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AGAINST INTOLERANCE: THE RED SCARE ROOTS OF LEGAL LIBERALISM

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 January 2019

Laura Weinrib*
Affiliation:
University of Chicago

Abstract

This article argues that important antecedents of post-New Deal American liberalism emerged in response to the First Red Scare. As war hysteria gave way to patent antiradicalism, the pervasiveness of peacetime state-sponsored repression undermined progressive confidence in administrative governance and generated support for so-called personal rights. At the same time, the suppression of meaningful labor activity during the early 1920s buttressed conservative confidence in the judiciary and emboldened lawyers and business advocates to oppose state policing of putatively private beliefs. The result was increasing convergence around a new liberalism, defined against “intolerance,” which laid the groundwork for judicial enforcement of free speech and minority rights.

Type
Special Forum
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2019 

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Footnotes

I am grateful to the Herbert and Marjorie Fried Faculty Fund for support. For helpful suggestions, many thanks to Adam J. Hodges, Aziz Huq, Genevieve Lakier, Martha Nussbaum, James Gray Pope, Eric Posner, and Geoffrey Stone. This article benefited from comments by workshop participants at the University of Chicago Law School, Harvard Law School, and Yale Law School. I am grateful to the Herbert and Marjorie Fried Faculty Fund for support.

References

NOTES

1 “The Red Hysteria,” New Republic, Jan. 28, 1920.

2 In these outlets, the two terms were often used interchangeably during this period. See, for example, Herbert Croly, “The Eclipse of Progressivism,” New Republic, Oct. 27, 1920 (referring to the “eclipse of liberalism or progressivism”).

3 See, for example, “Says Liberalism is in Eclipse Here,” New York Times, Nov. 10, 1923.

4 See Rotunda, Ronald D., The Politics of Language: Liberalism as Word and Symbol (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986), 3251Google Scholar.

5 “Leading Americans Discuss Liberalism,” American Hebrew, Sept. 18, 1925, 540 (entry by Nicholas Murray Butler).

6 For recent examples, see Fawcett, Edmund, Liberalism: The Life of an Idea (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014)Google Scholar; Bell, Duncan, “What is Liberalism?,” Political Theory 42 (2014): 682715CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rosenblatt, Helena, The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018)Google Scholar.

7 Brinkley, Alan, End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 8Google Scholar.

8 The association of the term “liberal” with anti-statist policy preferences subsequently considered “conservative” predated the appropriation of the label by progressives in the late 1910s, which developed in response to British new liberalism as well as a rising sentiment that Theodore Roosevelt had tainted the meaning of progressivism. See Rotunda, Politics of Language, 38–41; Brinkley, End of Reform, 8–10.

9 See Filene, Peter, “An Obituary for the Progressive Movement,” American Quarterly 22 (1970): 2034CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rodgers, Daniel T., “In Search of Progressivism,” Reviews in American History 10 (Dec. 1982): 113–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Some regarded unions as necessary counterweights to concentrated employer power, while others regarded them as divisive entities that were incompatible with class reconciliation. See Eisenach, Eldon J., The Lost Promise of Progressivism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994)Google Scholar; Fink, Leon, Progressive Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Democratic Commitment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1997)Google Scholar; Stromquist, Shelton, Re-inventing “The People”: The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Wunderlin, Clarence E., Visions of a New Industrial Order: Social Science and Labor Theory in America's Progressive Era (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

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12 Allit, Patrick, The Conservatives: Ideas and Personalities Throughout American History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 126–57Google Scholar.

13 “Says Liberalism is in Eclipse Here,” New York Times, Nov. 10, 1923 (quoting Nicholas Murray Butler).

14 Tufts, James H., “The Legal and Social Philosophy of Mr. Justice Holmes,” ABA Journal 7 (1921): 359–63, 361Google Scholar.

15 “Liberalism: The Gospel of the Open Mind,” American Hebrew, Sept. 18, 1925, 535.

16 “Leading Americans Discuss Liberalism,” American Hebrew, Sept. 18, 1925, 540 (entry by Wisconsin governor John J. Blaine). Blaine, a Republican, submitted the resolution proposing a twenty-first amendment to repeal prohibition.

17 “Says Liberalism is in Eclipse Here.”

