Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 January 2019
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.
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.
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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”).
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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(who had vetoed the original bill, which was then signed by his successor Nathan L. Miller), the public school law was repealed.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.
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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.
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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): 1–123CrossRefGoogle 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): 277–329Google 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): 41–42Google 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): 7–11, 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): 1–183Google 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).