Hellraisers Journal: From Pearson’s Magazine: Courtenay Lemon on Free Speech in the U. S. of A.; Praises I. W. W.

Hellraisers Journal, Monday December 11, 1916
From Pearson’s Magazine: Courtenay Lemon on Free Speech

In a long article in this month’s edition of Pearson’s, we find Courtenay Lemon discussing the state of free speech as that sacred constitutional guarantee is applied at the present time in the United States of America. The Industrial Workers of the World comes in for special mention by Mr. Lemon:

From Pearson’s Magazine of December 1916:

“FREE SPEECH” IN THE UNITED STATES

By Courtenay Lemon

Without free speech no search for truth is possible; without free speech no discovery of truth is useful; without free speech progress is checked and the nations no longer march forward toward the nobler life which the future holds for man. Better a thousandfold abuse of free speech than denial of free speech. The abuse dies in a day, but the denial slays the life of the people and entombs the hope of the race.—Bradlaugh.

All truth is safe, and nothing else is safe; and he who keeps back the truth or withholds it from men, from motives of expediency, is either a coward or a criminal, or both.-Max Müller.

If there is anything in the universe that can’t stand discussion, let it crack.—Wendell Phillips.

Error of opinion may safely be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.—Thomas Jefferson.

He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression, for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.—Thomas Paine.

THE United States is supposed to be the freest country in the world. That is what we were taught when we were children, and that is the basis of most Fourth of July oratory. But an examination of existing laws and the actual facts of current history should administer a rude shock to any American who believes this-a shock such as the immigrant who comes here with that naive belief must experience when he picks himself up and feels himself over after being run through the mill of certain “American institutions.”

Not only is the United States the only country in which courts, both state and national, have the power to nullify legislation; not only has our Supreme Court a greater power in this respect than that possessed by any European monarch except the Czar, but as a matter of provable fact the elementary rights of free speech and free press are more restricted than in any great nation, with the sole exception of Russia. We have our advantages. We have a more genuinely universal and equal manhood suffrage than any other country. And we have freedom of movement and domicile: we do not, under ordinary circumstances, have to present passports to police officials and janitors and give account of our comings and goings. But so far as free speech is concerned, our only advantage is the possession of a rhetorical tradition of freedom to which appeal can be made in the fight to establish those rights which the average American citizen fondly imagines himself to possess, but which do not in fact exist.

I shall not speak of the economic censor ship of free speech exercised by employers and advertisers, the fear of losing their jobs or their profits which intimidate writers, editors and publishers, and so often make wage-workers and civil servants afraid to express their opinions openly and freely. Nor shall I speak of the similar economic coercion which silences professors in semi-public institutions. Economic censorship exists everywhere and will exist as long as we have a property system which places the means of life in the hands of some men and makes the rest dependent upon them for the opportunity to earn a livelihood. This is bad enough, but what is worse is the direct suppression by governmental force of that freedom of speech which might change these conditions. Free speech, in the political sense of the phrase, may be said to exist when men who are willing to sacrifice their financial interests for their convictions are not interfered with in the exercise of the freedom thus dearly bought. But when men who are willing to forego material advantage for an idea, when men who are willing to brave the loss of livelihood or case or advancement in order to freely utter that which to them seems true and important—when such men are met with club and cell,fine, imprisonment, and suppression, then indeed is freedom dead.

In England, whose political philosophers have given the principle of free speech its fullest theoretical expression, freedom of utterance is greatly restricted by libel laws which punish with atrocious severity attacks on particular persons, even when their truth is admitted. And in Germany all utterances in the slightest degree disrespectful to the Kaiser personally are punished with preposterous strictness and severity. But apart from these two peculiarities, in times of peace there is in these nations, as well as in France, probably less meddling, usurpation and restriction on political and economic agitation than in the United States; while even in Russia, as well as in Germany and France, there is far greater freedom in the discussion of sexual questions than there is here.

Interference with freedom of speech and publication in the United States, as will be shown in detail in the course of this article, has reached a degree of tyranny and absurdity which all but equals the anecdote of the Russian censor who suppressed a love lyric because of the poet’s impassioned declaration that his beloved was the first thing in the world for him. “This,” gravely ruled the blockhead bureaucrat, “is a treasonable utterance, for the Czar comes before all and every Russian’s first allegiance is to the Little Father.”