18 See, for example, Kornhauser, Anne M., Debating the American State: Liberal Anxieties and the New Leviathan, 1930–1970 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 34Google Scholar. For Southern Democrats, conversely, endorsement of state power was conditioned on the suspension rather than conferral of civil rights to African Americans. See Katznelson, Ira, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: Liveright, 2013)Google Scholar.

19 Karl, Barry Dean, The Uneasy State: The United States from 1915 to 1945 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Ernst, Daniel R., Tocqueville's Nightmare: The Administrative State Emerges in America, 1900–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On subsequent efforts to reform rather than dismantle the administrative state, see Grisinger, Joanna L., The Unwieldy American State: Administrative Politics Since the New Deal (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Scholarship since Skowronek, Stephen, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities 1877–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, has documented a robust federal power during the nineteenth century. See, for example, Novak, William J., The People's Welfare: Law and Regulation in Late-Nineteenth Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Nelson, William E., The Roots of American Bureaucracy, 1830–1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982)Google Scholar; Mashaw, Jerry L., “Federal Administration and Administrative Law in the Gilded Age,” Yale Law Journal 119 (2010): 13621472Google Scholar; Parrillo, Nicholas R., Against the Profit Motive: The Salary Revolution in American Government, 1780–1940 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rao, Gautham, National Duties: Custom Houses and the Making of the American State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Other scholars have resisted this reperiodization, arguing that the modern administrative state emerged only during the 1930s, e.g., Kornhauser, Debating the American State, or even World War II, e.g., Sparrow, James T., Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011)Google Scholar, and never completely supplanted older models of governance, e.g., Tani, Karen, States of Dependency: Welfare, Rights, and American Governance, 1935–1972 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 In legal scholarship, the New Deal settlement is conventionally dated to footnote four of United States v. Carolene Products Company, 304 U.S. 144, 152 n.4 (1938). See, for example, Ackerman, Bruce, We the People (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1991), 105–30Google Scholar; Balkin, Jack M., “The Footnote,” Northwestern University Law Review 83 (1989): 275320Google Scholar; Gillman, Howard, “Preferred Freedoms: The Progressive Expansion of State Power and the Rise of Modern Civil Liberties Jurisprudence,” Political Research Quarterly 47 (1994): 623–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; White, G. Edward, The Constitution and the New Deal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 128–64, 227–32Google Scholar.

22 Gerstle, Gary, “The Protean Character of American Liberalism,” American Historical Review 99 (Oct. 1994): 1043–73, 1045CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Brinkley, End of Reform, 10. Richard Hofstadter famously regarded the New Deal as a “drastic new departure … in the history of American reformism,” distinct from its progressive precursor in its rejection of moralism. Hofstadter, Richard, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Knopf, 1955), 303Google Scholar.

24 Schiller, Reuel, Forging Rivals: Race, Class, Law, and the Collapse of Postwar Liberalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 40CrossRefGoogle Scholar. There were, of course, antecedents to the race-based civil rights claims of the post-New Deal period, but on the whole they were narrow in scope and weakly resonant among progressives. See, for example, Klarman, Michael J., “Race and the Court in the Progressive Era,” Vanderbilt Law Review 51 (May 1998): 881952Google Scholar; Goluboff, Risa Lauren, The Lost Promise of Civil Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 8 (“Before the late 1930s, federal civil rights litigation held out little promise for African Americans”). For a contrasting view, see Francis, Megan Ming, Civil Rights and the Making of the Modern American State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the new salience of civil rights during the 1930s, see Sitkoff, Harvard, A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978)Google Scholar.

25 On the role of totalitarianism, see Ciepley, David, Liberalism in the Shadow of Totalitarianism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2006)Google Scholar; Nelson, William Edward, The Legalist Reformation: Law, Politics, and Ideology in New York, 1920–1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Fiss, Owen, “The Idea of Political Freedom” in Looking Back at Law’s Century, ed. Sarat, Austin, Garth, Bryant, and Kagan, Robert A. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 3557Google Scholar; Primus, Richard, The American Language of Rights (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Purcell, Edward, The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1973)Google Scholar. Constitutionalism and judicial review have long been regarded as central to American liberalism. See, for example, Hartz, Louis, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harvest, 1955)Google Scholar, 9 (linking Americans’ “fixed dogmatic liberalism” to the “unusual power of the Supreme Court and the cult of Constitution worship on which it rests”); Kalman, Laura, The Strange Career of Legal Liberalism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 2027Google Scholar.

