During the summer of 1919 a group of dissident members of the Socialist party, including the radical journalist John Reed, published a manifesto in the left-wing newspaper Revolutionary Age attacking the party’s more moderate elements and calling on workers in the United States to rise up and “overthrow the political organization upon which capitalistic exploitation depends.” The only uprising their “Left Wing Manifesto” engendered was a walkout by Reed and his comrades at the Socialist party’s national convention that August (the one depicted in the recent film Reds). But to government officials caught up in the frenzy of a postwar Red Scare, publication of the manifesto was considered highly incendiary. Several members of the newspaper’s managing board, including Reed, were indicted under New York’s criminal anarchy statute, which made it a felony to advocate, “by word of mouth or writing,” the violent overthrow of the government.

Reed, who returned to Russia that fall and died there the following year, escaped prosecution. The others were tried separately and convicted. Among them was Benjamin Gitlow, the paper’s business manager, one of ten Socialists elected to the New York state assembly in 1917. Gitlow spent thirty-four months in jail while he appealed his verdict all the way to the Supreme Court. The Court had recently upheld the constitutionality of the wartime Espionage Acts, which made it a crime to say or publish anything “intended to cause . contempt, scorn, contumely or disrepute as regards the form of government of the United States, the Constitution, the flag, or the uniform of the Army or Navy,” so it was not surprising that the justices affirmed Gitlow’s conviction. What was surprising was that for the first time in the nation’s history the highest court in the land decided that freedom of speech and of the press were, in the words of Justice Edward Sanford, “among the fundamental rights and liberties protected by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment from impairment by the States.”

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