Free Speech in Its Forgotten Years, 1870-1920

Today's America is awash in information, a by-product of the burgeoning economy and the freedom of speech we have enjoyed during our lifetime.However, there was a time we were not always so careful with the First Amendment -- approximately our first 125 years as a country. This book recalls the tale of this America, when "order" prevailed above individual liberty. The list voices of the past -- workers struggling for decent working conditions, women dying from lack of access to birth control information -- were silenced by those in power who knew the First Amendment lacked teeth. Rabban's critically acclaimed book focuses on the transformation of this society from Civil War to World War 1. He deftly illustrates that in America's tumultuous relationship with the First Amendment, the outcome of this struggle was neither inevitable nor easy. As Rabban writes 'no group of Americans was more hostile to free speech claims before WWI than the judiciary, and no judges were more hostile than the justices on the United States Supreme Court.'Free Speech is enjoyable from a lay perspective and rich and challenging for those immersed in the nation's laws. It's a slice of history we rarely consider, but today, as we search for ways to manage the flow of information coming into our homes through the Internet, we would be unwise to take for granted.

What I admired about this book was the long second chapter, in which the author discusses the issue of free speech in connection with the Industrial Workers of the World, IWW, also known as the "Wobblies". Rabban leads us to wondering, does the first amendment protect the sort of thing the wobblies had in mind when they spoke of "direct action"? Separately, one also asks one's self, were the wobblies themselves genuinely opposed to censorship, or just opposed to efforts to censor the wobblies? This is a question worth asking about many real or alleged victims of suppression, because those who come into the inheritance of the martyrs of the past often turn into the censors of the future. In Rabban's words, "IWW commentary on the legal treatment of free speech frequently invoked basic Marxist class analysis and exhibited contempt for American law and legal institutions," so much so that for the wobblies, "contempt for the capitalist legal system...extended to rejection of the underlying worth of constitutional rights under any circumstances."