26 Graham, Otis L. Jr., An Encore for Reform: The Old Progressives and the New Deal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967)Google Scholar emphasized the relatively minor contribution of prewar progressives to New Deal liberalism. Other work has illuminated significant connections. See, for example, Rodgers, Daniel T., Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1998), 594–95Google Scholar n.11 (noting, however, that “not all progressives rallied to the New Deal,” and that the “continuity of proposals and the continuity of persons were inevitably two different things”); Tobin, Eugene M., Organize or Perish: America's Independent Progressives, 1913–1933 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986)Google Scholar.

27 Norman Hapgood, “Liberalism: Live and Let live,” American Hebrew, Sept. 18, 1925, 537.

28 Thomas Hardwick to Roger Baldwin, July 28, 1930, in American Civil Liberties Union Records, The Roger Baldwin Years, 1917–1950, Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Public Policy Papers, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ (ACLU Papers), reel 71, vol. 384.

29 Roger Baldwin, “Memorandum on the South as Observed in a Trip in May and June 1920,”ACLU Papers, reel 23, vol. 166; see also Pickens, William, Lynching and Debt Slavery (New York: American Civil Liberties Union, 1921)Google Scholar, 1. See also Smith, Rogers M., Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997)Google Scholar, 413 (arguing that the dominant, “centrist” strand of progressivism “increasingly agreed on the importance of cultural homogeneity” and that a more pluralist conception did not “come close to prevailing during the Progressive years”). On the new salience of civil rights during the 1930s, see Sitkoff, Harvard, A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978)Google Scholar.

30 “Leading Americans Discuss Liberalism,” American Hebrew, Sept. 18, 1925, 540 (entry by Arizona governor George W. P. Hunt). I take up other aspects of this transformation in Weinrib, Laura, The Taming of Free Speech: America's Civil Liberties Compromise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 See, for example, Montgomery, David, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 387410CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brody, David, Labor in Crisis: The Steel Strike of 1919 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1965)Google Scholar; Kerr, Austin K., American Railroad Politics, 1914–1920: Rates, Wages, and Efficiency (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1968), 204–27Google Scholar; Murray, Robert K., Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919–1920 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955), 122–34Google Scholar.

32 See generally Kennedy, David M., Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980)Google Scholar.

33 See Kennedy, Over Here, 59–63; Zieger, Robert, America's Great War: World War I and the American Experience (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 7884Google Scholar; Vaughn, Stephen, Holding Fast the Inner Lines: Democracy, Nationalism, and the Committee on Public Information (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980)Google Scholar.

34 “Victor Berger: Hearings Before the Special Committee,” 19.

35 See, for example, Marchand, C. Roland, The American Peace Movement and Social Reform, 1898–1918 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), 244–48Google Scholar; Weinstein, James, The Decline of Socialism in America, 1912–1925 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967)Google Scholar, ch. 3; Kazin, Michael, War Against War: The American Fight for Peace (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017)Google Scholar. On suppression of the IWW during World War I, see Dubofsky, Melvyn, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969), 438531Google Scholar; Preston, William Jr., Aliens and Dissenters: Federal Suppression of Radicals, 1903–1933 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 88117Google Scholar.

36 Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, 376–97; Weinrib, Taming of Free Speech, ch. 3.

37 Resolution, ACLU Papers, reel 1, vol. 3.

38 Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616, 630 (1919); Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47 (1919); Debs v. United States, 249 U.S. 211 (1919).

39 Stone, Geoffrey R., Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 183–91Google Scholar; Johnson, Donald, Challenge to American Freedoms: World War I and the Rise of the American Civil Liberties Union (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1963), 9798Google Scholar; Murphy, Paul, World War I and the Origin of Civil Liberties in the United States (New York, 1979), 80, 98103Google Scholar; Rabban, David M., Free Speech in Its Forgotten Years, 1870–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 250–55Google Scholar; Scheiber, Harry, The Wilson Administration and Civil Liberties (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1960)Google Scholar.

