Freedom of Expression and Political Speech

This paper will examine the status of the First Amendment right of freedom of expression as it existed in the 1950s. Specifically, the discussion will focus upon the standard used by the United States Supreme Court to protect freedom of expression with regards to political speech from governmental intrusion and how it changed during the 1950s as a result of the international and domestic political situations. Items discussed will include the background of the political speech standards up to the 1950s, how this standard changed during the 1950s, the domestic and world events which may have influenced this change, and the return to the strict protection standard in the 1960s.

The first time the Supreme Court addressed the issue of protection of political speech was immediately after the First World War. The cases involved prosecutions for agitation against the war and the draft, brought chiefly under the Espionage Act of 1917. It was in these early cases that Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes first articulated the "clear and present danger" standard for differentiating between legal advocacy and the incitement of criminal acts. The first case where Holmes applied this test was Schenck v. United States;1 involving the prosecution of persons who distributed pamphlets to recent draftees, urging them to not show up for service. In the majority opinion, Holmes said that the question in such cases is "whether the words

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in the minds of Americans may have been enhanced by the incidents of foreign espionage and industrial sabotage which had occurred, but none of these incidents formed the bases for the prosecutions under the Smith Act, which comprised the First Amendment decisions during the 1950s. These dangers, which had some basis in reality during that time, were not the products of the subversive activities, or the conspiracies to advocate, for which the defendants in the Smith cases were prosecuted.15 If these dangers were not the ones specifically addressed by the Court in these cases, however, they contributed in no small part to the "hysteria" of that era. It is often said that Americans respond politically to unexpected and disruptive crises with negative and even embittered emotionalism, endorsing the "need" for a greater popular voice in the government. The essentially conservative mood of the American public had shifted towards radicalism during the Depression of the 1930s, giving new strength to the radical left which had been popularly attacked during the Red Scare after the First World War. During the Second World War, government propaganda, formulated by Hollywood, had impressed the public with the status of the Soviets as a
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Approximate Word count = 5294
Approximate Pages = 21 (250 words per page)

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