Overview
Today, free speech is among America’s most powerful values. But for most of the nation’s history, the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech did little to protect those who challenged power or offended public morals. A newspaper publisher could be prosecuted for ridiculing the president. A birth-control advocate could be gagged by Boston’s mayor. Protesters could be jailed for distributing antiwar leaflets, and an author could even be arrested for reading the Constitution aloud.
Free Speech Generation tells the dramatic story of the people who made the First Amendment’s promise real. Some were lawyers and professors. Others were journalists, students, internet pioneers, and professional heretics. Many first embraced free speech as a tactic in fights for labor, civil rights, sexual freedom, or peace. However, over time, they forged it into a principle—one they extended even to communists, Klansmen, neo-Nazis, flag burners, and pornographers.
Through vivid portraits and courtroom battles, Free Speech Generation reveals:
- How America went 140 years before the Supreme Court first struck down a speech restriction under the First Amendment
- Why a Jewish lawyer defended neo-Nazis who wanted to rally where thousands of Holocaust survivors lived
- How the Berkeley Free Speech Movement anticipated a constitutional revolution
- How burning the American flag came to represent a “bedrock” First Amendment principle
- How early cyber-libertarians stopped Congress from imposing broad censorship rules on the emerging internet
- Why today’s fights over hate speech, campus censorship, misinformation, and political retaliation continue battles civil libertarians have fought for decades
At once a collective biography, constitutional history, and political drama, Free Speech Generation asks whether the civil libertarians who created America’s Free Speech Century left behind a lasting inheritance—or a fragile achievement already beginning to crack.
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