The very tradition of free speech itself, complacently accepted as a fact through dint of repetition, prevents the American people from fully realizing what Whitman called “the never-ending audacity of elected persons” (to say nothing of appointed ones, such as Federal judges, Post Office officials, and police chiefs). And thus each fresh instance is regarded as an exception, a separate and special case, instead of as a gradually accumulating precedent and as part of a universal tendency and policy of officials and property-owners to suppress all that threatens their power or their prejudices. To these gentry a strait-jacket is the only decorous garb for truth, the police are to be called out against ideas, and there is no finer use for the flag than to serve as a gag with which to stuff the throat of protest.

The methods by which free speech is curtailed and abolished fall naturally into five heads, and will be considered in this order: (1) by acts of state legislatures; (2) by court usurpations; (3) by police outrages; (4) by postal legislation and Post Office Department rulings; (5) by the activities of that unique body-a private organization with public powers-—the Society for the Suppression of Vice.

1. The Constitution of the United States, with its Supreme Court, its Senate, and its other ingenious “checks and balances” upon the popular will, is now recognized by students of the subject as being what the debates of the Constitutional Convention showed it was intended to be—one of the most skillfully devised documents for the protection of a propertied class ever promulgated by a republic. But it does contain, in the shape of the First Amendment, an unequivocal provision that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press. Most of the state constitutions contain a similar provision. Nevertheless so many laws have been passed by state legislatures violating the rights of free speech, that it has been contended that more varieties of opinion and communication are specifically penalized here and now in the United States than in any country in the history of the world. It is of course conceded that the penalties are less severe than in the days of the pillory, ear-slicing and whipping through the public streets. Much of this state legislation, just because of the comparatively petty matters with which it deals, is of far less practical importance than the other vital abridgments of free speech to be considered later; some of it is “freak” legislation and much of it is not enforced except against people unpopular with local business interests; but it is highly significant in spirit and interesting in relation to this contention that a greater number of kinds of punishable utterance or opinion have been definitely specified than ever before.

Mr. Theodore Schroeder, secretary of the Free Speech League and author of works on the legal and other aspects of free speech, has recently completed an examination of the codes of the various states in relation to free speech and liberty of religious opinion, and the following are some of his findings:

In the state of Washington to say any thing “tending to encourage disrespect for law or for any court” is a crime. It would follow that the law may not be brought into disrespect even for the sake of promoting its repeal—the new blasphemy! Oregon thriftily forestalls avoidance of punishment for its undesirable citizens in a sweeping enactment against “all indecent and immoral actions not otherwise punishable.” Really, after that, all the rest of the penal code could well be repealed, and our infallible judiciary will do the rest by “construction.” Be it remembered that our courts seldom fail to construe such uncertain statutes in whatever way big business or moral sentimentalism may incline them.

In seventeen states we have legislative enactments against “blasphemy” and thirty six states have prohibited “profanity.” North Dakota goes to the extreme of penalizing “any use of the Deity’s name either in imprecation or light, trifling speech.” New York, among other states, penalizes even a reverent presentation of Jesus on the stage (Satan may still be impersonated with impunity). In five states attorneys are especially authorized to appeal to religious bigotry and prejudice in order to discredit the evidence of non-religious witnesses. North Carolina by implication bars unbelievers as witnesses, through requirement of a religious oath from all witnesses except Quakers, Moravians, Dunkers and Mennonists. In several states atheists, infidels and even agnostics are expressly prohibited from testifying, by which every irreligious heretic is denied one of his most elementary civil rights. (Recently the newspapers announced that a Tennessee judge had punished a heretical witness for contempt of court because he refused to kiss an unsterilized Bible.) Many of the above statutes enlarge upon the old common law “offense against God.”

In a number of states there are “Anti Anarchist” Laws of unbelievable scope and severity passed in the panic after the assassination of McKinley, where a penalty is imposed for the advocacy of the abolition of government; and in Iowa “whoever shall advise, counsel, or encourage the unlawful killing, within or without the state, of any human being, even where no such killing takes place,” may be imprisoned for twenty years. Therefore, you dare not declare the advisability of a rebellion in Russia, Ireland or India. Here in the United States we have also found laws under which we have repeatedly convicted Mexican revolutionists who in our country have promoted the revolutionary campaign for “land and liberty” in Mexico.

