Fighting Faiths: The Abrams Case, The Supreme Court, and Free Speech

by Richard Polenberg

Overview

Jacob Abrams et al. v. United States is the landmark Supreme Court case in the definition of free speech. Although the 1918 conviction of four Russian Jewish anarchists—for distributing leaflets protesting America's intervention in the Russian revolution—was upheld, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes's dissenting opinion (with Justice Louis Brandeis) concerning "clear and present danger" has proved the touchstone of almost all subsequent First Amendment theory and litigation.

In Fighting Faiths, Richard Polenberg explores the causes and characters of this dramatic episode in American history. He traces the Jewish immigrant experience, the lives of the convicted anarchists before and after the trials, the careers of the major players in the court cases—men such as Holmes, defense attorney Harry Weinberger, Southern Judge Henry DeLamar Clayton, Jr., and the young J. Edgar Hoover—and the effects of this important case on present-day First Amendment rights.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801486180
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	09/15/1999
Series:	Cornell Paperbacks
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	464
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.03(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Richard Polenberg is Goldwin Smith Professor of American History at Cornell University. He is the author, most recently, of The World of Benjamin Cardozo: Personal Values and the Judicial Process.

What People are Saying About This

Nat Hentoff

A book crowded with intense, stubborn, vulnerable, idealistic, and mean-spirited people.... The kind of social legal history Dickens might have enjoyed.

Ellen Bales

Polenberg's abridgement is a successful distillation of the original sprawling transcript into a lean form that focuses our attention to acute questions of national loyalty and security, morality, ethics, politics, and human frailty.

Anthony Lewis

A marvelous... book that brings the people and the law to life.... It teaches us again, dramatically, that our Constitution lives because judges apply its eternal principles in the light of accumulated experience and wisdom.

Editorial Reviews

"A book crowded with intense, stubborn, vulnerable, idealistic, and mean-spirited people. . . . The kind of social legal history Dickens might have enjoyed."--Nat Hentoff, Washington Post Book World

"A marvelous . . . book that brings the people and the law to life. . . . It teaches us again, dramatically, that our Constitution lives because judges apply its eternal principles in the light of accumulated experience and wisdom."--Anthony Lewis, The New York Times

"Polenberg's abridgement is a successful distillation of the original sprawling transcript into a lean form that focuses our attention to acute questions of national loyalty and security, morality, ethics, politics, and human frailty."--Ellen Bales, Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, 33:2

From the Publisher