This year, the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary. To commemorate the occasion, FIRE is proud to present the limited series “Figures of Speech,” looking at the heroes and villains of free speech in American history. We began with Joseph McCarthy, the senator who scared America silent. Then we looked at Thomas Paine, American history’s winter soldier, and Woodrow Wilson, our worst president for free speech. Today we turn to Frederick Douglass, whose legacy represents the very best of what it means to be American.

In 1860, Frederick Douglass watched a violent pro-slavery mob storm the stage at the Tremont Temple Baptist Church in Boston before he could even begin speaking. Abraham Lincoln had just been elected to the presidency the month before on the promise to halt slavery’s expansion westward. In response, rumors spread from below the Mason-Dixon that South Carolina was convening to discuss secession. Other states were making similar calls to delegates. War was looming. The nation was a powder keg.

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On top of this, the meeting — titled “How Can Slavery Be Abolished?” — was held on the anniversary of the execution of John Brown, one of the most divisive figures in America. Brown was a martyr to abolitionists, but a dangerous fanatic to conservatives who feared abolitionism would bring about civil war. The meeting almost immediately exploded into violence as the mob shouted, punched, and smashed chairs for three hours. Douglass actually fought his way to the rostrum “like a trained pugilist” before police cleared the area.

Douglass never expected to see such a display in a building that loomed so large over Boston life. With a parish of nearly 2,000 souls in the latter half of the 19th century, Tremont Temple was one of the most consequential buildings in the growing city. It was both a spiritual sanctuary and a lively debate hall. An epicenter of civic life and anti-slavery advocacy. Daniel Webster, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Lincoln himself had all spoken from the very same stage.

There was no reason to think the discussion that December night would boil over in the way that it did. But political tensions were higher than anyone realized at the time.

Such acts of censorship were commonplace in the early American republic. Since 1776, the question of what to do with American slavery had reached a frustrating stalemate. The escalating conflict between abolitionists and pro-slavery factions often resulted in the suppression of free speech and the press. Southern states went as far as to impose the death penalty for the circulation of pamphlets advocating for abolition or emancipation. In Congress, a gag rule was passed in 1836 prohibiting the discussion of slavery. Outside of legislative halls, pro-slavery mobs destroyed public property, burned newspaper offices to the ground, and killed abolitionists on both sides of the Mississippi.

This was the world that Douglass escaped to in 1838 after a lifetime in slavery. He was 21 years old when he fled Maryland’s eastern shore, boarding a northbound train to Baltimore. Disguised as a free black sailor, Douglass settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts, by way of New York, Philadelphia, and Wilmington. Learning from his mentor William Lloyd Garrison, Douglass became the face of the abolition movement.

To Douglass, free speech wasn’t a side issue. It was a weapon essential to the cause. “To utter one groan, or scream, for freedom in the presence of the Southern advocate,” Douglass said in a 1854 speech, “is to bring down the frightful lash upon their quivering flesh … The right of speech is a very precious one, especially to the oppressed.” Douglass knew that free speech is essential not for those in power, but for those who are not. If the enslaved could not speak for themselves, he would speak for them. And he did so for decades as the sectional tensions continued to rise.

Undeterred by the violent mob, Douglass found a new stage in Boston to deliver his remarks six days later. Returning to the city after being almost murdered. The recently built Boston Music Hall held over 2,500 people, even larger than Tremont Temple. This time, his planned remarks went off without a hitch. But before adjourning, Douglass extemporaneously addressed the mob’s successful efforts to shout down the Tremont event. The result is the most powerful defense of free speech in American history:

No right was deemed by the fathers of the Government more sacred than the right of speech. It was in their eyes, as in the eyes of all thoughtful men, the great moral renovator of society and government. Daniel Webster called it a homebred right, a fireside privilege. Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down. They know its power. Thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers, founded in injustice and wrong, are sure to tremble, if men are allowed to reason of righteousness, temperance, and of a judgment to come in their presence. Slavery cannot tolerate free speech. Five years of its exercise would banish the auction block and break every chain in the South. They will have none of it there, for they have the power. But shall it be so here?

Douglass’ “Plea for Freedom of Speech in Boston” is the rarest type of political oratory. It is a speech that is somehow both timeless and of a particular time. Drawing on the lessons of history, Douglass knew America’s free speech tradition was exceptional. The Old World had shown that “thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers” are sure to tremble at the thought of its subjects speaking their minds. Here in the New World, however, the Founders largely embraced dissent and dialogue. They knew that a republic would die without free speech and a free press. Not only that, there were no subjects here. Just citizens. In embracing the eternally radical idea that, as Jefferson said, “Almighty God hath created the mind free,” America stepped out of history and onto a new path.

With every reason to hate the promise of America in light of its hypocrisy on the question of freedom, Douglass still believed that the Constitution was “a glorious liberty document” and that debate and dissent would help drag the country kicking and screaming towards the promise of the Declaration of Independence. He believed, above all, in the power of words to change human destiny. This was the same man who, as a child in Baltimore, used to carry pieces of bread in his pockets so that whenever he met poor white children in the street, he could trade them for reading lessons. Emancipating himself, Douglass kept his country, the New World, from retreating to the dogmas of the Old. He did so by exercising those sacred rights and never taking them for granted.

