Forgotten Years Research Articles

The First Amendment's New Standard History

The First Amendment’s New Standard History Stephen A. Siegel (bio) David M. Rabban. Free Speech in Its Forgotten Years. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. xi + 404 pp. Notes, pictures, and index. $34.95. The standard history of free speech in America is that nothing significant occurred between 1801, when the Sedition Act of 1798 expired, and 1917, when Congress enacted the Espionage Act to suppress opposition to America’s entry into the First World War. David Rabban’s study of the First Amendment in American law and culture between the 1870s and the 1920s thoroughly undermines this view. By canvassing various free speech controversies over the course of half a century, analyzing the legal system’s response to them, and probing the philosophical underpinnings of that response, Rabban presents a new paradigm for the development of our First Amendment freedoms. Rabban’s thesis is that prior to WW I there were numerous controversies eliciting social debate and judicial application of free speech principles. These controversies show, on the one hand, that throughout the fifty year period prior to WW I, America’s dominant culture was fairly speech repressive. On the other hand, these controversies show the emergence of a “libertarian radical” subculture that denied government power to proscribe speech on any subject (p. 3). Rabban’s claim is that after WW I, the dominant culture became more protective of speech, but never to the extent of the prewar libertarians. Influenced by Progressive Era social thought emphasizing the importance of the interchange of ideas for democratic self-government, postwar changes in First Amendment freedoms focused on protecting political speech, not speech generally. We are not aware of these changes, Rabban writes, because part of the Progressives’ campaign to establish broader protections for political speech involved denying the existence of both aspects of the prewar tradition. The Progressives’ strategic denial of that multifaceted tradition was so successful that it eventually became the standard history of free speech. In the first four chapters, Rabban demonstrates his views on First Amendment freedoms before WW I through a study of the prosecution and defense of Gilded Age and Progressive Era sex, labor, and political radicals. He also [End Page 743] canvasses laws regulating political campaigns and public speaking, as well as litigation over libel, slander, and contempt of court. Gilded Age and Progressive Era sex radicals included advocates of free love, gender equality, and birth control. Labor and political radicals included advocates of syndicalism and anarchism. In the fifty years between 1870 and 1920, the national, state, and local governments routinely prosecuted these radicals for their speeches and writings. The national government prosecuted proponents of increased sexual freedom under the Comstock Act of 1873 which banned “obscene” material from the mail. Successful prosecutions under the Act included the suppression of Medical Common Sense, the most popular medical text of its time, because of its discussion of contraceptive methods and devices. Under the act, postal officials also censored Margaret Sanger’s discussion of venereal disease in a newspaper column entitled “What Every Girl Should Know.” State and local governments imprisoned advocates of anarchism and syndicalism under a variety of laws, and the national government frequently deported them under provisions of the Alien Immigration Act, enacted in 1903 in response to President McKinley’s assassination. Imprisonment and deportation were imposed for discussions of anarchism and syndicalism devoid of any incitement to violent action. As Rabban’s study of the Industrial Workers of the World speech fights shows, advocates of politically unpopular causes were regularly arrested before they even had begun to speak, sometimes merely for setting their soap boxes on what we today would consider public fora. Mainstream political expression was subject to the same panoply of repressive laws, as Thomas Patterson, United States senator from Colorado and editor of Rocky Mountain News, discovered when he published a series of articles criticizing the Colorado Supreme Court for a decision invalidating Denver’s home rule powers. Patterson was fined $1,000 for criminal contempt of court in a proceeding that did not allow him to prove truth as a defense. Not only did the offended Colorado Court uphold his conviction, but so did the United States...

Free Speech in Its Forgotten Years

Introduction 1. The lost tradition of libertarian radicalism 2. The IWW free speech fights 3. The courts and free speech 4. Legal scholarship 5. Free speech in progressive social thought 6. The Espionage Act 7. World War I and the creation of the modern Civil Liberties Movement 8. Holmes, Brandeis, and the judicial transformation of the First Amendment after World War I 9. Epilogue: current parallels to prewar progressive thought.

