Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism

Throughout Geoffrey Stone's engrossing examination of free speech during times of war, two crucial conclusions emerge. Both drive from an explanation articulated by Justice Louis in 1927: "fear breeds repression" and "courage is the secret of liberty." Exquisitely researched, gracefully written and forcefully argued, "Perilous Times" is a compelling exploration of the First Amendment in wartime. Professor Stone, through argument and anecdotal evidence, develops a convincing thesis that the American people, hesitatingly and often with frustrating slowness, have embraced not only the right, but the need, to honor dissent during times of national emergency. This is a hard-earned victory for free speech, one gained only through the raw and open courage of dissidents and the often underestimated and unseen courage of jurists who stood for principle when it mattered most. "Perilous Times" is an unusual historical analysis; its scholarship is meticulous, making it an academician's treasure, and its narrative drive is irresistible, welcoming a large audience to its research and understandings. Wartime political dissent invariably brings charges of disloyalty and suspicions of motivation. Stone chronologically analyzes six periods of the condition of free speech during times of war; from the nation's first attempts to thwart free speech during the "half war" with France in the late 1790s to its coming of age in respect for the First Amendment in the Vietnam War era, those in power have had an uneven approach to the First Amendment. Within a decade of writing the First Amendment, a repressive congress passed the nefarious Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, blatant contradictions to the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech. During World War I, the purportedly scholarly Woodrow Wilson unleashed an unprecedented assault on free speech through government-issued propaganda and outright prohibitions of "disloyal" speech. Of all the wartime presidents, Wilson's record receives the greatest criticism. At the onset of the Cold War, President Truman vacillated between steadfast commitment to First Amendment rights to outright capitulation to regressive legislation. His tolerance of "loyalty oaths" helped unleash McCarthyism. Genuine heroes and heroines emerge in battle for free speech. There's the firebrand Mollie Steimer, whose outspoken opposition to capitalism and World War I earned her a fifteen-year prison sentenced for violating the Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917. Her crime: distribution leaflets that proclaimed: "there is only one enemy of workers...and that is CAPITALISM." During the Great Depression, the "boy wonder" of academia, Robert Maynard Hutchins, steadfastly championed free speech and thought at the University of Chicago. With extraordinary elegance and quiet courage, he breathed life into the need for more, not less, speech during times of duress. It's not difficult to measure the author's respect for David Dellinger

Perilous Times is a fascinating account, by Geoffrey R. Stone, of free speech in wartime, that is oddly both often a little frightening and quite hopeful. The six periods on which the author focuses are the sedition act of 1798, the Civil War, the two World Wars, the Cold War, and the Vietnam War. Three of these periods show a carlessness with the First Amendment (1798, World War I, and the Cold War) on the part of national leaders that is balanced with a less hysterical reaction in the other three wartime periods. The author is brilliant in analyzing why this is so and he tells a fascinating story of a progressive, though never inevitable or strictly linear, development of the importance of a free press and a free discourse of ideas, even (perhaps particularly) during times of national crisis. A brilliant, important, truly fascinating tale.

Don't be intimidated, as I first was, by the fact that the author was a law professor. Stone tells an important story in an engaging style, blending legal analysis with history lessons and character development - the result is a terrific book that is at the same time educational and thought-provoking. I confess I am a liberal, which is what attracted me to the title in the first place, but "Perilous Times" is not preachy. It is a true examination of the evolution of our relationship with the first Amendment. The good news seems to be that after each bow-wave of hysteria and fear, cooler heads prevail and free speech generally emerges intact. The bad news is that history does, in this case, seem to repeat itself. It's also important to note that the usual cast of towering figures in our history, like Roosevelt and Lincoln, were not innocent in their approach to defending the Constitution when they felt the country was in danger. The bottom line is that I learned a tremendous amount from this book (and I bought it as a recreational read - I am not a law student) - it was terribly enlightening - and I think we ALL would do well to examine the issues that Stone presents - I believe we Americans don't take the time to have an appreciation for the Constitution really means - I guess we trust our lawmakers to cover that for us - but as Stone points out, that hasn't always worked out. In my view, a must-read. Particularly today.

