Free Speech Fights Have Historically Targeted the Left

No Class is an op-ed column by writer and radical organizer Kim Kelly that connects worker struggles and the current state of the American labor movement with its storied — and sometimes bloodied — past.
Black Panther Chauncey Booker 19 is led to police car by Patrolman Michael O'Neill after arrest at Cole Junior High...
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Once upon a time, the biggest free speech battles in the country weren’t happening on college campuses or Fox News, and they had nothing to do with aggrieved Republican boomers or so-called cancel culture. A century ago, these conflicts unfolded on the streets of cities like Spokane, Washington, Missoula, Montana, and San Diego, California, where police doled out beatings and threw leftist protesters in jail by the hundreds for the crime of publicly exercising their First Amendment rights. Led by a revolutionary industrial labor union, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), these “free speech fights” centered on the right of organizers to stand on soapboxes and speak out about capitalism’s exploitation of workers. Soapboxing was a core component of the IWW’s organizing strategy, so, in the 1900s, when authorities (who regarded organizers as a nuisance at best, and treasonous at worst) began cracking down on the ability of organizers to speak freely to their fellow workers, the Wobblies fought back.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a prominent Wobbly organizer, was often at the epicenter of the free speech campaign. The radical labor organizer, who was particularly focused on lifting up women workers, traveled the country spreading the good word of revolutionary unionism, and became known as a fiery orator. In 1909, after the Spokane City Council made it illegal to hold a public meeting or give a speech downtown, the IWW put out a call for Wobblies from across the country to flood the city with protests; this action was later immortalized in the pamphlet, Wanted: Men to Fill the Jails of Spokane. “We don’t want you for riot or violence,” Flynn reportedly wrote in a call to action published in the Industrial Worker. “We need you to defend your organization’s rights to free speech and free press. Are you game?”

The Wobblies paid dearly for their commitment to free speech. Flynn was jailed multiple times for her efforts, and she and the other Wobblies were treated monstrously while imprisoned. Some of the women were sexually assaulted by guards, and the men were tortured by exposure to extreme temperatures. But the ones who survived kept fighting, and eventually brought the campaign to nearly two dozen cities. They kept up the pressure until 1917, when the U.S. entered World War I, Congress passed the Espionage Act, and the Justice Department launched a massive 24-hour raid on every single IWW office in the country in an effort to shut them down. The next year, over 100 organizers were tried on charges of violating the Espionage Act, which barred anyone from voicing public opposition to WWI or obstructing the war effort (for example, by encouraging young men to resist the draft, which the IWW often did from soapboxes). Emma Goldman and her associate Alexander Berkman, two of the period’s best-known anarchists, were arrested under the Espionage Act for their anti-war agitation, and were eventually deported to Russia with other purged radicals on a ship dubbed the “Soviet Ark.”

The persecution of the Wobblies is an instructive example of who has had to suffer the real price of crackdowns on free speech in the United States. Time and time again, we have seen those who advocate for social progress face blacklisting, punishment, and imprisonment for speaking out.

“From slavery, to the struggle for civil rights, to today, the government has proffered the rights of truly free speech on some and not others,” author P.E. Moskowitz wrote in their 2019 book, The Case Against Free Speech: The First Amendment, Fascism, and the Future of Dissent, which analyzes decades of leftist repression and the evolving definition of free speech. “We don't need to look very far back to know that free speech is a conditional freedom in this country, and that those conditions are nearly always defined by those in power.”

When it comes down to it, the right to free speech has never been extended to everyone, and the founders that so many Constitution-huggers venerate so loudly never even intended that to be the case. As early as 1798, Congress passed legislation outlawing “false, scandalous, or malicious writing” against the government, and in the ensuing centuries, it’s been proven that only some forms of speech are allowed to fly free. As we’ve seen with state efforts to delegitimize and quash the movement for Black lives, First Amendment rights have once again been tossed aside like a broken riot shield, as peaceful protesters are arrested, beaten, and terrorized in cities across the country. Alternately, these rights have been used as a hammer by bad-faith right-wingers who seem more concerned with being yelled at on Twitter than with the activists in Portland, Oregon, who, Oregon Public Broadcasting reported, were being picked up by federal agents in unmarked vans.