In our 250th year of independence, we often fail to follow Douglass’ example. We take for granted the beauty and power of free speech and press, these “homebred rights” and “fireside privileges.” Being born without them, Douglass knew how precious they were. He knew their power. He knew how they shaped the ongoing American story, and wielded them to make a more perfect union until his death in 1895. It is an example we can all look up to and emulate. Few figures in the American story loom as large as Frederick Douglass, and none exemplify the importance of free speech better.

This year, the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary. To commemorate the occasion, FIRE is proud to present the limited series “Figures of Speech,” looking at the heroes and villains of free speech in American history. We began with Joseph McCarthy, the senator who scared America silent. Then we looked at Thomas Paine, American history’s winter soldier, and Woodrow Wilson, our worst president for free speech. Today we turn to J. Edgar Hoover and the story of how he used the FBI to wage war on dissent.

In 1964, Martin Luther King Jr. received a suspicious package. Inside was an audio recording and a letter denouncing him as “a complete fraud and a great Liability to all of us Negroes.” The letter accused King of “countless acts of adultery and immoral conduct lower than that of a beast,” before ending with a chilling message: “King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days.”

The package had not come from a disillusioned admirer. It came from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. King suspected as much and understood the ultimatum as an invitation to kill himself before his private life was exposed.

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The episode was part of the FBI’s broader campaign of surveillance and harassment against King, which included wiretapping his home and offices and planting hidden microphones in his hotel rooms. Whether the bureau hoped King would take his own life or merely withdraw from public life, it was attempting to silence the nation’s leading voice for racial equality.

This was J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI.

For nearly half a century, Hoover shaped the bureau in his own image, transforming it from a small, scandal-plagued agency into one of the most respected and powerful institutions in America. But Hoover’s greatest ambition was never simply to catch criminals. He believed the FBI should protect the nation not just from gun-toting bank robbers, but from idea-toting dissidents. Under his leadership, the bureau amassed countless intelligence files on Americans, secretly recorded perceived enemies, infiltrated political organizations, and covertly disrupted movements deemed a threat to the social and political order. Hoover’s long, relentless campaign to snuff out dissent made him one of the most formidable enemies of free speech in American history.

Hoover entered the Justice Department in 1917 at the age of 23, just as the United States’ entry into World War I triggered a massive crackdown on dissent. The censorship fever that gripped the nation only spiked after the war ended, as the Russian Revolution, labor unrest, and a wave of anarchist bombings contributed to heightened public anxiety about communist influence.

The First Red Scare enabled Hoover to develop his skills in collecting and managing vast amounts of information on the government’s undesirables. He used a system of index cards to keep tabs on suspected radicals and helped coordinate the Palmer Raids, a brutal campaign to arrest and deport immigrants with alleged radical beliefs or associations. Authorities swept up thousands in the raids, often without warrants or any evidence of criminal wrongdoing. The backlash to this notorious assault on civil liberties taught Hoover not that political repression was wrong, but that it had to be done with more professionalism and less overt lawlessness.

Hoover rose to become director of the FBI (then called the Bureau of Investigation) in 1924. After firing the previous director, Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone warned that “a secret police system may be a menace to free government and free institutions.” Unfortunately, the man he just appointed would spend the next 48 years proving him right.

Hoover’s reign wasn’t all bad. He modernized the FBI through forensic science techniques, fingerprint databases, crime statistics, centralized training, and strict hiring standards (perhaps too strict, insisting the FBI reject all “long hairs, beards, mustaches, pear-shaped heads, [and] truck drivers”). But the same bureaucratic machinery that made the FBI successful at fighting crime also made it disturbingly effective at monitoring Americans’ speech.

World War II gave Hoover the opportunity to increase his institutional power and establish the FBI as a permanent domestic intelligence agency. As fears of Nazi espionage and sabotage mounted, President Franklin D. Roosevelt granted the bureau sweeping new authority, including secret approval for warrantless wiretapping. Hoover interpreted “subversion” broadly, targeting not only foreign agents but also communists, labor activists, isolationists, and others he viewed as impediments to the war effort. The FBI’s wartime expansion of personnel, resources, and surveillance capabilities laid the foundation for its increasingly aggressive attacks on free speech.

During the Cold War, concerns about communism again took center stage. To be sure, Hoover was not chasing an entirely imaginary threat. Soviet intelligence had infiltrated the U.S. government, and the FBI uncovered several spy networks. But his anticommunist crusade extended beyond espionage to encompass political belief and association. Agents broke into Communist Party offices, installed listening devices, photographed membership rolls, and compiled detention lists for use during a national emergency. Hoover also secretly supplied information to congressional committees, state officials, and anti-radical organizations like the American Legion, fueling public hearings, blacklists, and professional ruin.

If the Palmer Raids foreshadowed Hoover’s approach to dissent, and the Cold War normalized it, COINTELPRO represented its fullest expression. Launched in 1956 against the Communist Party and later expanded to other “subversives” including civil rights activists, black nationalist groups, Vietnam War protesters, student organizations, and — in a break from Hoover’s usual focus on the left — the Ku Klux Klan, the program used covert tactics designed to make political movements collapse from within.

In one so-called “snitch jacket” operation, agents planted a forged report in an effort to frame Communist Party official William Albertson as an FBI informant. The ruse succeeded, destroying Albertson’s standing within the party.

Anonymous letters, like the one sent to King, were a COINTELPRO staple. The FBI also used informants to spread rumors, derail meetings, and sow internal distrust. The bureau so thoroughly infiltrated the Communist Party that one former Justice Department prosecutor joked Hoover had inadvertently saved it from collapse because “his informants were nearly the only ones that paid the party dues.”