Free speech in its forgotten years

Free speech in its forgotten years

"That's When We Were Marching for Jobs": Black Teachers and the Early Civil Rights Movement in Milwaukee

“That's when we were marching for jobs … They didn't even have the first black teacher then.” —Calvin Moody, Black politician, on Milwaukee civil rights activism in the 1940s The 1930s and 1940s pose a challenge to historians of the civil rights era, since these decades are still the “forgotten years.” Most accounts of the movement focus on the tumultuous events of the mid-1950s through the mid-1960s: the mass boycotts, sit-ins, and protest marches which mobilized thousands of African Americans. Thus civil rights historians commonly draw upon the 1930s and 1940s only to set the stage, merely a preface to more important events yet to come.

Free Speech in Its Forgotten Years

Free Speech in Its Forgotten Years

Dreams of stability: Mexican political thought during the ‘forgotten years’. 1 An analysis of the beliefs of the creole intelligentsia (1821 – 1853) 2

Dreams of stability: Mexican political thought during the ‘forgotten years’. 1 An analysis of the beliefs of the creole intelligentsia (1821 – 1853) 2

Dreams of Stability: Mexican Political Thought During the ‘Forgotten Years?1 An Analysis of the Beliefs of the Creole Intelligentsia (1821–1853)2

Dreams of Stability: Mexican Political Thought During the ‘Forgotten Years?¹ An Analysis of the Beliefs of the Creole Intelligentsia (1821–1853)²

God's aristocracy: Daniel Henry Deniehy's vision of a great Australian republic

Daniel Henry Deniehy (1828–65) left Sydney in May 1854 to practise as a solicitor in Goulbum. Two days after his arrival there, he wrote to a friend that he would ‘ere long return to Sydney ... leading the van of a Republican “opposition” in the legislature, and scattering dismay in the camp of the Philistines ...’. Deniehy did eventually return to Sydney as the member for the (Goulburn) electorate of Argyle in 1857. But the youthful currency lad would ultimately prove no match for those who dominated the early sessions of parliament. In this article I will concentrate not on his parliamentary career, but on the ‘forgotten years’ in Goulburn before his election to parliament when Deniehy had, in his own words, ‘command’ over the editorial pages of the Goulburn Herald. These extraordinary editorials represent the most imposing series of visionary and iconoclastic statements in the history of Australian republicanism. The quality of contemporary debate on ‘Australia's Republican Question’ will undoubtedly b...

State and Society in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Egypt

List of plates Preface Note on transliteration, dates, and references Introduction: the forgotten years Part I. The Ottoman-Egyptian Elite in the Middle of the Nineteenth Century: Introduction 1. Dissent and opposition 2. Creation of a dynastic order 3. The mainstay of dynastic order - the elite 4. The realities of office holding 5. The demon-image of Abbas Pasa: evidence and counter-evidence 6. The demon-image as a product of elite culture Part II. The Social Divide and the Life of the Lower Strata: Introduction 7. The great social divide in Egyptian society 8. The rural squeeze - pressure and resistance in the countryside 9. Rural migrants and urban attitudes 10. The urban squeeze 11. The network of urban control 12. The use of unappropriated time Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index.

Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement

Most historians would agree that the modern civil rights movement did not begin with the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board ofEducation. Yet all too often the movement's history has been written as if events before the mid-1950s constituted a kind of prehistory, important only insofar as they laid the legal and political foundation for the spectacular advances that came later. Those were the forgotten years of the Negro Revolution, wrote one historian; they were the seed time of racial and legal metamorphosis, according to another. But such a periodization profoundly underestimates the tempo and misjudges the social dynamic of the freedom struggle.1 The civil rights era began, dramatically and decisively, in the early 1940s when the social structure of black America took on an increasingly urban, proletarian character. A predominantly southern rural and small town population was soon transformed into one of the most urban of all major ethnic groups. More than two million blacks migrated to northern and western industrial areas during the 1940s, while another million moved from farm to city within the South. Northern black voters doubled their numbers between 1940 and 1948, and in the eleven states of the Old South black registration more than quadrupled, reaching over one million by 1952. Likewise, membership in the National Association for the Advancement