40 Sedition Act of 1918, 40 Stat. 553 (1918).

41 Norman Thomas, “War's Heretics,” Survey, Dec. 7, 1918, p. 319–23, 323.

42 See generally Kennedy, Over Here; Capozzola, Christopher, Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43 Literature on the NCLB and early ACLU includes Johnson, Donald, Challenge to American Freedoms: World War I and the Rise of the American Civil Liberties Union (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1963)Google Scholar; Walker, Samuel, In Defense of American Liberties: A History of the ACLU (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Cottrell, Robert, Roger Nash Baldwin and the American Civil Liberties Union (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Witt, John Fabian, Patriots and Cosmopolitans: Hidden Histories of American Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, ch. 3.

44 Joseph Byers to Roger Baldwin, June 25, 1918, ACLU Papers, reel 3, vol. 26, 151.

45 Civil Liberties Bureau to the editor of the New York Tribune, Aug. 28, 1917, ACLU Papers, reel 3, vol. 18

46 William English Walling to L. Hollingsworth Wood, Jan. 7, 1918, ACLU Papers, reel 3, vol. 24. See Weinrib, Taming of Free Speech, ch. 2; Weinrib, Laura M., “Freedom of Conscience in War Time: World War I and the Limits of Civil Liberties,” Emory Law Journal 65 (2016): 10511137Google Scholar.

47 On “slackers,” see Capozzola, Uncle Sam, 30.

48 “The Liberals Wake Up,” New York Call, Mar. 24, 1919.

49 Editorial paragraph, Nation, Nov. 8, 1920.

50 McCartin, Joseph A., Labor's Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912–1921 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

51 Dubofsky, Melvyn, The State and Labor in Modern America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1994), 72Google Scholar; Montgomery, Fall of the House of Labor, 442–46.

52 Montgomery, Fall of the House of Labor, 388–89.

53 Avrich, Paul, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1991), 137–59Google Scholar.

54 Murray, Red Scare, 80.

55 Murray, Red Scare, 77–79, 193–200; Coben, Stanley, A. Mitchell Palmer: Politician (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), 215–21Google Scholar.

56 Berger v. United States, 255 U.S. 22 (1921). See Murray, Red Scare, 227–29.

57 On the Overman Committee, see Schmidt, Regin, Red Scare: FBI and the Origins of Anticommunism in the United States, 1919–1943 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2000), 136–46Google Scholar.

58 On New York's Lusk Committee, see Pfannestiel, Todd J., Rethinking the Red Scare: The Lusk Committee and New York's Crusade against Radicalism, 1919–1923 (New York: Routledge, 2003)Google Scholar.

59 Stevenson, Archibald E., “The World War and Freedom of Speech,” review of Freedom of Speech (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920)Google Scholar, by Zechariah Chafee, New York Times, Feb. 13, 1921; see also Stevenson, Archibald E., “Circular” in Civil Liberty, ed. Phelps, Edith M. (New York: Wilson, 1927), 150Google Scholar. On the Seattle general strike see Friedhem, Robert L., The Seattle General Strike (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964)Google Scholar.

60 Dubofsky, State and Labor, 76–79.

61 Roger Baldwin to Fay Lewis, Jan. 30, 1918, ACLU Papers, reel 5, vol. 39; see also Grubbs, Frank L. Jr., The Struggle for Labor Loyalty: Gompers, the A. F. of L., and the Pacifists, 1917–1920 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1968)Google Scholar.

62 “Labor Federation Demands Death of Sedition Bill,” Public Ledger (Philadelphia), June 21, 1919 (quoting John Fitzpatrick).

63 Resolution Adopted by the Annual Convention of the American Federation of Labor, Atlantic City, June 1919, ACLU Papers, reel 7, vol. 69.

64 Gompers v. Buck's Stove and Range Co., 221 U.S. 418 (1911).

65 “Police Unions in Thirty-Seven Cities,” New York Times, Sept. 14, 1919 (quoting Wilson). On the steel strike, see Brody, Labor in Crisis. On the Boston strike, see Slater, Joseph, “Public Workers: Labor and the Boston Police Strike of 1919,” Labor History 38 (1989): 727Google Scholar.

66 Brody, Labor in Crisis, 60–77.

67 Murray, Red Scare, 135–65.

68 Croly, “Eclipse of Progressivism.”

69 Murray, Red Scare, 105.

70 Ibid., 239–62.

71 State officials fell back on such laws when efforts to enact explicit antistrike and antipicketing laws were unsuccessful. Murphy, Paul L., The Meaning of Freedom of Speech: First Amendment Freedoms from Wilson to FDR (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Co., 1972), 42Google Scholar; see also Preston, Aliens and Dissenters.

