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.