The Assault on Free Speech, Public Assembly, and Dissent

A National Lawyers Guild Report 1
Foreword
<strong>The</strong> spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not too sure that it is right.
Judge Learned Hand
<strong>The</strong> facts assembled in the following pages attest to the pathology of
a government so frightened of its own citizens that it classifies them
as probable enemies. Mustering evidence from witnesses everywhere
in the country (from trial judges in Oakland and Philadelphia as well
as from First Amendment lawyers in New York, Portland, Boston,
Washington and Miami) the report cites a long list of recent incidents
in which various law enforcement agencies (federal, state, municipal)
have deployed one or another of the increasingly sophisticated
methods of intimidation (checkpoints, rush tactics, pop-up lines,
containment pens, mass and false arrests, etc.) meant to negate the
freedoms of speech and silence the voices of dissent.
To read the testimony is to know that the American democracy is in
serious trouble. Not because the country lacks for a successful
economy or a splendid military equipage, but because the wisdoms
in office find the practice of democratic self-government vulgar and
unsafe. Too loud, too uncivil and disrespectful, too many people in
the room who don’t belong to a health club or the Council on
Foreign Relations, not enough marble in the ceilings and the walls.
<strong>The</strong> corporate and political gentry disapprove of the company and
deplore the noise; whether seated in the Senate, installed in a
television studio, charged with the management of an insurance
company or a police precinct, they don’t like to be reminded that
democracy is by definition a work in progress, a never-ending
argument between the inertia of things-as-they-are and the energy
inherent in the hope of things-as-they-might-become.
<strong>The</strong> country was founded by people unafraid to engage the
argument, which, if it was to mean anything, required honest and
sharply pointed speech, often dangerous, nearly always fierce.
Protestant dissenters who arrived on the shores of Massachusetts Bay
with little else except a cargo of contraband words, they possessed
what they believed to be truthful refutations of the lies told by the
lords temporal and spiritual in Europe, and they settled the New
England wilderness as an act of intellectual opposition framed on the