A dense history (over 1000 footnotes) of the conviction of five
East Harlem anarchists for sedition, and the subsequent landmark
dissent in 1919 by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., that became a
guidepost for 50 years of First Amendment decisions. Polenberg (One
Nation Divisible, 1979) presents both the intellectual legal battle
and a social history of the anarchists. The Jewish anarchists,
recent Russian arrivals who eked out sweatshop livings as
bookbinders or garment workers, got caught between a rock and a
hard place. The rock was a new sedition law enacted at the crest of
WW I patriotic fever; the hard place was President Wilson's
decision to send US troops to aid Czech soldiers caught in Russia,
which the anarchists saw as a ploy to crush their beloved Bolshevik
revolution. They tossed some polemical flyers off a tenement roof;
the N.Y.C. Bomb Squad quickly found the group, giving them the
third-degree. One anarchist died, probably of pneumonia, before the
trial. Pacifist defense lawyer Harry Weinberger argued that the
flyers were not seditious - in calling upon workers to oppose the
Russian invasion, they neither supported the Germans nor advocated
the direct violation of laws - but his distinctions made little
headway. Conservative Judge Caffey was active enough in the trial
to insure that the jury had a choice between guilty and guilty. The
conservative Supreme Court upheld the decision 7-2, but Holmes, who
had voted against similar defendants, now dissented, asking for a
far stricter use of the "clear and present danger" standard. In
1921, the anarchists were deported from US prisons to Russia. A
useful, even important account - for those able and willing to wade
through the too-thick prose. (Kirkus Reviews)
Jacob Abrams et al v. United States is the landmark Supreme Court
case in the definition of free speech. Although the 1918 conviction
of four Russian Jewish anarchists -- for distributing leaflets
protesting America's intervention in the Russian revolution -- was
upheld, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes's dissenting opinion (with
Justice Louis Brandeis) concerning "clear and present danger" has
proved the touchstone of almost all subsequent First Amendment
theory and litigation.
In Fighting Faiths, Richard Polenberg explores the muses and
characters of this dramatic episode in American history. He traces
the Jewish immigrant experience, the lives of the convicted
anarchists before and after the trials, the careers of the major
players in the court cases -- men such as Holmes, defense attorney
Harry Weinberger, Southern Judge Henry DeLamar Clayton, Jr., and
the young J. Edgar Hoover -- and the effects of this important case
on present-day First Amendment rights.
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