72 See generally Pfannestiel, Rethinking the Red Scare. The committee was named for State Senator Clayton R. Lusk.

73 Albert De Silver, “Freedom of Speech” (Review), World Tomorrow, Feb. 1921, 56.

74 On interwar efforts to grapple with the expansion of administrative power, see Ernst, Tocqueville's Nightmare; Ernst, Daniel R., “Ernst Freund, Felix Frankfurter, and the American Rechtstaat: A Transatlantic Shipwreck, 1894–1932,” Studies in American Political Development 23 (2009): 171–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tushnet, Mark, “Administrative Law in the 1930s: The Supreme Court’s Accommodation of Progressive Legal Theory,” Duke Law Journal 60 (2011): 15651637Google Scholar.

75 Philip Willett to Roger Baldwin, Aug. 21, 1917, ACLU Papers, reel 5, vol. 35.

76 Pound, Roscoe, “Interests of Personality” (pt. 2), Harvard Law Review 28 (1915): 445–56, 453–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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78 Weinrib, “Freedom of Conscience in War Time.”

79 Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905).

80 For a provocative response to the “persistent progressive critique of law versus the state,” see Novak, William J., “The Legal Origins of the Modern American State,” in Looking Back at Law's Century, eds. Sarat, Austin, Garth, Bryan, and Kagan, Robert A. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 249–86, 252Google Scholar. The extent to which the Lochner-era judiciary in fact inhibited progressive legislation is, of course, contested. See, for example, Gillman, Howard, The Constitution Besieged: The Rise and Demise of Lochner Era Police Powers Jurisprudence (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

81 Kessler, Jeremy, “The Administrative Origins of Modern Civil Liberties Law,” Columbia Law Review 114 (2014): 10831166Google Scholar.

82 “Assails Wilson as an Autocrat,” New York Times, Sept. 4, 1918 (quoting Lawrence Yates Sherman).

83 For example, Smith, Walter George, “Civil Liberty in America,” ABA Journal 4 (1918): 551–66Google Scholar.

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85 Judah Leon Magnes, The Old American and the New (New York: ACLU, 1920) (address of Feb. 8, 1920).

86 “Danger Ahead,” Nation, Feb. 8, 1919.

87 Wilson, Woodrow, The Triumph of Ideals: Speeches, Messages and Addresses Made by the President Between February 24, 1919, and July 8, 1919, Covering the Active Period of the Peace Conference at Paris (New York: Harper, 1919), 78Google Scholar.

88 “The Liberals Wake Up,” New York Call, Mar. 24, 1919.

89 Murray, Red Scare, 140.

90 Swinburn Hale, “The Force and Violence Joker,” New Republic, Jan. 21, 1920.

91 “Albany's Ousted Socialists,” Literary Digest, Jan. 24, 1920, 19; Brief of Special Committee Appointed by the Association of the Bar of the City of New York (New York, 1920), 41.

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94 NCLB, “This Little Story is Entitled ‘God Bless the Lusk Committee,” Jan. 28, 1920, in Records of the American Civil Liberties Union, Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore, PA, box 1.

95 59 Congressional Record 4685 (Joseph I. France, Mar. 22, 1920).

96 “The Degradation of Teaching,” Nation, Dec. 7, 1921, 639.

97 “New York Editors’ View on Election,” New York Times, Nov. 8, 1922 (quoting New York World). In May 1923, at the urging of newly re-elected governor Al Smith (who had vetoed the original bill, which was then signed by his successor Nathan L. Miller), the public school law was repealed. So was the private school licensing law, despite a split decision by New York's intermediate court upholding its constitutionality against a due process challenge.

98 National Popular Government League, Report upon the Illegal Practices of the United States Department of Justice (Washington, DC, 1920)Google Scholar.

99 Ibid., 3–4.

100 On the Committee of Forty-Eight, see Glad, Paul W., “Progressives and the Business Culture of the 1920s,” Journal of American History 53 (1966): 7589CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tobin, Organize or Perish, 101–24.