Vermont provides that “a person who defames a court of justice, or defames the magistrate, judge or justice of said court, as to an act or sentence therein passed, shall be fined,” etc. In Michigan it is ad judged criminal to “advance candidacy before the close of primaries except by small cards or postals or letters.” New and relatively unknown candidates are thus suppressed by limiting their freedom to argue their cause.

In California, and some other states, caricatures are prohibited, and several states penalize the publication of photographs without the written consent of the original. It is seldom that publishers respect such rights except as against rich people and politicians. Thus we see who it is that are deemed so sacred that ordinary people may not be informed of their appearance, and whose most holy countenances may not be blasphemed. In Indiana they have things which are legally so sacred that no graven image thereof is permitted. Hence they penalize”the manufacture or sale of pictures, models, books or other representations of the monument and grounds at Monument Place,” Indianapolis. In the same state there is also a law against the sale of paper novels “bearing dangerous or incendiary” pictures.

Anywhere in the United States one may with impunity denounce and destroy liberty itself, but thirty-one states penalize disrespect to the flag, which was once supposed to symbolize liberty. So the Rev. Bouck White is sent to jail for 60 days for placing a “$” over a picture of the flag. The Blast of San Francisco is excluded from the mails for publishing a similar picture. In “progressive” Iowa a boy 11 years old is sent to a reformatory until his majority for refusing to salute the flag in school.

Even capital punishment is too sacred for exposure. Colorado probably hangs as many as any other state, but under the uncertain name of “scandal” this Commonwealth has taken the interesting precaution to penalize any publication of the details of such official and lawful acts. Similar statutes exists in Minnesota. Thus legalized murder is made so sacred as to be protected against the most effective argument for its abolition, namely, a full and true account of its horrors. Of course, the courts have also upheld the constitutionality of this legislation. Certainly, liberty of the press cannot possibly include the right to know just how brutal and brutalizing are these ofiicial murders. They are participated in by courts and court officers, and even if these could do wrong, it cannot be the right of the ordinary person to know just how wrong or savage these officials are. In Ohio an official hanging may be reported by not more than three newspapers in the county where the crime was committed, but (presumably from the habit of giving privileges to big business) the big papers, with greater influence for “evil,” must be exempt. Therefore the law permits the attendance of one reporter from each daily in Columbus.

In Michigan they penalize those who discourage others from joining the army.

In Mississippi and Tennessee, to advocate the doctrine of polygamy is a crime. This seems to have been aimed at Mormon missionaries, and suggests that soon we may imprison those who advocate easier divorce laws. A fair start in that direction has already been made. Some states make it a crime to advertise that assistance and advice will be given to those contemplating divorce action, and under the pretense of suppressing “obscenity” our courts already have punished the advocacy of the abolition of all marriage laws. Why not carry these precedents to their logical conclusion and at once put in jail every one who expresses approval of any divorce ?

(2) Courts. In addition to their routine function of finding precedents and technicalities to justify the outrages of police and administrative officials, the courts have contributed on their own initiative to the abolition of free speech—by injunctions, by enlargement of the common law, and by the doctrine of “constructive contempt.”

As early as 1803, the Pennsylvania courts, notwithstanding constitutional guarantees, held that the old common law crime of “seditious libel” was in force in the United States. In 1910 this precedent was followed by the court in Lawrence County, Penn., in a case against McArthy and others, charged with numerous “seditious libels” published in the interests of striking workers.

By means of the doctrine of “constructive contempt of court,” many judges have imposed punishments on editors for criticisms published in their newspapers and not in the presence of the court. Thus the judge is lawmaker, judge and jury all in one-as well as plaintiff. Within the last few years, the Toledo News-Bee was fined $7,500 by a Federal judge for such “constructive contempt”; the late Col. William R. Nelson of the Kansas City Star was sentenced to jail for a like offense; United States Senator Patterson of Colorado was fined $1,000 for printing in his newspaper charges relative to matters that had formally been tried in the Supreme Court of Colorado; Josephus Daniels, now Secretary of the Navy, while editor of the Raleigh (N. C.) News and Observer, was fined $2,000 for criticizing a Federal judge for appointing a receiver for a railroad; J. M. Shepherd, a Missouri editor, was fined $500 for expressing his opinion of the state Supreme Court in setting aside a judgment against the Missouri Pacific Railroad; two of the above punishments were set aside by higher courts. In Trinidad, Colorado, during the summer of 1914, some citizens circulated a petition designed to initiate recall proceedings against District Judge A. W. McHendric. The judge replied to this offense to his vanity by promptly punishing the leading petitioners for contempt of court!

