I considered organizing a little side business, where I would knock on residential doors, offering to read my column out loud, for a fee.
But, with the advent of the internet, the notion of going door-to-door, looking for business, seemed unlikely to succeed. The age of the door-to-door salesman has been largely swept aside by tons of SPAM and pop-ups and banners and streaming video.
There is still some unsavory door-to-door magazine subscription funny business going on; there is still a healthy business in hard-copy junk mail; there are still those irritating phone solicitors that don’t seem to care whether you’re on a do-not-call list. But, the weary traveling salesman stuff has pretty much disappeared.
Long before computer technology worked its magic, cranky state and local politicians devoted decades attempting to forbid, discourage, or, at the least, regulate the door-to-door peddlers. Oddly enough, the battle still goes on, despite the diminished number of peddlers prowling the neighborhood.
The City Council in Phoenix, Ariz., is pondering regulations that would require door-to-door solicitors to register; not to leave printed material at homes with “no soliciting” signs; and to immediately run away with their commercial tails between their legs, if a homeowner requests it. The maximum penalty would be six months in jail. Think about that. Your cellmate is a hardened criminal and he asks you what you’re in for. Aggressive selling.
In Puerto Rico, where streets inside gated communities are public thoroughfares, a federal appeals court in January ordered the snobby mansion-dwellers to open their gates to Jehovah’s Witnesses — a freedom-of-speech/freedom-of-religion thing that grants the Witnesses a right to come inside and evangelize, as is their wont.
That particular case can take us back to the wonderful days of yesteryear, in 1940, when Connecticut offered up one of the most rambunctious anti-peddling case ever to stagger on up to the U.S. Supreme Court — a case, interestingly enough, also involving the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
It was a package deal. Cantwell v. Connecticut offered up one Cantwell brother, arrested in New Haven on a breach-of-peace charge, for playing an anti-Catholic record on a city street. His conviction was overturned by the High Court, which suggested that playing a record, even an offensive record, didn’t breach much of a peace.
Three Cantwell brothers had been convicted of selling Witness literature, door-to-door, without a required permit. The unanimous Supreme Court wasn’t too happy — “to condition the solicitation of aid for the perpetuation of religious views or systems upon a license, the grant of which rests in the exercise of a determination by state authority as to what is a religious cause, is to lay a forbidden burden upon the exercise of liberty protected by the Constitution.”
While religious peddlers have had good luck over the years in fighting off restrictions on their public preaching and peddling, the non-religious, commercial folks have had a ragged time in court. Commercial speech is entitled to First Amendment protection, but with more limits than other forms of crooning.
A personal favorite was a Trenton, N.J., ordinance that prohibited commercial sound trucks that produced “loud and raucous noise.” Are you kidding, asked the commercial vendors, in a loud and raucous legal challenge. How loud? And what the heck does “raucous” mean?
The U.S. Supreme Court thought the ordinance was just fine. Whatever loud and raucous meant, “through daily use acquired a content that conveys to any interested party a sufficiently accurate concept of what is forbidden.”
Yeah. Sure.
By the way, if Hartford Business Journal writers do stand on street corners, reading for money, please don’t call the cops.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
