The Free Speech League was a progressive organization in the United States that fought to support freedom of speech in the early 20th century. The League focused on combating government censorship, particularly relating to political speech and sexual material. It was a predecessor of the American Civil Liberties Union.
The Free Speech League's main advocates included Edward Bliss Foote, his son Edward Bond Foote, Emma Goldman, and Theodore Schroeder. Other free speech advocates of the era included Ezra Heywood, Ben Reitman, Moses Harman, and D. M. Bennett. The League was formed in 1902. [1] Two other members involved in the League's creation were Bob Robins and Lucy Robins Lang. [2] In 1908, its goals were reported as "freedom of peaceable assembly, of discussion and of propaganda; an uncensored press, telegraph and telephone; an uninspected express; an inviolable mail." To achieve its goals, the League worked through the press, public speaking and the courts and felt that "the education of brains and quickening of consciences are first in order of time and effect." Its Secretary at the time was A. C. Pleydell of 175 Broadway in New York City. [3]
The League was officially incorporated on April 7, 1911, in Albany, New York. [4] Its charter included the goal "by all lawful means to oppose every form of government censorship over any method for the expression, communication or transmission of ideas... and to promote such legislative enactments and constitutional amendments, state and national, as will secure these ends." [4]
One of the primary targets of the League was the Comstock Laws. After the American Civil War, a social purity movement grew in strength and wasbaimed at outlawing vice in general and prostitution and obscenity in particular. [5] Composed primarily of Protestant moral reformers and middle-class women, the Victorian-era campaign also attacked contraception, which was viewed as an immoral practice that promoted prostitution and venereal disease. [6] A leader of the purity movement was Anthony Comstock, a postal inspector who successfully lobbied for the passage of the 1873 Comstock Act, a federal law prohibiting mailing of any material deemed to be obscene or related to sex in any way. Many states also passed similar state laws, which were collectively known as the "Comstock Laws" and sometimes extended the federal law by outlawing the use and the distribution of contraceptives. Comstock was proud of being personally responsible for thousands of arrests and the destruction of hundreds of tons of books and pamphlets. [7]
When a British anarchist, John Turner, was arrested under the Anarchist Exclusion Act and threatened with deportation, Emma Goldman joined forces with the Free Speech League to champion his cause. [8] The League enlisted the aid of Clarence Darrow and Edgar Lee Masters, who took Turner's case to the US Supreme Court. Although Turner and the League lost, Goldman considered the Casablanca to be a victory of propaganda. [9] She had returned to anarchist activism, but it was taking its toll on her. "I never felt so weighed down," she wrote to Berkman. "I fear I am forever doomed to remain public property and to have my life worn out through the care for the lives of others." [10]
Margaret Sanger supported the cause of free speech throughout her career with a zeal comparable to her support for birth control. Sanger had grown up in a home in which the agnostic and iconoclastic orator Robert Ingersoll was admired. [11] During the early years of her activism, Sanger viewed birth control primarily as a free speech issue, rather than a feminist issue, and when she started publishing The Woman Rebel in 1914, she did so with the express goal of provoking a legal challenge to the Comstock Laws banning dissemination of information about contraception. [12] In New York State, Emma Goldman introduced Sanger to members of the Free Speech League, such as Edward Bliss Foote and Theodore Schroeder, and the League later provided funding and advice to help Sanger with her legal battles. [13]
Around 1917 to 1919, the League gradually disbanded. [14] Many of its members later joined the American Civil Liberties Union.
Emma Goldman was a Lithuanian-born anarchist revolutionary, political activist, and writer. She played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe in the first half of the 20th century.
Margaret Higgins Sanger, also known as Margaret Sanger Slee, was an American birth control activist, sex educator, writer, and nurse. Sanger popularized the term "birth control", opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, and established organizations that evolved into the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that the Constitution of the United States protects the liberty of married couples to buy and use contraceptives without government restriction. The case involved a Connecticut "Comstock law" that prohibited any person from using "any drug, medicinal article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception". The court held that the statute was unconstitutional, and that its effect was "to deny disadvantaged citizens ... access to medical assistance and up-to-date information in respect to proper methods of birth control." By a vote of 7–2, the Supreme Court invalidated the law on the grounds that it violated the "right to marital privacy", establishing the basis for the right to privacy with respect to intimate practices. This and other cases view the right to privacy as "protected from governmental intrusion".
The Comstock laws are a set of federal acts passed by the United States Congress under the Grant administration along with related state laws. The "parent" act was passed on March 3, 1873, as the Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use. This Act criminalized any use of the U.S. Postal Service to send any of the following items: obscenity, contraceptives, abortifacients, sex toys, personal letters with any sexual content or information, or any information regarding the above items.
Anthony Comstock was an anti-vice activist, United States Postal Inspector, and secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (NYSSV), who was dedicated to upholding Christian morality. He opposed obscene literature, abortion, contraception, masturbation, gambling, prostitution, and patent medicine. The terms comstockery and comstockism refer to his extensive censorship campaign of materials that he considered obscene, including birth control advertised or sent by mail. He used his positions in the U.S. Postal Service and the NYSSV to make numerous arrests for obscenity and gambling. Besides these pursuits, he was also involved in efforts to suppress fraudulent banking schemes, mail swindles, and medical quackery.
