From the Palmer Raids to the Patriot Act: A History of the Fight for Free Speech in America
by Christopher M. Finan
Summary
In this lively history of our most fundamental and perhaps most vulnerable right, Chris Finan traces the lifeline of free speech from the War on Terror back to the turn of the last century.
During the YMCA’s 1892 Suppression of Vice campaign, muttonchopped moralist Anthony Comstock railed against that “Irish smut dealer” George Bernard Shaw. The burgeoning film industry of the early 1900s cannibalized its own reels as state censors dictated how many seconds on-screen kisses could last and refused to allow any references to birth, including a scene of a woman knitting baby clothes. In the midst of the country’s first Red Scare, the government rounded up thousands of Russian Americans for deportation during the Palmer raids. Decades later, a second Red Scare gripped the country as Senator Joseph McCarthy spearheaded a witch-hunt for “egg-sucking liberals” who defended “Communists and queers.”
Finan’s dramatic story of the fight for free speech, in times of war and peace—when writers, publishers, booksellers, and librarians are often on the front lines—is essential reading.
Excerpt
On the evening of November 7, 1919, Mitchel Lavrowsky was teaching a class in algebra to a room full of Russian immigrants at the Russian People’s House, a building just off Union Square in New York City. The 50-year-old Lavrowsky was also Russian. He had been a teacher and principal of the Iglitsky High School in Odessa before emigrating to the United States and now lived quietly with his wife and two children in the Bronx. Lavrowsky had applied for American citizenship. But that didn’t matter to the men who entered his classroom with their guns drawn around 8 p.m. They identified themselves as agents of the Department of Justice and ordered everyone to stand. One of them advanced on Lavrowsky and instructed him to remove his eyeglasses. He struck Lavrowsky in the head. Two more agents joined the assault, beating the teacher until he could not stand and then throwing him down stairs where more men continued to hit him with pieces of wood that they had torn out of the bannister.
The roundup of Russians continued through the night and into the next day. The police burst into apartments and dragged people from their beds. Sometimes, they had arrest warrants, but usually they simply arrested everyone they found. In the end, the Department of Justice had grabbed more than 1,000 people in 11 cities.
Although the raids launched by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer generated a lot of good publicity for the Department of Justice, they accomplished little. The radicals who were arrested in November and during an even larger series of raids in January were not charged with any crime. The Department of Justice would have been unable to take any action at all if Congress had not made it a deportable offense for an alien to belong to a group that advocated
the violent overthrow of the government. The people who were arrested during the Palmer raids were picked up not because of anything they had done but because of what they might do. In fact, many of those arrested and held for deportation did not believe in violence. In the end, the government succeeded in deporting only 800 of the more than 4,000 people it had arrested.
But the Palmer raids did achieve something important. They raised the issue of what freedoms are protected by the First Amendment. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., was one of the first prominent Americans to recognize this. Just three days after the launch of the November raids, in a case involving the distribution of radical pamphlets, he urged Americans to recognize “the ultimate good desired is better reached by a free trade in ideas–that the best test of truth is the power of thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.” Louis Brandeis was the only Justice to join his opinion. But an important turning point had been reached: free expression was no longer an issue for radicals alone; the fight for free speech had entered the political mainstream.
A June Book Sense Pick http://chrisfinan.com
Reviews
“An insightful history of the long struggle for free speech in America”—Publishers Weekly
“Could be the definitive study of a perpetually complex, contentious issue”--Booklist
“Of interest both to general and academic readers. Highly recommended”—Library Journal
Author's Biography
Chris Finan is president of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE), the bookseller’s voice in the fight against censorship. Chris has been involved in the fight against censorship since 1982. He is chair of the National Coalition Against Censorship and a trustee of the Freedom to Read Foundation.
A native of Cleveland, Chris is a graduate of Antioch College. After working as a newspaper reporter, he studied American history at Columbia University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1992. He is the author of “Alfred E. Smith: The Happy Warrior” (Hill and Wang), a biography of the New York governor who was the first Catholic to run for President.