War excites passions. The nation itself may find itself in peril; thousands, perhaps millions of lives are at risk. It is often thought that dissent during wartime is tantamount to being disloyal. This view puzzles libertarians. They view it as patriotism's highest manifestation. During wartime, the line between dissent and disloyalty is cloudy. The First Amendment, prohibiting Congress from enacting any law abridging freedom of speech, is put to the test. Some judges and legal scholars reason the First Amendment is essential to self-government. They argue the First Amendment promotes character traits that are essential to a robust democracy: skepticism, personal responsibility, curiosity, distrust of authority and independent thinking. "The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market," wrote one of my favorite Supreme Court justices, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Geoffrey Stone, the former dean of law provost at the University of Chicago, identifies six periods of widespread free-speech repression, dating back to the administration of the nation's second president, John Adams, and continuing through the Vietnam era. He identifies three principals that shape the Supreme Court's understanding of the First Amendment. 1. No government paternalism in the realm of political discourse. 2. Punish the actor, not the speaker. 3. Differentiate between low- and high-value speech. This is a book about Americans struggling with the responsibilities of self-government during times of war. It is about the presidents who struggled balancing liberty and security. It is about the justices of the Supreme Court who attempted to define the difference. More importantly, it is about those individuals who had the courage to dissent during perilous times. Some were fools; others were villains; some were individuals of great moral courage. Geoffrey Stone has written a timely masterpiece about individual Americans who struggled to preserve our liberties.

In this marvelously readable new work by celebrated academic Geoffrey R. Stone, the author offers up for our reading pleasure a wonderfully pensive, comprehensive and timely contextual look at one of the key elements in the ongoing calculus of a free society; the right to free speech as embodied in the First Amendment. Opening by collaring Oliver Wendell Holmes' famous dictum regarding the social, economic and political wisdom in allowing all sorts and manners of thoughts and premises to freely compete in the marketplace of ideas, Professor Stone delivers a wonderful and sometimes whimsical history of just how critical such allowances of civil liberties are in guaranteeing the continuance of the republic. In so doing, he allows us a more meaningful window through which we can view the current battle-lines organized around civil rights issues emanating from concern over the Patriot Act and other infringements on personal liberties. His anecdotes are telling, and often surprising, as when one learns that Abraham Lincoln suspended the right of the writ of habeas corpus several times during his embattled administration, or how the government tried groups of dissidents in the aftermath of World War One (including famous intellectuals such as Eugene Debs and the later sixties countercultural "back-to-the land" icon Scott Nearing) for treason for their free speech critical of the war effort. In sum, this book provides the reader with a marvelous compendium tracing the history of the continuing struggle and tension between the need for public order, on the one hand, and the right of individuals and groups to speak their minds without fear of official or unofficial consequences from the government at large. Surely, events such as the involuntary segregation and detainment of Japanese Americans during the course of WWII is among the most grievous of the episodes related herein, yet other, later efforts such as the actions of the Congressional House Un-American Activities Committee (or HUAC) originally established by Harry Truman to invoke official investigation of the civil activities of ordinary Americans as a kind of litmus loyalty test are even more egregious transgressions of the ways in which government can trample over the rights and prerogatives of its citizenry. He takes great pains to help the reader to understand that most usually such blatant transgressions on individual rights to free speech and public assembly take place during times of great national danger, such as a state of warfare. In this sense, the invocation of such a state of war itself may signal the likelihood of such efforts by the state to limit or muzzle efforts by people to speak their mind and criticize the actions of the government. Thus, we are reminded that one most often describes the period of the late 1940s until the late 1980s as the time of the so-called `Cold War". Then too, in more contemporary terms, the presumptuous attachment and use of the term "War On Terror"