The Taming of Free Speech: America’s Civil Liberties Compromise

"Judicial enforcement of the Bill of Rights is a defining feature of American constitutional democracy, yet in the first half of the twentieth century, neither freedom of speech nor court-centered constitutionalism commanded broad-based consensus. The Taming of Free Speech explains how lawyers and activists convinced Americans to entrust their civil liberties to the courts. When class war shook the nation's institutions, labor radicals within the American Civil Liberties Union claimed a right to agitate through organized economic pressure--a right of workers to picket, boycott, and strike. Over time, they hitched those commitments to a conservative constitutional tradition that valorized individual rights. At the height of the New Deal, the corporate bar and its clients reluctantly accepted judicial deference to social and economic regulation. In place of property rights, they redeployed the First Amendment to shield business interests from the intrusive reach of the state. In an age of totalitarianism abroad and administrative discretion at home, a powerful Bill of Rights protected conservatives as well as radicals, industry as well as labor"--