Once upon a time, the biggest free speech battles in the country werent happening on college campuses or Fox News, and they had nothing to do with aggrieved Republican boomers or so-called cancel culture. A century ago, these conflicts unfolded on the streets of cities like Spokane, Washington, Missoula, Montana, and San Diego, California, where police doled out beatings and threw leftist protesters in jail by the hundreds for the crime of publicly exercising their First Amendment rights. Led by a revolutionary industrial labor union, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), these free speech fights centered on the right of organizers to stand on soapboxes and speak out about capitalisms exploitation of workers. Soapboxing was a core component of the IWWs organizing strategy, so, in the 1900s, when authorities (who regarded organizers as a nuisance at best, and treasonous at worst) began cracking down on the ability of organizers to speak freely to their fellow workers, the Wobblies fought back.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a prominent Wobbly organizer, was often at the epicenter of the free speech campaign. The radical labor organizer, who was particularly focused on lifting up women workers, traveled the country spreading the good word of revolutionary unionism, and became known as a fiery orator. In 1909, after the Spokane City Council made it illegal to hold a public meeting or give a speech downtown, the IWW put out a call for Wobblies from across the country to flood the city with protests; this action was later immortalized in the pamphlet, Wanted: Men to Fill the Jails of Spokane. We dont want you for riot or violence, Flynn reportedly wrote in a call to action published in the Industrial Worker. We need you to defend your organizations rights to free speech and free press. Are you game?

The Wobblies paid dearly for their commitment to free speech. Flynn was jailed multiple times for her efforts, and she and the other Wobblies were treated monstrously while imprisoned. Some of the women were sexually assaulted by guards, and the men were tortured by exposure to extreme temperatures. But the ones who survived kept fighting, and eventually brought the campaign to nearly two dozen cities. They kept up the pressure until 1917, when the U.S. entered World War I, Congress passed the Espionage Act, and the Justice Department launched a massive 24-hour raid on every single IWW office in the country in an effort to shut them down. The next year, over 100 organizers were tried on charges of violating the Espionage Act, which barred anyone from voicing public opposition to WWI or obstructing the war effort (for example, by encouraging young men to resist the draft, which the IWW often did from soapboxes). Emma Goldman and her associate Alexander Berkman, two of the periods best-known anarchists, were arrested under the Espionage Act for their anti-war agitation, and were eventually deported to Russia with other purged radicals on a ship dubbed the Soviet Ark.

The persecution of the Wobblies is an instructive example of who has had to suffer the real price of crackdowns on free speech in the United States. Time and time again, we have seen those who advocate for social progress face blacklisting, punishment, and imprisonment for speaking out.

From slavery, to the struggle for civil rights, to today, the government has proffered the rights of truly free speech on some and not others, author P.E. Moskowitz wrote in their 2019 book, The Case Against Free Speech: The First Amendment, Fascism, and the Future of Dissent, which analyzes decades of leftist repression and the evolving definition of free speech. We don't need to look very far back to know that free speech is a conditional freedom in this country, and that those conditions are nearly always defined by those in power.

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Free Speech Fights Have Historically Targeted the Left - Teen Vogue