Even Hoover’s targeting of other groups was motivated in part by his belief that they were communist fronts or vulnerable to communist influence. He initially targeted King because of his alleged ties to communists, but he also became hostile to King’s own activism. Although King preached nonviolence, Hoover argued that even peaceful demonstrations incited violence by provoking hostile reactions. The Supreme Court has long rejected this “heckler’s veto” censorship logic, recognizing that angry mobs can’t be allowed to dictate who gets to speak. But for Hoover, public order came first, even if it meant silencing one of the country’s most influential voices.

Despite his methods, Hoover remained remarkably popular for most of his career, serving under eight presidents of both parties. Unlike the flamboyant anticommunist Joseph McCarthy, who burned out after a few years, Hoover cultivated the image of a disciplined, incorruptible public servant — the “G-Man” — who cared about facts rather than politics or headlines. He earned public trust by pursuing gangsters, spies, and other actual criminals, and much of the country shared his fears about communism and subversion. Meanwhile, many of his most controversial tactics remained hidden from public view.

Only in the 1960s did Hoover’s popularity begin to decline, as the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and broader cultural upheaval divided Americans and made many of them increasingly skeptical of authority. Then, in 1971, activists burglarized an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, exposing details of confidential surveillance programs that tarnished the bureau’s reputation.

Hoover died in office the next year at the age of 77. But the full scale of his abuses didn’t become clear until 1975, when the Senate’s Church Committee investigated the FBI and other intelligence agencies. Its final report was Hoover’s posthumous indictment, revealing that America’s celebrated G-Man was the architect of one of the most egregious crackdowns on political dissent the nation had ever seen. As biographer Beverly Gage observed, Hoover went from an unheard-of 98% approval rating to “almost nobody willing to claim his legacy, even within the FBI.”

That legacy is a reminder that the government can trample Americans’ freedom of speech without passing a law or filing a criminal charge. Hoover’s methods were less formal and visible, but they could be just as effective at making people afraid to speak.

The Hoover era also reminds us that the gravest threats to free speech often come from officials who promise to protect us from whatever dangers seem most pressing at the moment — and from a public willing to accept those promises without asking what freedoms are being surrendered in return.

This year, the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary. To commemorate the occasion, FIRE is proud to present the limited series “Figures of Speech,” looking at the heroes and villains of free speech in American history. We began with Joseph McCarthy, the senator who scared America silent. Then we looked at Thomas Paine, American history’s winter soldier, and Woodrow Wilson, our worst president for free speech. Today we turn to Ida B. Wells, a journalist, activist, civil rights icon, and free speech hero.

If you visited the Chicago home of Ida B. Wells in the late 1890s, you’d likely find a gun within the lady’s reach.

“A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home,” she wrote in her 1892 pamphlet Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, “and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.”

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Unfortunately, she lived at a time when the law gave her very little. But as a journalist, activist, and public speaker, she rose above her circumstances to become one of America’s most important civil rights icons. Through her detailed reporting on lynching in the United States after the Civil War, Wells did more than most to demonstrate the power of using one’s voice in the pursuit of truth and justice.

Ida Bell Wells was born July 16, 1862, the first child of James and Elizabeth Wells, two slaves on the Boling plantation in Holly Springs, Mississippi. The Emancipation Proclamation would be issued six months later, and Ida’s parents moved quickly to assert their independence. James, a carpenter by trade, founded his own business and became well known in Holly Springs for his political activism. Elizabeth joined her children in school until she learned to read and write, showcasing a steadfastness and perseverance that Ida would later embody in her own work.

When Wells was 16, a yellow fever epidemic struck the south, claiming her parents and youngest brother. Refusing to allow the surviving family to be split up, Wells found work as a teacher in a nearby town to support her siblings. Two years later, she moved with her two youngest sisters to live with an aunt in Memphis Tennessee, and continued her work as an educator in various schools nearby.

Soon after arriving in Memphis, two incidents involving the Chesapeake, Ohio & Southwestern Railroad company lit a fire in Wells, kickstarting her journalistic and activist career. After refusing to give up her first class seat on the conductor’s orders, Wells was forcibly removed from the train car. She was furious and sued the railroad over her mistreatment. She initially won, but the Tennessee Supreme Court would later overturn the ruling, claiming that Wells’ purpose with the lawsuit was to “harass” the railroad company.

Perhaps naively, Wells was shocked by this outcome. “I have firmly believed all along that the law was on our side and would, when we appealed it, give us justice,” she later wrote. “I feel shorn of that belief and utterly discouraged.”

Soon after, Wells began writing for the Memphis publications The Living Way and The Evening Star, attacking racist Jim Crow policies and exposing the conditions of African American schools in the region. Her criticisms led to her teaching contract not being renewed, and while she lamented the loss of a beloved profession, she was undeterred. She soon bought a partnership in and became editor of the local Memphis paper Free Speech and Headlight. Circulation tripled under her stewardship, and it is in the pages of Free Speech that the next major turning point in Wells’ life would occur.

After the lynching of her friend Thomas Moss and two others by a racist mob in 1892, Wells dedicated her life to exposing the horrors of lynching across the country. Writing first for Free Speech, and later in dedicated pamphlets like Southern Horrors, Wells would single-handedly bring what she labeled an “awful indictment against American civilization” to the public’s attention, and craft one of the first data-driven journalistic exposés in American history.