These usurpations have become so offensive that in some states laws have been passed defining contempt of court, forbidding the punishment of any conduct not specified, and forbidding the courts to punish criticism not made in the presence of the court. But the precedent-obsessed “judicial” mind was ready to discover that our American courts, like their ancestors the English kings, have inherent rights which the people cannot deprive them of by legislation, or by constitutional provisions, and this is the practical effect of numerous judicial decisions which agree upon holding unconstitutional those laws which restrain the judicial power to punish critics. These decisions are discussed by Hon. John L Thomas in “The Law of Constructive Contempt.” One appreciates the statement of Sergeant Hill: “When judges are about to do an unjust act, they seek for a precedent in order to justify their conduct by the faults of others.”

A similar legal doctrine, now growing in popularity, is that of “constructive disorderly conduct.” Forty states of the Union prohibit and variously define an “unlawful assembly” of two or more persons. The offense is oftenest called “rout,” i. e., an assembly which might lead to riot, and the criteria of guilt are usually so vague that under it a court can find a pretext for punishing any unpopular person who speaks in public. Some states punish as “rout” any speaking of a sort likely “to provoke an assault on the speaker.” As a further development of these laws, we have the doctrine of “constructive disorderly conduct.” A street-speaker who says anything which sounds ominous to an ignorant policeman, perhaps because he does not understand it or it conflicts with some prejudice or superstition of his, may be arrested. Then a fanatical or bigoted judge can, if he so desires, find the speaker guilty of disorderly conduct by holding that the utterance in question, problematically and speculatively, in a purely hypothetical hearer, tends to cause a breach of the peace by provoking an assault upon the speaker himself. But of course this dangerous hypothetical hearer cannot be arrested for this constructive assault upon a judicially constructed person. Such decisions have been rendered with great frequency, against free-thought and anti-Catholic speakers as well as industrial agitators. And one judge has had the naiveté to publish a pamphlet in defense of such procedure and explaining how one may be guilty of “disorderly conduct” without being a disorderly person (“Disorderly Conduct,” by Judge Frederick B. House).

(3) Police outrages. An account of the cases in which free speech has been arbitrarily suppressed by police officials would doubtless fill an entire issue of this magazine. The suppression of free speech during strikes has become almost a routine procedure, a mere commonplace. Wherever the labor war breaks out—especially in industrial towns and localities dominated by one or two great corporations-we have, if not martial law, then police law. Cracked skulls take the place of civil rights, and prison cells that of public platforms. Hall keepers are intimidated, speakers arrested, meetings dispersed.

On this question, the final report of the U. S. Commission on Industrial Relations says, in part:

One of the greatest sources of social unrest and bitterness has been the attitude of the police toward public speaking. On numerous occasions in every part of the country, the police of cities and towns have either arbitrarily or under the cloak of a traffic ordinance, interfered with or prohibited public speaking, both in the open and in halls, by persons connected with organizations of which the police or those from whom they received their orders did not approve. In many instances such interference has been carried out with a degree of brutality which would be in credible if it were not vouched for by reliable witnesses. Bloody riots frequently have accompanied such interference, and large numbers of persons have been arrested for acts of which they were innocent…Such action strikes at the very foundations of Government. It is axiomatic that a Government which can be maintained only by the suppression of criticism should not be maintained. Furthermore, it is the lesson of history that attempts to suppress ideas result only in their more rapid propagation.