So, as it ever was, for all the petty conservative teeth-gnashing over cancel culture, the only people truly being punished for speaking out of line seem to be those on the left looking to shatter the status quo. They have the least power and the most to lose. And whether they’re union organizers, anarchists, Black liberation fighters, antifascists, or regular working-class people fighting for racial justice, nothing terrifies the government more than people who are willing to fight tooth and nail for the better world they know is possible.

Let’s take a look back at the era of the Palmer Raids, a sweeping, covert law enforcement operation that targeted the left during what is now known as the First Red Scare. This period kicked off in 1918 with the passage of the Sedition Act, which essentially made it illegal to criticize the government, and was explicitly aimed at anarchists, socialists, and other radicals. A man named J. Edgar Hoover, then a Justice Department lawyer, was placed in charge of the Bureau of Investigation group that oversaw the operation. Over a two-year span, thousands of people were arrested, often without warning and purely on the suspicion of being anarchists; government agents raided radical bookstores, union halls, immigrant community centers, and private homes, hunting down and torturing suspected dissidents. Their mission was to destroy the organized left in America, and they did their damnedest to complete the job.

Hoover and the department were roundly criticized for the chaotic brutality of the operation, but the experience he gained targeting his political enemies came in handy several decades later, when, as the head of the FBI, Hoover launched COINTELPRO. This massive covert counterinsurgency operation was explicitly aimed at destroying the Black Panthers and other radical leftist groups, and used a variety of violent tactics, including psychological warfare and attempts to incite killings, to disrupt Black liberation efforts. The government feared the Panthers’ message of unity against the oppressors and the group's prowess in defending its own communities, so the state spent more than a decade working to destroy the organization, much like they did to the Wobblies decades earlier. Even as recently as 2017, a research project on the Black Panthers by Ula Taylor, chair of the African American Studies department at UC Berkeley, lost funding from the National Park Service after a letter from the Fraternal Order of Police to Donald Trump claimed the project would memorialize a group whose politics they opposed. Decades after Chicago police killed party leader Fred Hampton in his sleep, the legacy of the Panthers is still deemed too dangerous for public consumption.

Some organizations have abandoned their own histories as a result of these cyclical purges. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was originally formed as a response to the Palmer Raids’ repression by what the organization described as “a small group of idealists.” According to Moskowitz’s account in The Case Against Free Speech, the ACLU spent its early years advocating for revolution. Moskowitz and others (myself included) believe the ACLU’s original radical raison d'etre has been watered down to advocating for more mainstream liberal issues and a frustrating “all sides” view. When over 200 protesters were kettled and arrested during Trump's inauguration, in 2017, the ACLU of Washington, DC, stepped in to help with their defense. But the ACLU has also taken on controversial free speech fights, including when it represented a group of neo-Nazis, in 1978, who wanted to march through Skokie, Illinois, a town where many Holocaust survivors lived; and when the ACLU of Virginia sued the city of Charlottesville to allow the 2017 Unite the Right rally, which brought white supremacists and neo-Nazis to the city. (According to the ACLU’s website, the Skokie decision “caused some ACLU members to resign, but to many others the case has come to represent the ACLU's unwavering commitment to principle.") The organization does plenty of good work, but one can’t help but wish it would hew more closely to its original goals and stop wasting time defending the far right.

As Emma Goldman told the jury as she stood trial in 1917, “We say that if America has entered the war to make the world safe for democracy, she must first make democracy safe in America.” Her words could have just as well been written in 2020. “How else is the world to take America seriously, when democracy at home is daily being outraged, free speech suppressed, peaceable assemblies broken up by overbearing and brutal gangsters in uniform; when free press is curtailed and every independent opinion gagged. Verily, poor as we are in democracy, how can we give of it to the world?”

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