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Last updated Jan. 11, 2025

Casual observers of the free speech movement in the United States pin its origins to 1920, when the American Civil Liberties Union was formed to defend the rights of people convicted under the Espionage Act for opposing World War I. But the founding of the ACLU was only possible because of a more radical, little-known group called the Free Speech League, which launched in 1902 and grew out of earlier progressive movements like abolitionism, free thought, and free love. 

The foremost scholar on the Free Speech League, historian , has called the League the first organization to advocate free speech rights “for viewpoints its members opposed.” In his book “,” he chronicled the many ways that the ACLU’s first executive director, Roger Baldwin, sought counsel and resources from the FSL. To understand the ACLU’s significance in free speech history, it’s important to understand how the weirder, more radical, and more sex-positive FSL paved the way.

In 1901, President William McKinley was assassinated by a self-proclaimed anarchist named Leon Czolgosz, who police claimed was inspired after hearing a speech by anarchist Emma Goldman. This set off a wave of government suppression of unpopular political speech.

At the time, an anarchist named Edwin Walker was coediting the Chicago-based radical newspaper Lucifer the Light-Bearer with his father-in-law, Moses Harman. Lucifer published articles on free love, free thought, and excerpts from Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.”&�Բ�����; across the country read free thought and free love publications like Lucifer from the 1840s to the 1910s, connecting with communities of like-minded people; the “letters” sections were basically 19th-century Substack discussion threads.

Rabban has dubbed the editors behind these publications “libertarian radicals” — a mix of sex educators, physicians, Quakers, ethical non-monogamists (or as they called themselves, varietists), atheists, and Spiritualists. Most libertarian radicals opposed the 1873 Comstock Act, which made it illegal to mail contraception and abortion instruments and information. They believed individuals should have social, religious, and sexual sovereignty over church and state. Other causes they supported were freedom of religion, labor rights, a single tax, Communism, divorce reform, prenatal care, equal division of household chores, and marriage based on love and respect.

In 1886, Harman published a letter about marital rape, which contained references to oral sex, bestiality, and homosexuality. For this and other letters, he was arrested and eventually sentenced to a year in the Kansas penitentiary. During his prosecution, Harman was supported by a group called the National Defence Association, which raised money for people prosecuted under the Comstock Act. 

After the McKinley assassination, Lucifer published articles opposing government suppression of anarchist speech and reported on the legal travails of Comstock Act victims. When an anarchist newspaper in Washington state was censored by the post office, Lucifer reported that a group called the Manhattan Liberal Club supported a committee to “defend liberty of investigation and expression.”&�Բ�����;

On May 15, 1902, Walker reported on the formation of a new group calling itself the “Free Speech League” which would oppose “every form of governmental censorship over any method for the expression, communication or transmission of ideas.” It aimed to be a national organization that would “maintain the right of free speech against all encroachments. . . . The prospects are good; come in at once and help all you can in a movement that means so much to all who think outside the conventional ruts.” Membership was just $1 a year (around $36 today). National Defence Association President Ned Foote became its treasurer and Edward Chamberlain, Manhattan’s turn-of-the-century version of Bill Kunstler, its president. 

That June, the Free Speech League held its first public event, a banquet in a Manhattan hotel to raise funds for a sex educator, , who had already been imprisoned under the New York Comstock Act for mailing a marriage manual and also faced a federal trial. A hundred people attended. Though food was provided, the only drink was ice water. 

With Craddock looking on, speaker after speaker (mostly men) said they did not approve of her writing but believed in her right to express herself. In the wake of suppression of political speech, the speakers believed, a free speech movement could appeal to a broader group of Americans than those who hated the Comstock Act. 

Whatever their own individual opinions, they knew that for the FSL to be successful, it could not be perceived as fringe.

Early FSL members included anarchist and socialist , lawyers  and , and muckraking journalist . Roe, who was well-connected in Washington circles, made his money on personal injury, contracts, and bankruptcies, and defended free speech cases with the League at reduced or no pay. He was also a major player in New York State politics, helping enact its workmen’s compensation.

The League’s operating expenses came from a fund left for Schroeder by Foote, and from Schroeder’s own savings (he was frugal). A longtime crusader against Mormonism, Schroeder is one of the most significant figures in American free speech history, and his  at Southern Illinois University a rich source of research material. 