Ben Lewis Reitman M.D. (1879–1943) was an American anarchist and physician to the poor. He is best remembered today as one of radical Emma Goldman's lovers. Martin Scorsese's 1972 feature film Boxcar Bertha is based on one of Reitman's books.
In the United States, anarchism began in the mid-19th century and started to grow in influence as it entered the American labor movements, growing an anarcho-communist current as well as gaining notoriety for violent propaganda of the deed and campaigning for diverse social reforms in the early 20th century. By around the start of the 20th century, the heyday of individualist anarchism had passed and anarcho-communism and other social anarchist currents emerged as the dominant anarchist tendency.
The Hicklin test is a legal test for obscenity established by the English case R. v Hicklin (1868). At issue was the statutory interpretation of the word "obscene" in the Obscene Publications Act 1857, which authorized the destruction of obscene books. The court held that all material tending "to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences" was obscene, regardless of its artistic or literary merit.
United States v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries, 86 F.2d 737, was an in rem United States Court of Appeals case in the Second Circuit involving birth control.
Albert Theodore Schroeder was an American author who wrote on issues pertaining to freedom of expression. Schroeder challenged the state of freedom of speech in the United States by claiming that the US government may be a tyranny and that Americans view their liberties in a way that makes them hypocrites.
The National Birth Control League was a United States organization founded in the early 20th century to promote sex education, the use of means and methods to prevent conception, to lobby for a change in legislation making this illegal, and to bring up courtcases with the aim to change jurisprudence, enabling birth control.
John Turner was an English-born anarcho-communist shop steward. He referred to himself as "of semi-Quaker descent."
Free Society was a major anarchist newspaper in the United States at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Most anarchist publications in the US were in Yiddish, German, or Russian, but Free Society was published in English, permitting the dissemination of anarchist thought to English-speaking populations in the US.
The Immigration Act of 1903, also called the Anarchist Exclusion Act, was a law of the United States regulating immigration. It codified previous immigration law, and added four inadmissible classes: anarchists, people with epilepsy, beggars, and importers of prostitutes. It had minimal impact and its provisions related to anarchists were expanded in the Immigration Act of 1918.
Medical Common Sense: Applied to the Causes, Prevention and Cure of Chronic Diseases and Unhappiness in Marriage was an 1858 work authored and published by Edward Bliss Foote. The work sold well and an expanded version, Plain Home Talk, Embracing Medical Common Sense, sold 500,000 copies. This expanded version would include over 500 pages of new content and whereas the initial work was written in two parts, Plain Home Talk contained four parts and put a large emphasis on marriage and sexual health and ethics topics.
The womb veil was a 19th-century American form of barrier contraception consisting of an occlusive pessary, i.e. a device inserted into the vagina to block access of the sperm into the uterus. Made of rubber, it was a forerunner to the modern diaphragm and cervical cap. The name was first used by Edward Bliss Foote in 1863 for the device he designed and marketed. "Womb veil" became the most common 19th-century American term for similar devices, and continued to be used into the early 20th century. Womb veils were among a "range of contraceptive technology of questionable efficacy" available to American women of the 19th century, forms of which began to be advertised in the 1830s and 1840s. They could be bought widely through mail-order catalogues; when induced abortion was criminalized during the 1870s, reliance on birth control increased. Womb veils were touted as a discreet form of contraception, with one catalogue of erotic products from the 1860s promising that they could be "used by the female without danger of detection by the male."
Edward Bliss Foote was an American doctor, author, and advocate for birth control.
The birth control movement in the United States was a social reform campaign beginning in 1914 that aimed to increase the availability of contraception in the U.S. through education and legalization. The movement began in 1914 when a group of political radicals in New York City, led by Emma Goldman, Mary Dennett, and Margaret Sanger, became concerned about the hardships that childbirth and self-induced abortions brought to low-income women. Since contraception was considered to be obscene at the time, the activists targeted the Comstock laws, which prohibited distribution of any "obscene, lewd, and/or lascivious" materials through the mail. Hoping to provoke a favorable legal decision, Sanger deliberately broke the law by distributing The Woman Rebel, a newsletter containing a discussion of contraception. In 1916, Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, but the clinic was immediately shut down by police, and Sanger was sentenced to 30 days in jail.
Birth control in the United States is available in many forms. Some of the forms available at drugstores and some retail stores are male condoms, female condoms, sponges, spermicides, and over-the-counter emergency contraception. Forms available at pharmacies with a doctor's prescription or at doctor's offices are oral contraceptive pills, patches, vaginal rings, diaphragms, shots/injections, cervical caps, implantable rods, and intrauterine devices (IUDs). Sterilization procedures, including tubal ligations and vasectomies, are also performed.
Family Limitation is a pamphlet written by American family planning activist, eugenicist, educator, writer, and nurse Margaret Sanger that was published in 1914. It was one of the first guides to birth control published in the United States. The 16-page pamphlet details information on, and ingredients for, various contraceptive methods and included illustrations and instructions for use. After the pamphlet was released, Sanger was forced to flee the United States to Britain to avoid prosecution under federal anti-obscenity laws, the Comstock Act, which prohibited disseminating information about contraception.
