Source: https://www.floridabar.org/the-florida-bar-journal/the-origination-and-early-development-of-free-speech-in-the-united-states-a-brief-overview/
Timestamp: 2019-04-21 06:14:14+00:00

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The First Amendment guaranty of freedom of speech is one of the most revered cornerstones of American society. The full text of the amendment reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press or of the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”1 Historically, what were the origins of free speech theory in the United States and how did the concept of freedom of speech expand to its present scope? This article will briefly explore the origination and early development of free speech theory and practice in the United States.
Freedom of speech and press, as all the scattered evidence suggests, was not understood to include a right to broadcast sedition by words. The security of the state against libelous advocacy or attack was always regarded as outweighing any social interest in open expression,. . . .
With profound strokes of his pen, Justice Holmes dramatically enlarged the parameters of freedom of speech in the United States. Over a period of time, the Supreme Court began to consistently rule that the First Amendment was not limited to merely prohibiting prior restraints. The government could only punish speech when it constituted a clear and present danger.
Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the state was to make men free to develop their faculties, and. . . [t]hey believed liberty to [be] the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty. They believed that freedom to think as you will and speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that without free speech and assembly discussion would be futile;. . . that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty. . . . If there be time to discover through discussion the falsehood and the fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech not enforced silence.
Thus, we have seen that protection of free speech in the United States certainly has increased from its relatively modest origins. Now, jurists must evaluate free speech theory in light of inventions such as the Internet with its global perspective which were, of course, unknown to First Amendment framers. Furthermore, after the tragic events of September 11, 2001, the people of the United States have to face perhaps new limitations on freedom of speech for the sake of homeland security. History has proven the First Amendment, thus far, able to meet the challenges of wartime peril and peacetime prosperity. Hopefully, our commitment to liberty and our maturation as a society can embellish the legacy of the United States as the one country above all others in history which has continually striven for and realized the cherished ideal of freedom for its people.
1 Bill of Rights, Amendment 1 (1791).
2 1 R. Elwes, The Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza 258 (1951); Mayton, Seditious Libel and the Lost Guarantee of a Freedom of Expression , 84 Colum. L.Rev. 91, 110 (1984). Spinoza thought that “[i]t is impossible to deprive men of the liberty of saying what they think.” Elwes, supra , at 264; Mayton, supra , at 110. Government “should merely have to do with actions and every man should think what he likes and say what he thinks.” Elwes, supra , at 265; Mayton, supra , at 110.
3 “For instance, a man who holds that the supreme power has no rights over him,” Spinoza believed, could be punished “not so much from [the] actual opinions” but because of the danger to the stability of government that actions based upon the opinions could cause. Elwes, supra note 2, at 260; Mayton, supra note 2, at 110.
4 Along with many of his contemporaries, he feared legislation against speech because of its indeterminacy which would permit broad discretionary power by government. Actions are another matter, Montesquieu believed: They can be detected by the five senses and “are exposed to the eye of the public; and a false charge with regard to matters of fact may be easily detected.” C. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws 193–194 (T. Nugent trans., 1949); Mayton, supra note 2, at 110.
5 Sir Earnest Barker, Introduction to Social Contract xiv, xix (1968); Lowenthal, No Liberty for License 43–45 (1997).
6 As Levy points out, Locke’s concept of property encompassed more than material goods. In his Second Treatise on Government, Locke remarked that “people united for the general purpose of the preservation of their lives, liberties and estates, which I call by the general name-—property.” property, Locke added “I must be understood here as in other places to mean that property which men have in their persons as well as goods.” Levy, Origins of the Bill of Rights 251–252 (1999); Lowenthal, supra note 5, at 49–50; 1 The Great Political Theories 359–360 (Curtis ed., 1981).
7 In his Second Treatise on Government, Locke described this idyllic state of nature as “a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man. . . . . ” John Locke, Second Treatise on Civil Government ch. II, §4. According to Locke, man gave up his unfettered freedom to preserve his property. Second Treatise on Civil Government at ch. VII, §87.
8 Locke was a proponent of the concept of government by the consent of the governed rather than by divine right. He believed that “[m]an being. . . by nature all free, equal, and independent, no one can be put out of his estate and subjected to the political power of another without his own consent, which is done by agreeing with other men, to join and unite into a community for their comfortable, safe, and peaceable living, one amongst another, in a secure enjoyment of their properties, and a greater security against any that are not of it.” John Locke, Second Treatise on Civil Government ch. VIII, §95.