However, this also led to more controversy and danger for Wells. She published an editorial in Free Speech refuting “that old threadbare lie that Negro men rape white women,” and commented that, “if Southern men are not careful, a conclusion might be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.” The article was republished in various other Memphis newspapers, along with commentary decrying Wells’ “loathsome and repulsive calumnies.”

“Patience under such circumstances is not a virtue,” another newspaper forebodingly added, mistakenly thinking Wells was a man. “If the Negroes themselves do not apply the remedy without delay it will be the duty of those whom he has attacked to tie the wretch who utters these calumnies to a stake at the intersection of Main and Madison Sts., brand him in the forehead with a hot iron and perform upon him a surgical operation with a pair of tailor’s shears.”

Days later a mob descended upon the offices of Free Speech and Headlight, destroying it. Creditors seized and sold the newspaper’s assets. Co-owner James L. Fleming was forced to flee Memphis. Reverend Taylor Nightingale, who had founded the paper but sold it to Fleming and Wells, was assaulted and forced at gunpoint to sign a letter retracting the editorial.

Wells had been vacationing in New York City during the sacking of Free Speech, but trains were reportedly being monitored in case she returned. She never did. She stayed in New York City, working briefly for The New York Age before permanently relocating to Chicago the following year.

Her work investigating and campaigning against lynchings, however, remained uninterrupted. In 1895 Wells published A Red Record, a 100-page pamphlet outlining her sociological research on lynching in the United States since emancipation, as well as the overall struggles of African Americans after the Civil War. Since 1865, she wrote, “ten thousand Negroes have been killed in cold blood without the formality of judicial trial and legal execution.”

Wells’ reporting brought lynching to the forefront of the American consciousness — particularly in the North, where the general public knew very little about it. She also gained international notoriety, traveling to Europe on lecture tours and helping to build anti-lynching coalitions in Britain.

In Chicago, Wells continued her work in journalism but also expanded her efforts to include civil rights activism. Because women could not vote at the time, Wells used women’s clubs in Chicago to raise their voices and advocate for issues important to their cause. She founded the League of Colored Women to pursue self-education, start kindergartens and libraries in the African American community, and lobby the government to secure women’s suffrage. She was instrumental in the creation of the NAACP, was an active member of the National Equal Rights League, fought against school segregation in the South, and marched for civil rights in Washington D.C.

By the time of her death in 1931, Ida B. Wells had become a civil rights icon and a model for how exercising our expressive rights can help us seek and secure justice. Among other posthumous accolades and commemorations, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2020 “for her outstanding and courageous reporting on the horrific and vicious violence against African Americans during the era of lynching.”

To this day, she remains an inspiration to all who raise their voices to combat injustice and fight for their civil liberties.

“The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them,” she wrote in her unfinished autobiography. And as the legacy of her work continues to ignite and inspire, few have lived these words better.

This year, the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary. To commemorate the occasion, FIRE is proud to present the limited series “Figures of Speech,” looking at the heroes and villains of free speech in American history. We began with Joseph McCarthy, the senator who scared America silent. Then we looked at Thomas Paine, American history’s winter soldier. Now we turn to Woodrow Wilson, our worst president when it comes to free speech.

On Feb. 9, 1919 — the eve of an ill-fated vote on the 19th Amendment — the National Woman’s Party burned President Woodrow Wilson in effigy.

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Suffragettes had been protesting outside the White House for years at this point, and were furious with Wilson’s disinterest in supporting their cause. After years of pressure, Wilson had finally paid lip service in support of the cause, but this commitment had come without action. “We burn not the effigy of the President of a free people, but the leader of an autocratic party organization,” suffragist Sue White declared. This sentiment was echoed by protest signs and banners that read “The President is responsible for the betrayal of American women,” and “He preaches democracy abroad and thwarts democracy here.”

These criticisms were right.

Wilson had become quite successful at denying people their right to be heard. By 1919, he had secured his reputation as the worst president for free speech in American history. Thousands of arrests, prosecutions, convictions, and even deportations for speech occurred under his stewardship and instruction. He had even successfully established the first modern propaganda institution in American history, which also controlled and stifled the dissemination of any speech counter to his preferred narratives.

Wilson’s iron grip on American speech was short-lived, but devastating at a scale not seen before or arguably since.

Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born in Staunton, Virginia, on Dec. 28, 1856, and grew up in the midst of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. He was one of only two presidents, the other being John Tyler, to have been citizens of the Confederate States of America. It was an upbringing that was consistent with the racist policies and sentiments Wilson would carry with him into the White House. He later re-segregated the federal government and promoted Ku Klux Klan propaganda, such as by showing the film The Birth of a Nation at the White House and lavishly praising it.

Wilson would study history, political philosophy, and German before earning his PhD in history and political science. Soon after, he became president of Princeton University, where he became a prominent advocate for progressive education. He later served as governor of New Jersey from 1911 to 1913, wherein he engaged in various progressive actions including antitrust laws and workers compensation legislation, as well as reforms regulating child labor and increasing standards for factory working conditions. This won him widespread recognition as a leader in the Progressive movement and made him a prominent contender for the presidency, which he won in 1912.

When World War I broke out in 1914, Wilson was praised for maintaining neutrality and keeping America out of the conflict, as well as for attempting to broker peace between the warring powers. His position was so popular, in fact, that it was used extensively during his reelection campaign, which used the slogan “He Kept Us Out of War.”

This, however, wouldn’t last — nor would his overall approval by the masses.

