“Civil liberties once were radical.” So begins Laura Weinrib’s important revisionist history of the origins of American civil liberties, provocatively entitled The Taming of Free Speech: America’s Civil Liberties Compromise. In her account, the fight began in the early twentieth century as a radical struggle for workers’ rights and redistributive justice. The central claim was for a “right of agitation,” which its proponents believed predated the Constitution and afforded workers the right to engage in direct collective action to pressure employers for higher wages and better working conditions. To these early civil libertarians, all the forces of the state, and especially the courts, were enemies, allied with business interests and against labor. As Morris Ernst, first general counsel to the American Civil Liberties Union, summed it up in 1935, “The decisions of the courts have nothing to do with justice.”

By 1938, however, Roger Baldwin, the ACLU’s executive director, proclaimed that the ACLU had “no ‘isms’ to defend except the Bill of Rights.” The ACLU had shifted its focus from labor’s struggle for economic justice to a defense of the “neutral” rights of speech and association, rights that could be invoked not just by individual workers and unions but by Henry Ford and big business. As Baldwin put it one year later, “We are neither anti-labor nor pro-labor. With us it is just a question of going wherever the Bill of Rights leads us.”

Read more at The New York Review of Books