Free Speech Is the Antidote to Political Violence

For two decades and more, anarchists and members of the
Industrial Workers of the World, or IWW, had engaged in a wild set of bombings and
assassinations, from Haymarket Square in Chicago in 1886 to the assassination
of President William McKinley in Buffalo in 1901, to the destruction of the Los
Angeles Times building in 1912. The mayhem included a nationwide assassination
campaign of mail bombs in 1919, as well as the 1920 wagon-bombing of
Manhattan’s Financial District, whose destructive force is still visible today in
a pock-marked exterior on Wall Street.

Against this backdrop, free speech appealed to statesmen
attuned to the dynamics of mass democratic politics. When the Wobblies (as the IWW men were known)
launched free speech fights in towns across the West, a police commissioner in
Denver named George Creel decided to allow the radicals to speak their piece. In
New York City in 1914, Police Commissioner Arthur Woods declined to interfere
in an anarchist memorial at Union Square on behalf of a would-be Rockefeller
assassin. Protests that had caused
crisis in Fresno, Missoula, San Diego, and Spokane soon fizzled without the
added electricity of mass arrests.

During the First World War, a contingent of key Wilson
administration insiders such as George Creel—the former Denver police commissioner,
who now took up the role as Wilson’s chief propagandist—and journalist Walter
Lippmann blocked the most aggressive wartime censorship plans favored by rivals
in the administration like the young Douglas MacArthur and heavy-handed Texas
politicos such as Attorney General Thomas Gregory and Postmaster General Albert
Burleson.