In 1917, after several military escalations, the United States officially declared war against Germany and Austria-Hungary. It soon became important to Wilson to not only succeed in the war effort, but to garner support and tamp down on any opposition. Via executive order, Wilson formed the Committee on Public Information to influence public opinion through the use of all available media — including posters, pamphlets, newspaper releases, films, school campaigns, and more. A volunteer pool of 75,000 men was recruited for the effort, which spanned the country in various languages and formats.

Importantly, the Committee’s duty also included the suppression of any news or sentiment that ran counter to the pro-war narrative — of which there was plenty. Under the leadership of investigative journalist George Creel, the CPI pressured American media outlets to censor news stories. It also coordinated with various other government agencies, including the Post Office, to stifle the dissemination of dissident messaging. In his memoirs, Creel would later gloat that the CPI “reached deep into every American community” and that there “was no part of the great war machinery that we did not touch, no medium of appeal that we did not employ.”

All of this occurred at Wilson’s direction, but the censorial efforts didn’t end there. Shortly after the U.S. entered the war, Congress passed the Espionage Act at Wilson’s behest. The law granted postal officials the authority to ban and prevent the circulation of newspapers from the mail, and declared that anyone convicted of obstructing the draft would face a $10,000 fine and up to 20 years in jail. With this newfound power, the government was able to destroy the distribution channels of more than 70 publications deemed disloyal to the cause.

This was the motivating factor for Wilson: silence any and all dissent. “If there should be disloyalty,” he wrote in a letter to Congress, “it will be dealt with a firm hand of repression.”

The Espionage Act was soon amended into what would become the Sedition Act of 1918, granting even more censorial powers to the government. The revised law maintained the Espionage Act’s control of content sent through the mail, but also criminalized anyone who interfered with the draft or who willfully made “false statements with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the military or naval forces of the United States.”

Perhaps most critically, the Sedition Act also criminalized anyone who would “willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States, or the Constitution of the United States, or the military or naval forces of the United States.” This put into the government’s crosshairs anyone who advocated for labor strikes, campaigned against the draft, showed support for countries at war with the U.S., or who could have been interpreted as having lied about any of it.

With that, President Woodrow Wilson had granted himself and his administration immense power to silence speech, stifle dissent, and control the American narrative through the remainder of the Great War. Under his leadership, more than 2,000 prosecutions, 1,000 convictions, 4,000 arrests, and 800 deportations occurred in response to speech considered incitement to violence, espionage, sedition, and wrongthink. This includes the infamous Palmer Raids as well as the First Red Scare — a series of tribunals, arrests, and suppression attempts against suspected communists, socialists, anarchists, labor unions, and other dissenters.

There’s a poetic symmetry to the fact that Wilson wasn’t actually in the White House the day he was burned in effigy. He had been in Paris for weeks helping to formalize an end to World War I — and playing a major role in the founding of the League of Nations. But the reverberations of his censorial policies continued without him. Dozens of protesters were arrested that day — so many, in fact, that police had to commandeer private vehicles to transport prisoners once their paddy wagons were full.

As predicted, the Senate vote on the 19th Amendment did not pass the following day. It would be subsequent pressure from suffragists and a vote during a special session of Congress — called by Wilson, who was increasingly concerned about his administration’s reputation — that would allow the Amendment to pass in May of 1919. It was ratified a year later, officially giving voice to those who to that point had been silenced.

Wilson suffered a debilitating stroke in October 1919, ending his aspirations for a third presidential term. He died in February of 1924 at the age of 67, and he has remained a controversial figure ever since. While many praise his progressive policies and work in antitrust and labor legislation, as well as his efforts to secure peace during World War I, his overt racism and expansion of federal power draw significant and rightful criticism.

But it is his devastating and draconian crackdown on free expression, which remains unmatched on American soil, that makes Woodrow Wilson one of the worst villains for free speech in our nation’s history.

This year, the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary. To commemorate the occasion, FIRE is proud to present the limited series “Figures of Speech,” looking at the heroes and villains of free speech in American history. We began with Joseph McCarthy, the senator who scared America silent. Then we looked at Thomas Paine, American history’s winter soldier. Now we turn to Frank Kameny, one of the great leaders of the early gay rights movement.

It’s hard to think of an American whose life better illustrates the effectiveness of free expression than Frank Kameny.

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Born in 1925 and raised in the Richmond Hill section of Queens, Kameny was provided with a solid middle-class upbringing by his father, an immigrant from Poland, and his mother, a secretary from the Lower East Side. As a child, Kameny looked to the stars at night and settled on becoming an astronomer to uncover the secrets of the universe. His own secret would stymie those plans, but his response to adversity changed the course of history.

After seeing frontline combat in Europe, Kameny earned a PhD in astronomy at Harvard, and in the fall of 1956, he moved to Washington, DC, to take a teaching job at Georgetown University.

Kameny’s skills were in high demand. The Cold War competition with the Soviets was expanding into outer space, and the following year, he was hired by the Army Map Service, the military’s cartographic agency. His passion for celestial exploration mirrored a personal process of self-discovery, as he began surveying the city’s subterranean gay scene, spending most evenings at one of the handful of gay bars or at private after-hours parties. Fulfilled by his job, confident in his abilities, and increasingly comfortable in his identity as a homosexual, Kameny saw a future for himself as bright as the stars he had begun to gaze at through the starter telescope his parents gave him as a child.

