During World War I, Roger Nash Baldwin was running a rag tag organization called the American Union against Militarism when he decided to create a civil liberties bureau, in part because he felt that defending conscientious objection to conscription would serve his wider pacifist goals. He knew that there was no mention of “civil liberties” in the United States Constitution—and that even the phrase itself would be unfamiliar, since it had not much figured in political rhetoric before. But it was a good ploy, he thought, to pretend that his principles were as American as apple pie.

Baldwin told his associates “to get a good lot of flags” and “talk a good deal about the Constitution” to represent the movement’s precepts as if they were what Americans already believed. In 1920 the bureau became an independent organization—the American Civil Liberties Union—which Baldwin directed until 1950.

Over the course of those three decades, as the story is usually told, Americans were convinced to honor free speech in new ways thanks to heroic judges who had the good sense to agree with civil libertarians. The starring role in this tale is given to JusticeOliver Wendell Holmes. He personally abhorred the leftist views that the government prosecuted under the Espionage Act, but Holmes still dissented when the Supreme Court failed to save a Jewish anarchist from being sent to jail for his opinions in Abrams v. United States (1919). His colleagues on the bench were soon won over, in large part because of stalwart advocacy from the ACLU, and the Supreme Court embraced untrammeled free speech as First Amendment birthright.

Laura Weinrib overturns this simple narrative in her utterly brilliant new book. “The Taming of Free Speech: America’s Civil Liberties Compromise” shows that civil libertarian politics originated out of a trade-unionist movement for economic justice, and that its conscious choice to frame itself as serving constitutional principles above the political fray ironically disarmed the progressive movement out of which it was born.

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