Political Science, the Labor Movement, and the Struggle for Freedom of Expression

Abstract

This article examines the role of the labor movement in the struggle for freedom of expression between 1877 and 1919. Conventional scholarship has not addressed the fact that from the end of the Civil War to the passage of the Wagner Act in 1935 the most significant institutional actor in the struggle for freedom of expression was the labor movement. Workers, struggling both for narrow, immediate interests and for broader social justice, had to use associational and expressive activity to further their goals. While the labor movement did not have a modern civil libertarian perspective, its activities did lead to serious thinking about rights. Prior to 1900, organizations like the Knights of Labor and craft unions tended to associate freedom of expression with a broader republican ideology of citizenship. After 1900, the American Federation of Labor and even the Industrial Workers of the World began to articulate a more specific, First Amendment conception of these rights. In the process, they raised significant questions about freedom of expression and played a major role in forcing the judiciary to confront these issues.