And then his secret caught up with him. On Oct. 4, 1957, the Soviets officially kicked off the space race by launching the first satellite, Sputnik 1, into orbit around the Earth. Kameny at the time was conducting fieldwork at an observatory 12,000 feet above sea level, on the Big Island of Hawaii. It was an inconvenient place to be when, just a few weeks later, a letter arrived from the Civil Service Commission ordering him back to Washington within 48 hours.

After Kameny arrived in Washington, he waited several weeks before he was summoned to a meeting at Army Map Service headquarters. Upon his arrival, a pair of investigators from the CSC were waiting. They had in their possession the record of his arrest the previous year in a San Francisco public restroom on charges of disorderly conduct. Kameny, according to the report, had solicited sex from an undercover police officer.

“We have information that leads us to believe you are a homosexual,” one of the investigators stated. “Do you have any comment?”

At the time, homosexuality was illegal in all 50 states, classified as a mental disorder by the medical establishment, and condemned from the pulpits of every major religious denomination. All Kameny would tell them was that his sexual activity was none of their business. As far as his interrogators were concerned, this was as good as an admission of guilt. On Dec. 20, Kameny was duly fired, and his security clearance was revoked.

“Are Homosexuals Security Risks?” the gay magazine ONE had asked on the cover of its December 1955 issue. Noting that “howls of righteous indignation” had been raised when Sen. Joe McCarthy smeared Gen. George Marshall as a Communist puppet, the editorial lamented the conspicuous lack of “protest against the infamous blanket dismissal of homosexuals from government jobs without a public hearing.”

There were no civil libertarians willing to defend the due process rights of homosexuals as they did those accused of disloyalty. In January, the American Civil Liberties Union, founded in 1920 “to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States,” had decided that it was “not within the province of the Union to evaluate the social validity of laws aimed at the suppression or elimination of homosexuals” from public employment.

Prohibited from working for the federal government, Kameny applied for jobs in the private sector. But because President Dwight Eisenhower’s Executive Order 10450 prohibiting homosexuals from government employment applied to contractors, this Harvard-trained astronomer eager to serve his country at the height of its interstellar competition with the Soviet Union was rejected everywhere he looked. With no source of income and his savings drying up, Kameny accommodated himself to a penury that would remain a constant throughout the rest of his life. Over one particularly difficult eight-month period, he subsisted on twenty cents’ worth of food a day. A pat of butter for his mashed potatoes costing five cents was a luxury he could rarely afford.

Though he had been, by his own description, “shy and retiring” as a young man, Kameny was “radicalized” by the way his government had treated him. How could his homosexual orientation possibly affect his work as an astronomer or, as he one day hoped to be, an astronaut floating hundreds of miles away from Earth’s surface? On the contrary, it was the government that had wronged him. “I simply felt something had to be done,” he recalled.

And so, Kameny did what no gay man or woman in his position had yet done: He fought back.

In late 1958, after a futile year spent searching for work, Kameny contacted the ACLU. In line with its position of neutrality regarding the “suppression or elimination of homosexuals,” the national organization declined to take up his case. But it referred him to its Washington, DC, chapter, where a sympathetic staff attorney acting in a personal capacity helped him file a lawsuit against the army in district court. In so doing, Kameny became the first private citizen to challenge the federal government over its discrimination against homosexuals, a deed made more noteworthy by his decision to attach his name to the case rather than post it to the docket pseudonymously.

It’s hard to overstate the magnitude of the cost to Kameny as an individual, or the significance of the societal changes he would achieve, by openly confronting the government over its oppression of homosexuals.

On Dec. 22, 1959, district court judge Burnita Matthews granted the federal government’s motion to dismiss Kameny’s case against the army, and the following August, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia denied his petition for rehearing. To Kameny, whose determination to right the wrongs inflicted upon him would only grow stronger with each and every obstacle placed in his way, these were but temporary setbacks. Announcing his intention to continue his legal challenge, alone if necessary, the accidental activist set the tenor for what would be a decades-long campaign for equality:

I am not a belligerent person, nor do I seek wars, but having been forced into a battle, I am determined that this thing will be fought thru to a successful conclusion, come what may, and that as long as any recourse exists, I will not be deprived of my proper rights, freedoms and liberties, as I see them, or of a career, profession, and livelihood, or of my right to live my life as I choose to live it, so long as I do not interfere with the rights of others to do likewise.

Opening the nation’s closet door ever so slightly, Kameny lit a path for millions of men and women to follow him out. In 1961, he cofounded the Mattachine Society of Washington, DC, one of the country’s first gay rights organizations. Four years later, he organized the first gay rights protest outside the White House.

His constant lobbying, litigating, and lecturing helped bring about substantial change, from the American Psychiatric Association’s removal of homosexuality from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1973 and the Civil Service Commission’s lifting of its ban on gay employment in 1975. In 1971, he became the first openly gay person to run for Congress when he campaigned to be the District of Columbia’s non-voting delegate.

A clear and consistent advocate of the First Amendment, Kameny happily debated all comers and defended their right to speak no matter how passionately he disagreed with their views. The fruits of this successful strategy can be seen all around us, in a country more open, equal, and free.

This year, the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary. To commemorate the occasion, FIRE is proud to present the limited series “Figures of Speech,” looking at the heroes and villains of free speech in American history. We began with Joseph McCarthy, the senator who scared America silent. Then we looked at Thomas Paine, American history’s winter soldier. Now we turn to Anthony Comstock, the postal inspector who became our censor-in-chief.