Farnham Castle:the forgotten years. By P. D. Brooks

Farnham Castle:the forgotten years. By P. D. Brooks

The First Amendment in Its Forgotten Years

The First Amendment in Its Forgotten Years

Before Integration: The Forgotten Years of Jim Crow Education in Boston

In 1846, subcommittee of Primary School Committee and three years later special committee of Grammar School Board -the two agencies with plenary oversight of public education Boston-issued two long reports response to petitions from black parents opposed to exclusive schools. In first, Negro parents charged the establishment of exclusive denied them equal privileges; deprived them of harmonizing, socializing influence... of integrated education; and was an unnecessary municipal expense, unlawful, and. . . if not intention, fact, insulting. Exclusive schools, Charles Sumner told state's highest court 1849, were unequal, practical inconvenience, a violation of equality and in nature of Caste.' In reply to these charges, both reports repeatedly emphasized what their authors obviously believed was significant point of rebuttal, and one too frequently overlooked, namely, that these Schools were established at urgent and repeated requests of colored people themselves.' ' We did not originate system, one report protested, the system has grown up without help of law . . . , and the only reference to separate schools for colored children, on municipal Records of Boston, is mention of fact colored people themselves petitioned for them, and, on

La naissance de la télévision au Québec. 1949-1953

The birth of Québec television 1949-1953 In Canada, the history of television is like a pregnancy ; the period preceding birth, although apparently uneventful, is at least of equal importance as the moment of birth itself. Rediscovering the beginnings of the French network of Canadian television, the author describes these historical moments which were to determine the living conditions and the life style of Radio-Canada. First he describes the three years period (1949-1951) in which the technical means of production and distribution were set up. Then follows the experimental stage (January-September 1952) which saw the launching of a great number of "premiers". Finally, the author recalls briefly the first shaky but decisive steps taken by the Québec television industry (September 6th 1952 — January 1953). In all, three forgotten years in the history of Québec television but whose determining influence cannot be overstated.

Enjoying Preadolescence: The Forgotten Years

Enjoying Preadolescence: The Forgotten Years

The "Forgotten Years" of the Negro Revolution

A RECENT president of American Sociological Society addressed himself to a puzzling question about what we know as Civil Rights Revolution: Why did social scientists-and sociologists in particular-not foresee explosion of collective action of Negro Americans toward full integration into American society? He pointed out that is vigor and urgency of Negro demand that is new, not its direction or supporting ideas.' Without arguing further, lack of knowledge can be attributed to two groups-the ahistorical social scientists, and historians who, until recently, have neglected modern Negro history. search for a watershed in recent Negro history ends at years that comprised World War II, 1939-1945. James Baldwin has written of this period: The treatment accorded Negro during Second World War marks, for me, a in Negro's relation to America. To put it briefly, and somewhat too simply, a certain hope died, a certain respect for white Americans faded.'2 Writing during World War II, Gunnar Myrdal predicted that war would act as a stimulant to Negro protest, and he felt that There is bound to be a redefinition of Negro's status in America as a result of this War.3 Negro sociologist E. Franklin Frazier states that World War II marked where The Negro was no longer willing to accept discrimination in employment and in housing without protest.' '4 Charles E. Silberman writes that war was a turning point in American race relations, in which the seeds of

Herbert Hoovers Forgotten Years

Business Archives and HistoryVolume 3, Issue 1 p. 53-70 Article Herbert Hoovers Forgotten Years Geoffrey Blainey, Geoffrey BlaineySearch for more papers by this author Geoffrey Blainey, Geoffrey BlaineySearch for more papers by this author First published: 01 January 1963 https://doi.org/10.1111/aehr.31003Citations: 9AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume3, Issue1January 1963Pages 53-70 RelatedInformation