9 Locke believed that the social contract could be nullified by government breaching trust with the people who consented to be governed. In that case, sovereignty would devolve back to the people that originally surrendered it in the state of nature. John Locke, Second Treatise on Civil Government ch. XIX, §§219, 222.
10 Levy, Emergence of a Free Press 12 (1985); Van Alstyne, First Amendment, Cases and Materials 18–19 (1995).
11 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England bk. 4, ch. II, 150–153 (1765–1769).
13 Consider the case of Hugh Singleton, who in 1579 had enraged Queen Elizabeth I with the contents of a certain tract that he had published. In one of the early incidences of a combination of prior restraint and subsequent punishment, the printer Singleton was condemned to lose his right hand, which would not only have been a punishment but almost certainly would have restrained his future endeavors as a printer. F. Siebert, Freedom of the Press in England 1476-1776 91–92.
14 Blackstone, supra note 11, at bk. 4, ch. II, 150–153.
15 Southeastern Promotions Ltd. v. Conrad 420 U.S. 546, 558–559 (1975).
16 Siebert, supra note 13, at 22. There were later accounts that claimed printing was first introduced in England in 1468 at the behest of Henry VI. Id.
17 Siebert, supra note 13, at 25; Koenigsberg, Understanding Basic Copyright Law 1994 , Copyrights 10.
18 Hamburger, The Development of the Law of Seditious Libel and the Control of the Press , 37 Stan. L. Rev. 661, 666–672 (1985).
19 Siebert, supra note 13, at 238–43. Under the Printing Act of 1662, the licensor was required to testify that nothing contained in the book he examined was “contrary to Christian faith or the doctrine or discipline of the church of England or against the state or government of this realme or contrary to good life or good manners.” Siebert, supra note 13, at 243.
20 Hamburger, supra note 18, at 714, 719.
21 8 Ann. c. 21; Siebert, supra note 13, at 249.
22 25 Edw. III, st. 5, cap. 2 (1352); Hamburger, supra note 18, at 666.
23 25 Edw. III, st. 5, cap. 2 (1352).
24 Rex v. Twyn , 84 Eng. Rep. 1064 (K.B. 1663); Mayton, supra note 2, at 101.
25 Hamburger, supra note 18, at 668.
26 Case de Libellis Famosis , 77 Eng. Rep. 250, 5 Coke 125 (1605); Hamburger, supra note 18, at 693–695. Since a “true” libel is harder to disprove than a “false” libel, which would appear to be fairly self evident, thus was born the phrase attributed to Sir Edward Coke that “the greater the truth the greater the libel.” Levy, supra note 10, at 7.
27 Cunningham, In Pursuit of Reason: The Life of Thomas Jefferson 8 (1993).
28 Rex v. Tutchin , 90 Eng. Rep. 1133, Holt 424 (Q.B. 1704); 14 Howell’s State Trials 1095, 1128 (1704); Lord Chief Justice Holt changed the law of libel by punishing general criticism of the government as seditious libel. Hamburger, supra note 18, at 735–37.
29 Hamburger, supra note 18, at 753.
30 J. Alexander, A Brief Narrative of the Case and Trial of John Peter Zenger 58 (Katz ed., 1972) (1736); Levy, supra note 10, at 37–44.
31 Annals of Congress, 1st Cong., 1st sess. 451; Levy, supra note 10, at 251.
32 The debate about the first amendment concerns whether the framers meant the amendment to embrace Blackstonian free speech which punished seditious libel, as Levy suggests, or to abolish seditious libel outright, as Chafee believed. Levy’s conclusion seems more plausible because, among other reasons, of the framer’s emphasis on state’s rights. Prosecutions for libel continued in the states after the adoption of the First Amendment. Chafee, Free Speech 9–14, 34–39 (1920); Levy, supra note 10, at xii, 185–186, 269.
33 Leonard Levy, Legacy of Suppression 237, 247–48 (1960); Lowenthal, No Liberty for License 14 (1997).
34 Levy states that during this period our founding fathers conformed to the adage that “in time of war the laws are silent.” Levy, supra note 10, at 173.
35 William Dudley, The Bill of Rights: Opposing Viewpoints 42 (1994).
36 Dudley, supra note 35, at 41; Levy, supra note 10, at 255.
37 Dudley, supra note 35, at 54.
38 Leonard Levy, Jefferson and Civil Liberties 30 (1964).
39 Levy, supra note 38. In 1781, Governor Jefferson ordered the inhabitants of “Gloucester and York Counties” placed in prison because of speech which was “disaffected to the independence of the United States.” Levy, supra note 38.
