Freedom of speech has been a battleground between the Left and the Right for at least a century. Yet, in recent years, this conflict has taken a peculiar twist, with leftists frequently presented as opponents of civil liberties and conservatives as defenders of freedom of expression.
Whether or not this is accurate (hint: it’s not), the depiction is a reversal from previous decades, when the Right launched censorship campaigns to further conservative causes and leftists cast themselves as unapologetic partisans of free speech. It also gets the origins of the modern civil liberties movement backward.
As legal historian Laura Weinrib writes in The Taming of Free Speech: America’s Civil Liberties Compromise, it was labor organizers who formed the earliest pro–free speech groups in the United States. Weinrib focuses in particular on the rise of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), whose radical founders viewed “the right of agitation” — the right to strike, to picket, and to boycott — as both constitutionally protected and essential to workers’ ability to resist the power of their employers.
Jacobin contributor Chase Burghgrave recently spoke with Weinrib about the radical roots of free speech rights, the ACLU’s gradual deradicalization (becoming an organization “neither anti-labor nor pro-labor”), the Right’s adoption of free speech language for anti-labor ends, and much more.
CB: Your book shows that, prior to the ACLU’s founding, free speech activists were fighting businesses’ use of censorship to quash labor organizers. At the center of this was something you call “the right of agitation.” Can you explain what this was, and how it was connected with civil liberties activism in the early twentieth century?
LW: We are accustomed to thinking of freedom of speech as protecting the exposition and advocacy of ideas. The heroes in most accounts of the modern First Amendment are the soapbox speakers who demanded the right to espouse their visions of a just society, however radical or revolutionary.
But the right of agitation articulated by the labor activists who spearheaded the civil liberties movement in the late 1910s and early 1920s aligns only partially with this understanding. Drawing on a then-familiar distinction between agitation and propaganda, these advocates envisioned agitation as an arousal to action, in contrast to the dissemination of ideas. And the breed of direct action they had in mind was labor action, designed to counter the consolidation of capital with the organized power of workers.