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  • From the Palmer Raids to the Patriot Act: A History of the Fight for Free Speech in America
  • Matthew May
From the Palmer Raids to the Patriot Act: A History of the Fight for Free Speech in America. By Christopher M. Finan. Boston: Beacon Press, 2007; pp ix + 348. $25.95 cloth; $18.00 paper.

From the Palmer Raids to the Patriot Act offers a grassroots history of the fight for freedom of speech as told by one of the struggle's active participants, Christopher M. Finan, Chair of the National Coalition Against Censorship, President of the American Booksellers' Foundation for Freedom of Expression, and Trustee of the Freedom to Read Foundation. Admittedly inspired by Judge Learned Hand's famous 1944 proclamation that "liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it," Finan draws on a wealth of primary and secondary sources to argue throughout the book that "free speech depends on the courage of the individuals who fight for their rights" (305). The book should be of great interest to scholars of public communication as a corrective of traditional studies of the freedom of expression that tend to frame the evolution of First Amendment jurisprudence as the result of forward-thinking Supreme Court Justices. Without downplaying the role of the Supreme Court, Finan demonstrates the singular importance of organizing, strategy, and struggle in the liberalization of cultural attitudes, policy, and opinions of the Court pertaining to the First Amendment.

The book is organized chronologically according to historical periods of significant moments in First Amendment–related struggles. It draws on a mélange of insider information on free speech activism, policy analysis, and reflection on the historical transformation of common sense notions of civil liberties. Finan is strongest when analyzing how the strategic choices of early civil libertarian freedom fighters shaped the organizational and cultural attitudes of the struggle. For example, the first and second chapters explain the [End Page 130] first red scare and the early organizational evolution of the American Union Against Militarism into the American Civil Liberties Union. Perhaps to the surprise of some, Finan demonstrates the centrality of labor struggles to the early organizational choices of the ACLU. To his credit, Finan reminds us of the naiveté of some of ACLU founder Roger Baldwin's early attempts to intervene in union politics. For example, at the urging of Baldwin, in 1921 the executive board of the ACLU adopted a plan whose "chief weapon would be publicity … [by] send[ing] 'a few well known liberals' to challenge restrictions on union meetings in the Pennsylvania coal fields, where their arrests 'would dramatize the situation effectively'" (46). The strategy, a modified version of what the Industrial Workers of the World had pioneered over a decade earlier, proved ineffective for United Mine Workers in Mingo County, on whose behalf the publicity model had been deployed until their strike was lost in 1922. Despite these early missteps, the strength of the ACLU during its formative years, Finan argues, was not workplace organizing but forging spaces in public discourse for deliberation about free speech in American democracy.

After laying the groundwork of the twentieth-century fight for free speech, Finan presses quickly through history, describing fights against censorship and to secure artistic freedom. The author's analysis of the second red scare is a surprising tour de force of insight into the culture of postwar paranoia. Moving beyond obscenity and sedition to social justice, Finan explains in chapter 6—which borrows its title, Let the Sunshine In, from The Fifth Dimension—that by 1964, "the civil rights movement had used every form of protest to make its point: there had been boycotts, sit-ins, marches, rallies, and even paid newspaper advertisements … [which] inspired admiration throughout the country" (215–16). Finan describes how this culture of protest transformed Students for a Democratic Society, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, and the antiwar movement which, in turn, would play a role in liberalizing broader cultural attitudes toward freedom of speech. A case study of the antipornography movement provides a springboard for analysis of cultural and policy reaction to the liberalizations...

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