While digging around in history documents I noticed a very precise phrase comes from the Free Speech League of America, during 9 April 1917 “Espionage and Interference with Neutrality” Hearings of U.S. Congress:

There you see it, from the Free Speech League of America (radical socialists):

The first casualties of war are free speech and free press

Also, I noticed in the above passage an English general and statesman (Cromwell) quote.

This sent me right back to digging around some more, this time finding a huge list of famous quotes about speech in the records of U.S. District Court for New Jersey – 25 F. Supp. 127 (1938):

Eugene Lyons, whom we understand to be an experienced and originally sympathetic newspaper reporter, ends his most interesting book, Assignment in Utopia, in these words: “No plan for economic salvation must be accepted if it is diseased with disdain for life. Ultimately Russia will not be judged by how much bread it has given its people — by that standard other countries and other systems may be far more successful — but by how much freedom, self-respect, equality, truth and human kindness it has brought into the world.”

That’s a much more circumspect approach and hints at the irony behind the naming of Molotov cocktails (he had described airlifts as food aid and then dropped bombs, so his targets started producing a “drink” to go with them).

Make bread versus make speech…

What if it’s not a base freedom to make (and distribute in large quantities) either bread or speech that matters most but the integrity of both?

It seems like we should focus energy on the quality measures of those thing being spread, such as respect, equality, truth and compassion.

After all, is someone delivering unsafe food (Molotov’s “bread”) to be ingested really so much different than delivering unregulated poison into hands and to the mind (“diseased disdain for life”)?

Just a few days after the above appeal by the radical extremist Free Speech League of America in April 1917 for the right to criticize government, an Executive Order 2594 was published and a new Committee on Public Information (CPI) was formed under President Wilson.

The Secretary of State, Secretary of War, Secretary of Navy and a civilian (charged with executive direction) almost immediately started pushing out official propaganda based on KKK themes.

Few today seem to remember or speak of America in WWI amplifying KKK messaging from the White House itself, even the District Court for New Jersey left it out of their summaries, yet that is exactly what was happening.

Imagery of that time (given how Wilson had restarted the KKK in 1915 under “America First”) violently targeted Americans (especially Blacks) who believed in freedom:

Moreover, American tyranny (e.g. violence against those seeking freedom, such as the state sanctioned 1919 mass murder in Elaine, Arkansas to suppress speech) is sadly consistent with its earlier history.

…the persistent notion of Colonial America as a society where freedom of expression was cherished is an hallucination which ignores history. … The American people simply did not believe or understand that freedom of thought and expression means equal freedom for the other person, especially the one with hated ideas.

Again, back to the 1938 District Court for New Jersey, which offers copious history references:

The Colonies had had a similar history of repression at the hands of the Royal Governors: “There are no free schools or printing and I hope we shall not have these 100 years hence, for learning has brought disobedience and heresy and sects into this world and printing has divulged them. Libels against the best government have resulted. God keep us from both.”

And here’s the District Court for New Jersey final statement on the matter.

We close with the suggestion made by a distinguished British statesman in the course of the Debates on the Public Order Bill several times referred to. He said in speaking about Sir Oswald Moseley’s Fascists, “Why make martyrs out of clowns?” and we add wicked clowns at that.

Fascists beware. Clowns, as far as I can tell, are not a protected class.