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

• Author: Rosenblum, Jonathan

Fighting Faiths: The Abrams Case, the Supreme Court and Free Speech. Richard Polenberg. Viking, $24.95. This book is a study of how ideologies can collide--tragically, at times--to yield guiding principles for society. The book's title is taken from a line in Oliver Wendell Holmes's famous dissent in the 1919 case. Holmes's groundbreaking argument was that the law shouldn't suppress arguments, pamphleteering, or any other forms of speech exchanged between "fighting faiths."

The faiths lined up as follows: the U.S. had joined the fight against the Axis powers; the Russians had allied themselves with Germany; the six anarchists were protesting the deployment of U.S. troops in the new Soviet Union; the U.S. Congress had passed the Sedition Act, restricting opposition by word or deed to the war effort.

On August 22, 1918, the anarchists (average age: mid-20s; religion: Jewish; citizenship: none) floated leaflets off the roof of an East Side building. In English and Yiddish, they rallied workers to oppose President Wilson's deployment of 7,500 troops against the Bolshevik regime. "Workers, our reply to the barbaric intervention has to be a general strike!" read one of the leaflets. The group was arrested by New York's bomb squad, convicted, and given sentences ranging up to 20 years. Four were eventually released to Russia where they found no more justice than they had received here.

By a 7-2 vote, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld their convictions, with Holmes and Justice Louis Brandeis dissenting. Holmes's dissent was stunning. Earlier he had written the majority opinions that affirmed three similar cases, offering in one of them his analogy of shouting "fire!" in a crowded theater. Speech that caused a "clear and present danger," he ruled, could be suppressed by the authorities. In Abrams, he revised the line by substituting "imminent" for "present." This seeming bit of legal esoterica had profound...