One of the most typical and protracted of the fights for free speech was that carried on in San Diego in 1912. When street speaking was forbidden by the City Council, the Socialists, the Industrial Workers of the World, the trade unions and certain religious organizations united in a Free Speech League. Speaker after speaker arose consecutively and all were immediately hustled off to jail. This kept up day after day. Beatings and unspeakable cruelties and indignities were inflicted on the scores of prisoners. A powerful hose was played directly in the face of a woman evangelist who attempted to speak and her audience of 3,000 persons, which constantly re-formed, was followed about and attacked in the same way for three hours. One speaker who wrapped an American flag about his person was fined $30 for desecrating the flag. The San Diego Tribune editorially advocated taking the men out of the jails and shooting or hanging them. Among other things District Attorney Utley said: “Any man who has no work ought to be put in jail, especially if he wants to talk about it.”

The police charged the crowds repeatedly, and one old man, Michael Hoey, died from the effect of beatings and subsequent cruelties in jail. Later, another member of the I. W. W. was killed by the police. The editor of the San Diego Herald was kidnapped and threatened with death. On another occasion twenty-one men were kidnapped, taken twenty-eight miles from the town in autos, beaten and abandoned. Dr. Ben Reitman was kidnapped by the vigilantes, subjected to fiendish tortures and abandoned with out clothes in the desert thirty miles from San Diego. Protests of the State Federation of Labor and the situation itself forced an investigation by Governor Johnson, whose representative, Commissioner Weinstock, pronounced the conditions as bad as those in Russia. There were also investigations by the Federal Grand Jury. After months the struggle finally subsided, a drawn battle. Some of the prisoners were convicted and some discharged, but nothing was ever done to bring the real law-breakers, the officials and businessmen, to justice.

Here, as in so many cases, the I. W. W. took the lead in the fight for free speech. Again and again its foot-free members, burning with an indignation and a militant social idealism which is ever an inscrutable puzzle to local authorities, have hastened to towns where free speech fights were on, defied the police, braved clubbings, and voluntarily filled the jails to overflowing, to the rage and consternation of police and tax payers. It has acted as the flying squadron of liberty, the unconquered knight-errantry of all captive freedoms; and the migratory workers who constitute a large part of its membership, ever on the march and pitching their camp wherever the industrial battle is thickest, form a guerrilla army which is always eager for a fight with the powers of tyranny. Whether they agree or disagree with its methods and aims, all lovers of liberty everywhere owe a debt to this organization for its defense of free speech. Absolutely irreconcilable, absolutely fearless, and unsuppressibly persistent, it has kept alight the fires of freedom, like some outcast vestal of human liberty. That the defense of traditional rights to which this government is supposed to be dedicated should devolve upon an organization so often denounced as “unpatriotic” and “un American,” is but the usual, the unfailing irony of history.

(4) The Post Office. In some respects the postal censorship is the worst of all. The decision of a judge can be appealed from, and the acts of the police can be physically resisted if the protestants are in sufficient number. But with the Post Office there is hardly any redress. The Department refuses to tell an editor whether his issue is mailable before it is deposited in the mails; and then it may be ruled out, making the whole edition worthless, with out any more definite explanation than that its “tone” is regarded as “incendiary” or “obscene.”

Yet this censorship is entirely illegal, for Congress has repeatedly refused to grant the Department’s request to give it definite powers.

In 1908 the postmaster at Paterson, N. J., held up the anarchist paper La Question Sociale, pending instructions from Washington. President Roosevelt ordered the paper excluded from the mails and sent a message to Congress asking for more legislation and appending the official opinion of his Attorney-General, Mr. Bonaparte. In this opinion the latter says: “I cannot advise you that the section above quoted authorizes either the prosecution of the persons mailing the paper in question, or its exclusion from the mails.” After much argument to justify his reluctance at coming to such a conclusion, Mr. Bonaparte adds: “There is another aspect of the question. To determine whether those responsible for such a publication have legal right to their transportation in the mail, it may be material to determine whether they would have any adequate remedy if refused such transportation.” This question the Attorney-General answers in the negative; and then, simply because of his confidence that courts would refuse to give any relief, he concludes that lawful power exists, but without lawful authority.

Since then suppression, not only of Anarchist papers but of all sorts of radical, labor and free-thought publications, has grown apace. In the past six months six radical periodicals have been suppressed, without trial and without redress: Hippolyte Havel’s Revolt, a publication to which some of the foremost writers and artists in the country contributed; Alarm, of Chicago; The Blast, of San Francisco; Volutad (Spanish); Volni Listy (Bohemian); and Regeneración (English-Spanish).