In the spring of 1873, the U.S. postal inspector, a prudish Christian named Anthony Comstock, arrived in Washington carrying a box of dildos. There were also dirty books, naughty pictures, French playing cards, abortion pamphlets, “intermediate tegumentary coverings” (condoms), and enough sexually explicit material to scandalize Congress into trying to legislate the Devil out of Americans.

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Comstock called the collection his “Chamber of Horrors” and went around showing it to lawmakers like a traveling freak show. The performance worked. On March 3, President Ulysses S. Grant signed what became known as the Comstock Act, one of the most sweeping censorship laws in American history. The statute banned the mailing of “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” materials, along with contraceptives, abortion-related items, and even information about where such things could be found.

The law didn’t just criminalize objects. It criminalized the circulation of certain ideas. Then Congress did something truly astounding and effectively gave Comstock himself the authority to enforce the law. America had effectively created its censor-in-chief.

Comstock came of age in a world of New England restraint during one of the most turbulent periods in American history. Born in Connecticut in 1844, he fought for the Union in the Civil War and served without incident, although he complained about his fellow soldiers using profanity.

Comstock’s worldview was intensely religious. Amy Sohn — author of The Man Who Hated Women, a book about Comstock and civil liberties in the Gilded Age — notes that Comstock idolized his mother, a direct descendant of the Puritans who epitomized the “Victorian ideal.” He also masturbated obsessively and was tormented by guilt over it. “Today Satan has sorely tired me,” he wrote in his diary. “Yet by God’s grace did not yeild (sic).” Another entry notes, “This morning were severely tempted by Satan and after some time in my own weakness I failed.”

After the war, many people began insisting the country was cooked. About 700,000 lives had been lost, Lincoln was assassinated, and the economy was in ruins. But at the same time, the rural republic of Comstock’s childhood was becoming an industrial and increasingly urban nation. Railroads stitched together distant regions, and a trip that once took weeks by wagon or canal could suddenly take days by train. This allowed news and ideas to move across the country at unprecedented speed, helping form a truly national American identity. It also allowed cheap newspapers and dime novels to create a new mass media culture that circulated scandal on an unprecedented scale.

Americans had worried about the disruptive power of mass-distributed print before. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense helped ignite the Revolution by proving that cheaply printed pamphlets could move ordinary people nationwide. Now it seemed, to Comstock at least, the technology that spread democracy was also spreading sin.

As postwar Americans left farms for factory wages in places like New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, those cities began to experience overcrowded tenements, labor unrest, and more crime. As fears about crime intensified, so did anxieties about the vices believed to cause them. At the same time, waves of immigrants — especially Irish and Germans — transformed American cities with customs unfamiliar to its Protestant Anglo-American majority. This fueled nativist movements and calls for moral reform. Comstock moved to New York in 1867, where he worked as a stock clerk and with the local Young Men’s Christian Association.

In 1872, Comstock worked to get feminists Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin arrested after their newspaper, Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, published allegations about a preacher having an affair. Woodhull, the daughter of a con man and a literal snake oil salesman, was a spiritualist and the first woman to run for president of the United States. Along with her sister Tennessee, she was also the first woman to open a Wall Street brokerage firm. But the obscenity law Comstock used to get them arrested did not apply to newspapers. The sisters were acquitted and the embarrassment convinced Comstock he needed a broader federal law.

The following year, backed by the YMCA, he founded the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and traveled to Washington with his “Chamber of Horrors.” He persuaded lawmakers to pass the federal obscenity statute that became known simply as the Comstock Act. The law’s language was intentionally broad enough to criminalize almost anything Comstock deemed immoral. As the journalist Devin Leonard writes:

Within a year, Comstock seized more than twelve tons of offensive literature, and 200,000 salacious items . . . He kept his collection at the American Tract Society Building on Nassau Street in lower Manhattan, where it could do no harm. But even with the money and imprimatur of the YMCA, Comstock didn’t always succeed in putting smut merchants behind bars. It was the era of Boss Tweed, and the city was a lawless place. Pornographers bribed prosecutors to drop the charges against them. Corrupt state judges tossed out cases against booksellers and rubber goods dealers.

For the next four decades, Comstock stalked publishers, raided bookstores, and helped criminalize public discussion of sex in the United States. His censorship campaign devastated lives. He drove targets to prison, financial ruin, and even suicide — something Comstock actually bragged about. One case was Ida Craddock, a sex educator and writer who was prosecuted for distributing marital advice manuals through the mail. She advocated frank discussions of sexuality within marriage and opposed marital rape. After repeated arrests and looming imprisonment, Craddock killed herself in 1902, leaving a suicide note that condemned Comstock and the legal system that empowered him.

“His concept of immorality cast a wide net,” writes Robert Corn-Revere, who adds that Comstock even claimed that “evil reading” was more dangerous than smallpox or yellow fever, and “considered sex to be worse than deadly diseases. Why? Because he saw sex (and the lure of masturbation — and therefore eternal damnation) in everything.” Near the end of his life, Comstock claimed to have convicted enough people “to fill a passenger train of sixty-one coaches” and to have destroyed 160 tons of literature and 4 million pictures.

“Comstock once pursued a man for over a year, in a chase involving seven cities in three countries, because the offender sold Comstock a single condom,” write , , and in their review of Corn-Revere’s book The Mind of the Censor and the Eye of the Beholder. The book, which begins with the story of Comstock, is a riveting if at times disturbing read. Here’s another detail they pull from its pages:

Comstock was physically attacked at various points in his career: once stabbed in the face by a publisher; attacked by a former prize fighter; and punched repeatedly during a court proceeding by an opposing attorney, with a contemporary newspaper reporting that the commissioner overseeing the hearing imposed no punishment, and in fact “said something under his breath about some things being deserved.