40 Levy, supra note 10, at 300; Mayton, supra note 2, at 122.
41 The Treaty of Paris between England and her former colonies worried the French. The French foreign minister Talleyrand solicited a bribe to avoid war. The discovery of this attempt led to rampant anti French fervor in the United States. Smith, Freedom’s Fetters: The Alien and Sedition Laws and American Civil Liberties 5–14 (1956); Cunningham, supra note 27, at 212–14.
42 Publisher James Callender called Washington and President John Adams “poltroons” and “venal” and Adams a liar whose administration was a “scene of profligacy and. . . usury.” Federalist journalist William Cobbett labeled his political opponents as “frog-eating, man-eating, blood-drinking cannibals” and the “refuse of nations.” Wharton, State Trials of the United States During the Administrations of Washington and Adams 689, 322–32 (1849); Berns, 1970 Supreme Ct. Rev. 109, 111–12.
43 1 Stat. 596 (1798) §2.
44 Section 3 of the Sedition Act reads: “ And be it further enacted and declared, That if any person shall be prosecuted under this act, for the writing or publishing any libel aforesaid, it shall be lawful for the defendant, upon the trial of the cause, to give in evidence in his defence, the truth of the matter contained in the publication charged as a libel. And the jury who shall try the cause, shall have a right to determine the law and the fact, under the direction of the court, as in other cases.” Gragg, Order v. Liberty , Am. Hist. (Oct. 1998).
45 The Mind of the Founder: Sources of the Political Thought of James Madison 297–352 (Meyers ed., 1973); Cunningham, supra note 27, at 216–19. In a minority report to the Virginia Resolution, John Marshall supported the alien and sedition acts. He contended that obedience to government required that citizens have a good opinion of it. 2 Beveridge, The Life of John Marshall 402 (1916); Berns, 1970 Supreme Ct. Rev. 109, 133; Lowenthal, supra note 5, at 14–15. It appears that Jefferson was not supporting freedom of speech but the proposition that while the national government could not punish seditious speech, the states could. Berns, 1970 Supreme Ct. Rev. 109, 135.
46 Roseboom, A Short History of Presidential Elections 11–19 (1967). Ironically, shortly after Jefferson was elected, editor Croswell was indicted in New York under state law for libeling Jefferson. He was defended by Alexander Hamilton, Jefferson’s lifelong political opponent. Hamilton’s theory that the liberty of the press “consisted in publishing with impunity, truth with good motives, and for justifiable ends whether it related to men or to measures” eventually became accepted in all jurisdictions. People v. Croswell , 3 Johns 336, 352; Levy, supra note 10, at 338–39; Berns, 1970 Supreme Ct. Rev. 109, 153.
47 Jefferson said, “If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated, where reason is left free to combat it.” Cunningham, supra note 27, at 239–40; Gragg, supra note 44.
48 In 1925, the Supreme Court confirmed the conviction of Gitlow for being a member of the Socialist Party which advocated the violent overthrow of the government. Holmes and Brandeis dissented, stating that “[i]f in the long run the beliefs expressed in proletarian dictatorship are destined to be accepted by the dominant forces of the community, the only meaning of free speech is that they should be given their chance and have their way.” Gitlow v. New York, 268 U.S. 652, 673 (1925). Lowenthal believes that the foregoing “may well be the single most disgraceful sentence in our jurisprudence.” Lowenthal, supra note 5, at 35.
49 Schenck, 249 U.S. at 50 .
50 Patterson v. Colorado , 205 U.S. 454 (1907); Schenck , 249 U.S. at 52.
51 Schenck , 249 U.S. at 52.
52 Abrams , 250 U.S. at 620, 628.
53 Holmes stated that men “may come to believe. . . that the ultimate good desired is better reached by a free trade and ideas—that the best of truth is the power of the thought to get accepted in the competition of the market. . . “ Abrams , 250 U.S. at 630. Holmes here references the market place of ideas theory espoused by John Stuart Mill. See, generally , John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859).
54 See, e.g ., Sunstein, Democracy and the Problem of Free Speech 23–24 (1993).
Michael Kahn is vice chair of the First Amendment Law Committee of the Public Interest Law Section. He obtained his law degree from Duke University and has a master of liberal arts from Emory University. Mr. Kahn is a sole practitioner in Melbourne. He is a certified circuit court mediator who has limited his mediation practice to first amendment issues. An adjunct professor at Rollins College teaching computer law, ethics and First Amendment law, he was the 2002 winner of the Christa McAuliffe Teaching Award.
This column is submitted on behalf of the Public Interest Law Section, Gerard F. Glynn, chair.

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