As this is being written, news comes that a Russian labor paper, Rabochaya Rech (Workers Voice), has been held up by the Postmaster at Chicago, with an order that: “In future you will be required to file with this office a true translation in English of the articles contained, before copies can be accepted for transmission in the mails.” In reply to this, the Press Committee of the Russian Branch of the I. W. W. announce:

Having lived in Russia and having been subjected time and again to different kinds of persecution and oppression of the despotic government of the Russian Czar, we rest assured that we shall be able, not of course without strenuous efforts, to continue the publication and circulation of our newspaper, without any risk that it may be detained or confiscated. And until the organized working class of America will give it their close attention and harness the Postal Power, so anxiously attempting to destroy the workers’ press published in foreign languages—we shall be compelled to use the purely Russian method in the circulation of our publication.

Last year the Postmaster General excluded from the mails an article by Jack London entitled “Young Man, Don’t Be a Soldier,” which was being circulated by anti-militarists. The attorney of the Post Office Department declared to a New York Globe representative (Nov. 13, 1915), that the statute had been previously invoked to prevent the circulation of matter reflecting upon Jews, Catholics, Germans, British and other classes.

In Chicago there is published a Polish Free-thought weekly called Bicz Bozy (God’s Whip). Not long ago that paper published a picture of a priest carrying a kicking and protesting nun in his arms. The publisher was arrested for its alleged “obscenity” but was found not guilty. Later a Protestant clergy man was convicted for obscenity in publishing an intemperate criticism of Catholic priests. The higher court reversed the decision (People vs. Eastman; 188 N. Y. 478, 81 N, E, R. 459) After that the indictments against the publishers of The Menace for exposing alleged priestly salacity, but resulting in a verdict of “not guilty” after a long and expensive trial. In a like case against Thomas Watson in Georgia, the jury disagreed, and later the case was dismissed.

Several years ago a Socialist paper in Oklahoma announced a “Free Love Edition,” and were notified by the Post Office that it would be barred from the mails, although the intention of the editor was to show that Socialism did not stand for free love.

Section 211 of the U. S. Criminal Code, which is often pointed to as justifying these procedures, gives no powers to the Post Office arbitrarily to exclude debatable matter without trial, because its “tone” is disliked by administrative officials. But it does distinctly penalize the mailing of information about methods of preventing conception, and a number of physicians and others are now in jail for giving this information, which is not prohibited in any other country. In Holland government visiting nurses supply this information in the course of their official duties.

Margaret Sanger, the propagandist of birth control, was arrested and seven of the nine numbers of her paper, The Woman Rebel, were confiscated, although none of them contained the prohibited information. Mrs. Sanger is now about to start a new monthly, the Birth Control Review.

The Post Ofiice is the Russian “Third Section” of America—all it lacks is a Siberia to which to exile its victims.

(5) It was in 1872 that Uncle Sam took to his bosom the Mrs. Grundy that has henpecked him ever since. The Society for the Suppression of Vice was incorporated by legislation hurriedly passed without debate in the closing days of the notorious “Credit Mobilier” Congress of that year.

Its original bias was largely theologic, and it is said that in 1872 the original draft of the “obscenity” statutes included “blasphemous” literature among the unmailable matter. Under the vague statutory words “indecent, filthy, disgusting,” several attempts have been made to secure convictions for circulating merely anti-religious literature. Such cases were the arrest of D. M. Bennett, editor of The Truthseeker, for “An Open Letter to Jesus Christ;” the arrest of Moore, of the Blue Grass Blade in Kentucky; and the arrest of Vanni, a newsdealer, for vending foreign anti-clerical papers. Nevertheless when the distinguished eccentric, George Francis Train, was arrested for circulating obscenity in 1872, the matter turned out to consist of quotations from the Bible. Train and his attorneys sought release on the ground that the matter was not “obscene;” but to evade the issue the court directed the jury. against their own judgment, to find him not guilty on the ground of insanity; thus by necessary implication deciding the Bible to be criminally obscene. In 1895 John B. Wise of Clay Center, Kansas, in the United States Court, was found guilty and fined for sending “obscene” matter through the mail which consisted wholly of a quotation from the Bible.