101 “Platforms for Progressives,” New Republic, Dec. 31, 1919, 133–35. Notably, the authors praised the Plumb Plan for the federal ownership and cooperative operation of the railroads as an alternative model. On the Plumb Plan, see Foner, Philip, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, vol. 8, Postwar Struggles, 1918–1920 (New York: International Publishers, 1987), 1619Google Scholar.

102 William Hard, “Where are the Pre-War Radicals?,” Survey, Feb. 1, 1926, 559. On the early administrative accommodation of business interests, see Herring, E. Pendleton, “Politics, Personalities, and the Federal Trade Commission, I,” American Political Science Review 28 (1934): 1016–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Himmelberg, Robert F., “The War Industries Board and the Antitrust Question in November 1918,” Journal of American History 52 (1965): 5974CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cuff, Robert D., “Woodrow Wilson and Business-Government Relations During World War I,” Review of Politics 31 (1969): 385407CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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104 Among progressives, early efforts to constrain administrative actors for the purposes of securing civil liberties focused on postal and customs censorship in addition to immigration. See Weinrib, Laura M., “The Sex Side of Civil Liberties: United States v. Dennett and the Changing Face of Free Speech,” Law and History Review 30 (2012): 325–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

105 National Popular Government League, Report upon the Illegal Practices, 7.

106 Angell, Norman, Why Freedom Matters (New York: National Civil Liberties Bureau, 1918), 29Google Scholar.

107 See Murphy, Origin of Civil Liberties, 179–247; Geoffrey R. Stone, “The Origins of the Bad Tendency Test: Free Speech in Wartime,” Supreme Court Review 2002: 411–53.

108 Colyer v. Skeffington, 265 F. 17 (D. Mass., 1920). On Colyer v. Skeffington, see Smith, Donald L., Zechariah Chafee Jr., Defender of Liberty and Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 4750CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jeremy Kessler, “Administrative Origins,” 1152.

109 Skeffington v. Katzeff, 277 F. 129 (1st Cir. 1922)

110 Ernst Freund, “The Debs Case and Freedom of Speech,” New Republic, May 3, 1919, 13.

111 Chafee, Zechariah, “Freedom of Speech in War Time,” Harvard Law Review 32 (1919): 932–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See Rabban, Forgotten Years, 299–315; Healy, Thomas, The Great Dissent: How Oliver Wendell Holmes Changed His Mind—And Changed the History of Free Speech in America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2013)Google Scholar.

112 Chafee, “War Time,” 958–59.

113 Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616 (1919).

114 Dewey, John, “Liberty and Social Control,” Social Frontier 2 (1935): 4142Google Scholar.

115 Tufts, “The Legal and Social Philosophy of Mr. Justice Holmes,” 361. See Weinrib, Taming of Free Speech, ch. 4.

116 Corwin, Edward S., “Freedom of Speech and Press under the First Amendment: A Resume,” Yale Law Journal 30 (1920): 4855, 55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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118 Zechariah Chafee, Freedom of Speech, 3–6.

119 See Weinrib, Laura, “The Myth of the Modern First Amendment,” in The Free Speech Century (Bollinger, Lee C. & Stone, Geoffrey R., eds.) (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 4867Google Scholar.

120 Walter Nelles, Suggestions for Reorganization of the National Civil Liberties Bureau, undated, ACLU Papers, reel 16, vol. 120. See also ACLU, The Supreme Court vs. Civil Liberty (New York: ACLU, 1921) (reporting that the Supreme Court had “gone over to the side of reaction”).

121 Judson King (National Popular Government League) to Zechariah Chafee, July 30, 1921, in Zechariah Chafee Jr. Papers, 1898–1957, Harvard Law School Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, reel 2.

122 Mark Graber has demonstrated that some conservatives “recognize[d] a sphere of private mental conduct that was as inviolate as their cherished sphere of private commercial conduct.” See Graber, Transforming Free Speech, 19. During the late nineteenth century, a few went so far as to defend the speech rights of radicals. Nonetheless, “During World War I and the following red scare, [their] descendants introduced several new categories of speech that were beyond the pale of First Amendment protection,” including speech incompatible with military necessity and speech “attacking the principles of republican government.” Ibid., 45–46. On conservative libertarianism during the 1910s and 1920s, see also Bernstein, David, Rehabilitating Lochner: Defending Individual Rights against Progressive Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kersch, Kenneth I., Constructing Civil Liberties: Discontinuities in the Development of American Constitutional Law (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

123 Smith, Walter George, “Civil Liberty in America,” ABA Journal 4 (1918): 551–66, 551Google Scholar.

124 Norman Thomas, “War's Heretics: A Plea for the Conscientious Objector,” Survey, Aug. 4, 1917, 391–394, 393.

125 The tension between conservatives’ opposition to the centralization of state power and their relative indifference to suppression of dissenting speech during World War I is developed in Weinrib, Taming of Free Speech, ch. 2.

