirmative action in universities and corporations had privatized the enforcement of integration, the fear of litigation privatized the suppression of disagreement, or even of speculation. The government would not need to punish directly the people who dissented ...