Until his death last year, the Society was presided over by Anthony Comstock, an ignorant bigot with a personality so repellent that he was disliked even by the officers of the law with whom his work brought him in contact. He was repeatedly accused of attempted graft by those whom he prosecuted, although always under circumstances which precluded proof, except in the matter of extensive railway mileage charged to his expense account without travel. In appearance he was a cross between Chauncey Depew and the Mark Hanna of the cartoonists, combining the sanctimony of the one with the brutality of the other-a face to frighten children with. This was the man who for a generation was the custodian of literature and art, the wet-nurse of morality, the guardian of culture-virtue his profession, purity his trade, the scenting of obscenity from afar his special talent. In reply to critics he wrote an absurd book with the significant title, “Morals versus Art.” As Heine said to the prudish lady, so it must have been to him, “a terrible thought that all of us are naked under our clothes.” His powers were enlarged by his appointment as a Postal Inspector, and by police powers conferred on him by New York State.

Sometimes the police acted independently, as in the case of Bernard Shaw’s “Mrs. Warren’s Profession,” which, like Molière’s “Tartuffe” on its original performance in 1664, was suppressed after one production. On this occasion it might well have been replied to some of the critics, as in the case of Molière, that “if the rest of their bodies were as virtuous as their ears there would be more chastity in the world.”

It was thought by many that the degree of asininity manifested by the Society was largely due to Comstock’s personal ignorance and bigotry, and that with his death conditions would improve. His successor, John S. Sumner, even let it be understood that in future a less narrow-minded policy would be followed. But these hopes proved to be false and it now seems that Sumner is determined to out-Comstock Comstock. He has suppressed an issue of at least one popular magazine; censored the famous Russian Ballet; seized an issue of The Masses for publishing an advertisement of Forel’s celebrated scientific work. “The Sexual Question;” threatened the publisher of “Homo Sapiens” into with drawing the translation of that well known Polish novel; prevented the publication here of “The Rainbow,” by D. H. Lawrence, a serious English novelist; warned publishers away from some of the works of the greatest Russian writers.

The latest victim of this obscenity expert is Theodore Dreiser, the foremost of living American novelists, whose recent work, “The Genius,” has been proceeded against, “profanity” as well as “obscenity” being one of the charges against it! Dreiser, however, may look upon this philosophically—for without it his career would not have been complete. All art, even that which imagines itself to be “for its own sake,” is part of an eternal war for truth and freedom; and for the artist prosecution or imprisonment is like a decoration, the “iron cross” of letters, and the only ribbon the artist can wear without shame. With this, Dreiser takes his place in the long line of culprits, with Flaubert and the rest of his colleagues, the lock-step of genius that marches, smiling, across the years.

One function performed by the official “smut-hounds” is to protect the public from disappointment when looking for things “spicy.” Were it not for the suppressions effected, many people might read books or eagerly rush off to plays which they heard dealt with sexual themes-only to find sex tangled up with a lot of poetry and psychological analysis and thought and such like tiresome things, to their great chagrin. As it is, while leg-shows and smutty farces are unmolested, sex literature or drama having the above obnoxious “high-brow” qualities is pretty likely to be suppressed, so that the “tired” businessman, and other persons similarly bored by, their own irremediable empty-headedness, are in little danger of being imposed upon by being asked to think when they have come to smirk.

There is a feeling, however, among writers and artists that, whatever power they may have over the sort of photographs circulated in bar-rooms and houses of ill— fame, these professional “smut-hounds” must at least be taught to leave art and letters alone and not attempt to meddle in matters which are beyond the scope of either their powers or their intelligence.

So far the only organized and persistent attempt to check the censorship has been that of the Free Speech League, incorporated at Albany, N. Y., in 1911. The incorporators were: President, Leonard D. Abbott, associate editor of Current Literature; Vice-Presidents, Brand Whitlock, mayor of Toledo; Lincoln Steffens and Hutchins Hapgood, journalists; Bolton Hall, author and law-writer; Gilbert E. Roe, law-writer; Treasurer, Dr. E. B. Foote. Its Secretary, Theodore Schroeder, who retired from the practice of the law several years ago to devote himself to investigation and propaganda on this subject, has carried on a tireless campaign, contributed innumerable articles to legal and medical journals, published several valuable books on the subject, and wherever free speech has been an issue has bombarded the localities involved with pamphlets and arguments. No man in this country has fought so long and so well in behalf of this unpopular cause.