126 “Report of the Committee to Oppose Judicial Recall,” ABA Journal 4 (July 1918): 400.

127 For example, James A. Emery (general counsel, NAM), “Building a Political Platform for Industry,” American Industries 20 (1920): 36–38, 37; William H. King, “‘Bloc’ Menace in Law Making,” Nation's Business, November 1921, 11. Burgess and Judge George M. Borquin are important exceptions. See Graber, Transforming Free Speech, 39–40.

128 For a comprehensive overview of the revisionist literature, see Laura Kalman, “In Praise of Progressive Legal Historiography,” Law and History Review (forthcoming).

129 See generally Ernst, Daniel R., Lawyers against Labor: From Individual Rights to Corporate Liberalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Forbath, William E., Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Hattam, Victoria C., Labor Visions and State Power: The Origins of Business Unionism in the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tomlins, Christopher L., Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

130 See Ernst, Daniel, “The Yellow-Dog Contract and Liberal Reform, 1917–1932,” Labor History 30 (1989): 251–74, 268–270CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

131 For a contemporaneous account, see “Strikes and Boycotts” (note), Harvard Law Review 34 (1921): 880–88.

132 See, for example, Pope, James Gray, “The Thirteenth Amendment versus the Commerce Clause: Labor and the Shaping of American Constitutional Law, 1921–1958,” Columbia Law Review 102 (2002): 1123CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Other work exploring the differential treatment of labor tactics for constitutional purposes includes Estlund, Cynthia, “Labor Picketing and Commercial Speech: Free Enterprise Values in the Doctrine of Free Speech” (note), Yale Law Journal 91 (1982): 938–60Google Scholar; Schneider, Mark D., “Peaceful Labor Picketing and the First Amendment,” Columbia Law Review 82 (1982): 1469–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fisk, Catherine and Rutter, Jessica, “Labor Protest under the New First Amendment,” Berkeley Journal of Labor and Employment Law 36 (2015): 277329Google Scholar.

133 James A. Emery, May 18, 1915, United States Commission on Industrial Relations, Final Report and Testimony Submitted to Congress by the Commission on Industrial Relations, 11 volumes, 64th Congress, 1st session (Washington, DC, 1916), vol. 11, 10823.

134 Sen. William H. King, “‘Bloc’ Menace in Law Making,” Nation's Business, Nov. 1921, 11. On the internationalist origins of the early civil liberties movement, as well as the efforts of its subsequent leadership to distance the movement from an internationalist agenda, see Witt, Patriots and Cosmopolitans, ch. 3.

135 Current Events,” ABA Journal 6 (1920): 131–32Google Scholar.

136 Until Near v. Minnesota, 283 U.S. 697, 719 (1931), it was unclear whether a judicial order could serve as the basis for a First Amendment claim.

137 On the shift from private to state enforcement, see Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You.

138 Severance, Cordenio A., “The Constitution and Individualism,” ABA Journal 8 (1922): 535–42, 542Google Scholar (address at ABA annual meeting).

139 Dewey, John, “Liberty and Social Control,” Social Frontier 2 (1935): 4142Google Scholar.

140 “Gospel of the Open Mind—Editorial,” American Hebrew, Sept. 18, 1925: 535.

141 Burgess, John W., Recent Changes in American Constitutional Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1923), 26Google Scholar.

142 Abrams, 250 U.S. at 628 (Holmes, J., dissenting).

143 “Liberalism in Decay,” New York Times, Apr. 28, 1922.

144 Frankfurter, Felix and Greene, Nathan, The Labor Injunction (New York: Macmillan, 1930), 258Google Scholar; The Federated Shop Crafts Injunction,” ABA Journal 8 (1922): 624–25Google Scholar.