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Every idea, Schroeder wrote, no matter how unpopular, should “have the same opportunity as every other idea, no matter how popular, to secure the public favor.” He despised people he called “professing radicals,” who only supported free speech rights for their allies, and called them “more reactionary than the conservatives who framed our charters of liberty.” Asked by a chronicler of the movement why he cared about free speech, he said, “[I]f one person is oppressed for his opinions, everybody might be. I might be.” (Schroeder himself was so loquacious that Steffens once said, “I believe in free speech for everybody except Schroeder.”) 

The FSL supported radical unions, anti-vaxxers, anarchists, conscientious objectors, and the labor group the International Workers of the World, or Wobblies. Other clients included the socialist , who demonstrated against Standard Oil, and Max Eastman, prosecuted for criminal libel for an article in his journal, “,” accusing the Associated Press of false reporting on labor strikes.

One of the League’s most high-profile early cases was raising money to defend , an English anarchist accused of violating the  in his American lectures. This act, the government’s first attempt to target immigrants’ free speech rights in more than a century, led to the Espionage Act of 1917 (limiting dissent against World War I) and the Smith Act of 1940 (targeting Communists and Socialist Workers). 

For Turner’s case, the League recruited and hired Turner’s lawyer, , who later became an ACLU founder. Due to a Supreme Court decision, Turner was deported.

Throughout its approximately 15-year life, the League was closely associated with . A riveting speaker as comfortable in German and Yiddish as English, the anarchist, pacifist, and “birth controller” often found her speaking venues shuttered by local police. Local FSL branches helped her find new venues. She, in turn, gave the FSL some of her lecture proceeds, raised money, and published Schroeder and Abbott in her journal “Mother Earth.” She was also a significant reason the Comstock Act was revised in May 1908 to cover materials inciting arson, murder, or assassination. The government was taking aim at “Mother Earth.”

The FSL also supported a Goldman protege, the prominent birth control activist , when charges were brought against her for her journal “The Woman Rebel.” Roe was her lawyer and Abbott wrote about the case and strategized about her defense. The FSL paid to print her pamphlet “” and paid her living expenses when she fled to Europe to avoid trial. After her husband, Bill Sanger, was charged for giving a copy of “Family Limitation” to an undercover detective, the League raised money for his defense.

After World War I, Baldwin formed the National Civil Liberties Bureau, forerunner to the ACLU, to defend conscientious objectors. Schroeder urged Baldwin to take a broad view of free speech, but Baldwin believed the Bureau should focus on political and labor speech. Another ACLU founder, the Brown- and Harvard-educated , often dissociated himself from “persecuted radicals” and said he disagreed with conscientious objectors.

When a Yiddish play by Sholom Asch,  was censored in New York and the cast and production manager , the ACLU did not support an appeal. Baldwin wrote that censorship “on the ground of morality” was accepted law. Schroeder wrote Baldwin to explain the role of theatre in free speech but the ACLU board refused to take action. Schroeder believed that obscenity was protected speech and had written a book called “.”&�Բ�����;

Once a friend of Goldman, Baldwin decided that close association with anarchism would hurt his ability to forge new allegiances, writing, “I believed that support compromised the rest of us.” He did not attend Goldman’s trial for anti-war speech, which eventually led to her deportation.

Though Schroeder was frustrated that Baldwin didn’t listen to him, he was also gaining a new intellectual passion: psychoanalysis. He began to write about it prolifically, and by 1918 the FSL had begun to dissipate.

In Rabban’s view, the key difference between the FSL and ACLU was this: FSL members believed in dissent as a good in and of itself, while ACLU members believed an enlightened, postwar society would lead to a world without dissent. (It didn’t happen.)

Baldwin credited FSL members in his memoirs pedantically, calling FSL members “the apostles of a once slightly ‘fashionable’ cult on the left, the free lovers.” But his instincts to focus on antiwar speech may have been smart in helping the ACLU win public support in its crucial early years. 

Whether the FSL could have ever become the juggernaut the ACLU is today, or whether the 1920s could have supported two separate free speech organizations, is impossible to know. But just as Goldman raised Sanger’s birth control consciousness and then grudgingly accepted that Sanger made a better face of the movement than she did, the FSL gave crucial advice and resources to the ACLU and then passed the torch.