The enemies of free speech are the small minds, the politicians, the traders, spies, informers, police agents, and the men to whom great houses and the soiled and petty honors of public office are more than the things of the mind or the spirit. The springs of action of the destroyers of free speech are those of panic-stricken prejudice or infuriated self-interest; their “law” is but a club to beat non-conformity into submission; their “order” but the silence that ensues upon the ruthless extermination of all opposition.

The history of culture is in great part the record of the struggles of creative minds for freedom to proclaim new visions. The generality of mankind is dragged forward against its will, kicking and protesting every step of the way, and receives new truths and strange beauties as a child does unwelcome medicine. And much of the time and energy of great investigators and great artists has been expended in the mere struggle to gain even the possibility of an unmolested hearing, energy that might otherwise have been devoted to their proper labors. All the great names of the past have in turn taken their place in the age long struggle for free utterance. So in variably have they all at some time and in some form suffered suppression or imprisonment, exile, excommunication or censorship, that any first-rate reputation which has escaped the penalties naturally attached to marked superiority is to that extent suspect. These are the most prominent fighters for free speech in the past—the roll-call of genius, the “Who’s Who” of immortality, the catalogue of great intellects, the good friends of humanity, the lovers of their kind. Its destroyers are the assassins of liberty, the enemies of thought, the chiefest obstacles to the advance of the human race.

[Paragraph breaks and emphasis added.]

SOURCE
Pearson’s Magazine, Volumes 35-36
Pearson Publishing Company, 1916
https://books.google.com/books?id=-GY3AQAAMAAJ
Pearson’s Dec 1916
https://books.google.com/books/reader?id=-GY3AQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&source=gbs_atb&pg=GBS.RA1-PA479
“Free Speech” in the United States by Courtenay Lemon
https://books.google.com/books/reader?id=-GY3AQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&source=gbs_atb&pg=GBS.RA1-PA531

IMAGES
IWW & FSFs, C Lemon, Pearsons, Dec 1916
https://books.google.com/books/reader?id=-GY3AQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&source=gbs_atb&pg=GBS.RA1-PA536
Theodore Schroeder, Free Speech Lg, Pearsons, Dec 1916
https://books.google.com/books/reader?id=-GY3AQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&source=gbs_atb&pg=GBS.RA1-PA535
John Sumner, Suppress Vice, Free Speech, Pearsons, Dec 1916
https://books.google.com/books/reader?id=-GY3AQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&source=gbs_atb&pg=GBS.RA1-PA537

See also:

“WE NEVER FORGET~~Spring 1912 The San Diego Free Speech Fight”
-by JayRaye
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/5/30/1092207/-WE-NEVER-FORGET-Spring-1912-The-San-Diego-Free-Speech-Fight

The Everett Massacre
-by Walker C. Smith.
IWW, 1918
https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001106557

Tag: Everett Free Speech Fight of 1916
https://weneverforget.org/tag/everett-free-speech-fight-of-1916/

We’re Bound For San Diego
(Tune: The Wearing of the Green)
http://www.folkarchive.de/boundfor.html

In that town called San Diego when the workers try to talk.
The cops will smash them with a say and tell ’em “take a walk.”
They throw them in a bull pen, and they feed them rotten beans,
And they call that “law and order” in that city, so it seems.

We’re bound for San Diego, you better join us now.
If they don’t quit, you bet your life there’ll be an awful row.
We’re coming by the hundreds, will be joined by hundreds more,
So join at once and let them see the workers are all sore.

They’re clubbing fellow working men who dare their thoughts express,
And if old Otis has his way there’s sure to be a mess.
So swell this army, working men, and show them what we’ll do
When all the sons of toil unite in one big union true.

We have put the town of Aberdeen with others on our map;
And the brass bound thugs of all of them were handy with the “sap”.
But the I.W.W.’s are boys who have no fears,
And we’ll whip old San Diego if it takes us twenty years.

WE NEVER FORGET
Joseph Mikolasek
Michael Hoey, 65