Laura Weinrib. The Taming of Free Speech: America’s Civil Liberties Compromise.

Abstract

In the twentieth century, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) helped to create the paradigm of civil liberty enforcement in our country—court enforcement of neutral principles to protect individuals from government overreach. The ACLU now prides itself on its value-neutral approach to freedom of expression, in which expression itself is a goal regardless of the ideas expressed. In The Taming of Free Speech: America’s Civil Liberties Compromise, Laura Weinrib shows that neutral principles were not always central to the ACLU agenda. “Civil liberties once were radical,” says Weinrib (1), as she describes the radical, prolabor roots of the ACLU. In this well-written and thoroughly researched book, Weinrib explores the central role that the U.S. labor movement played in promoting civil liberties while advocating workers’ rights and, sometimes, revolutionary change. Ultimately, Weinrib shows how labor’s alliance with the ACLU helped to establish a new battleground in which labor eventually was destined to lose.