145 Duplex Printing Press Co. v. Deering, 254 U.S. 443 (1921); Truax v. Corrigan, 257 U.S. 312 (1921).

146 “Liberalism in Decay,” New York Times, Apr. 28, 1922.

147 “ACLU Statement on Civil Liberty Situation in America at Present,” Aug. 29, 1925, ACLU Papers, reel 41, vol. 285.

148 ACLU News Release, Apr. 1926, reel 46, vol. 303.

149 Roger Baldwin, “Civil Liberties in the United States,” 1926, ACLU Papers, reel 46, vol. 303. Scholarship linking the decline of class consciousness to the emergence of consumerism includes Ewen, Stuart, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture (New York: McGraw Hill, 1976)Google Scholar; Horowitz, Daniel, The Morality of Spending: Attitudes Toward the Consumer Society in America, 1875–1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985)Google Scholar.

150 Butler, Nicholas Murray, “The Changing Foundations of Government,” ABA Journal 8 (1922): 711, 10Google Scholar. On the role of Prohibition in shaping competing conservative and liberal attitudes to the administrative state, see Post, Robert, “Federalism, Positive Law, and the Emergence of the American Administrative State: Prohibition in the Taft Court Era,” William and Mary Law Review 48 (2006): 1183Google Scholar.

151 “Says Liberalism in Eclipse Here,” New York Times, Nov. 10, 1923. See also “Butler Denounces ‘New Barbarians,’” New York Times, June 4, 1925; “The True Liberalism,” New York Times, Dec. 25, 1926. On Butler's evolving views in the context of Prohibition and anti-evolution laws, among other issues, see Weinrib, “Freedom of Conscience in War Time,” 1117–20. Among the prominent threats to liberalism were anti-evolution laws (in particular, Scopes v. Tennessee), which, according to Roger Baldwin, had “opened the eyes of hundreds to the growth of intolerance and brought them into camp.” Scopes v. Tennessee, 152 Tenn. 424 (Tenn. 1925); Roger Baldwin, “Civil Liberties in the United States,” Fall 1926, ACLU papers, vol. 303.

152 “Karolyi Counsel Appeal to Coolidge,” New York Times, Nov. 23, 1925 (quoting Coolidge).

153 “The Red Assassins,” Washington Post, Jan. 4, 1920.

154 See, for example, Jacob H. Rubin, “Russia Ended Socialism for Me,” Nation's Business, Feb. 1924, 13.

155 Nation's Business, Feb. 1924, 9 (quoting Gompers). On the AFL, free speech, and anti-communism, see Luff, Jennifer, Commonsense Anticommunism: Labor and Civil Liberties between the World Wars (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

156 McCarty, “Protecting the Public,” 36.

157 The former position is perhaps most closely associated with Beard, Charles A., An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (New York: Macmillan Co., 1913)Google Scholar.

158 Butler, “Changing Foundations of Government,” 8.

159 McCarty, “Protecting the Public,” 36.

160 Weinrib, Taming of Free Speech; Laura M. Weinrib, “From Left to Rights: Civil Liberties Lawyering between the World Wars,” Law, Culture, and the Humanities, https://doi.org/10.1177/1743872116641871.

161 Proposed Reorganization of the Work for Civil Liberty, undated, ACLU Papers, reel 5, vol. 43.

162 For example, ACLU News Release, Apr. 1926, ACLU Papers, reel 46, vol. 303.

163 Forrest Bailey to Rev. Noah Cooper, June 15, 1925, ACLU Papers, reel 38, vol. 274.

164 Roger Baldwin to James P. Cannon (ILD), May 26, 1926, ACLU Papers, reel 46, vol. 303.

165 Roger Baldwin, “Civil Liberties in the United States,” Fall 1926, ACLU Papers, reel 46, vol. 303.

166 “Hughes Makes Plea for the Socialists,” New York Times, Jan. 21, 1920.

167 Hughes, Charles E., “Liberty and Law” (presidential address, Sept. 2, 1925), ABA Journal 11 (1925): 563–68, 564Google Scholar.

168 “Leading Americans Discuss Liberalism,” American Hebrew, Sept. 18, 1925, 540 (entry by Arizona governor George W. P. Hunt).

169 Ibid. (entry by New York governor Al Smith).

170 Ibid., 542 (entry by William Allen Neilson).