Eventually, Comstock became a joke. A syndicated news report from New York in 1913 would say Comstock “has made himself the laughing stock of the town so many times that his ‘raids’ have ceased to arouse any interest.” In 1915, he stepped down from his role as postal inspector and died three months later at the age of 71. Yet Comstock was more than a Victorian scold with unfortunate facial hair. Though he never held elected office, few people have exerted more influence over the limits of speech in America. If Senator Joseph McCarthy embodied the Cold War panic over political dissent, Comstock represented an earlier American panic over moral contamination.

Over time, the constitutional foundations of Comstock’s censorship regime eroded. In United States v. One Book Called “Ulysses”, federal courts rejected broad obscenity standards used to suppress literature. In Roth v. United States, the Supreme Court narrowed the obscenity doctrine substantially. Later decisions such as Griswold v. Connecticut dismantled laws restricting contraception and recognized constitutional protections for private intimate decisions. Legally and culturally, America moved in directions Comstock would have considered apocalyptic. Yet he never disappeared.

In June 2024, FIRE launched a campaign urging President Joe Biden to posthumously pardon DM Bennett, the freethinking publisher who was imprisoned under the Comstock Act in 1879 for mailing an anti-marriage tract. FIRE filed the petition on behalf of Roderick Bradford, publisher of The Truth Seeker, one of the oldest magazines in America and the paper Bennett founded in 1873. The intention was not only to correct a historical injustice, but to underscore the ongoing dangers posed by Comstock’s legacy.

Every era produces its own comstockery. The targets change, but the underlying logic remains familiar. Speech is framed as harm, citizens as vulnerable, and suppression as protection. That’s why the story of Anthony Comstock belongs in any history of American free speech. His is not merely a story of Victorian morality but of the enduring temptation to use state power against ideas deemed socially dangerous.

This year, the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary. To commemorate the occasion, FIRE is proud to present the limited series “Figures of Speech,” looking at the heroes and villains of free speech in American history. We began with Joseph McCarthy, the senator who became our censor-in-chief and gave us a new term for political oppression. This week, we turn to Thomas Paine, the revolutionary pamphleteer who made independence imaginable.

On June 8, 1809, 72-year-old Thomas Paine took his last breath inside a small house in Greenwich Village. The next day the pamphleteer and revolutionary’s body was loaded onto a cart and taken to his farm in New Rochelle, about 22 miles north of New York City, for burial. There was no procession, no national moment of silence, no celebration of a life fully lived. Only six people attended his funeral, including his caretaker, Madame Marguerite Bonneville, a friend from his many years in Revolutionary France, and her son, Benjamin.

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As the dirt hit the mahogany coffin, Mme. Bonneville exclaimed, “Oh! Mr. Paine! My son stands here as testimony of the gratitude of America, and I, for France!” A decade later, William Cobbett, a British admirer of Paine, dug up his bones to repatriate them to England and give Paine a hero’s burial. But Cobbett failed, and portions of Paine’s remains fell into multiple hands, scattered across the globe in the decades after his death — a fitting, if macabre, ending to someone who declared himself “a citizen of the world.”

By the time of his death and subsequent desecration, Paine had fallen out of the American pantheon of Founding Fathers, reviled as an alcoholic infidel. But as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of both Common Sense and the American independence his pen sparked, Paine deserves his due and our gratitude. Without the words of Paine, the most modern of the Founding Fathers, there may be no United States of America to even celebrate today.

In January 1776, Paine’s Common Sense hit the streets of Philadelphia like a cannonball. The 47-page pamphlet was an immediate sensation and improbable debut. Paine had only washed up on American shores about 13 months before, flotsam and jetsam from the Old World. Yet in little more than a year, the 37-year-old failure reinvented himself as a successful journalist and editor in colonial Philadelphia. After Common Sense’s publication, Paine became something more: the 18th century’s greatest propagandist for revolution.

The pamphlet — penned in prose the colonies’ artisans, farmers, and mechanics could understand — argued that there could be no reconciliation with Great Britain. Instead, Paine argued that the 13 colonies could rule themselves. But Common Sense also did something truly revolutionary. It sought to tear down the edifice of oppression, hereditary monarchy, and replace it with a democratic republic that protected individual liberty. For Paine, the United States of America had the potential to be a superpower for freedom and an “asylum for mankind.”

The popular reaction to Common Sense remains legendary. The first run of 1,000 copies sold out in days. Printers all across the colonies reprinted it. Within three months, 120,000 copies were sold — a blockbuster in a population of 2.5 million colonists. To put it in modern terms, Thomas Paine was the Stephen King of the early American republic of letters. Less than six months later, the pamphlet achieved its improbable goal. The Second Continental Congress declared on July 4, 1776, that “these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States.”

In his Tom Paine and Revolutionary America, historian Eric Foner explained why Common Sense and its author were so special:

What made Paine unique was that he forged a new political language. He did not simply change the meanings of words, he created a literary style designed to bring his message to the widest possible audience. His rhetoric was clear, simple and straightforward; his arguments rooted in the common experiences of a mass readership . . . Through this new language, he communicated a new vision — a utopian image of an egalitarian republican society.

But Paine’s contribution to American independence didn’t end with Common Sense. Throughout the Revolutionary War, Paine lent his talents to the war effort. Across 13 essays called The American Crisis, Paine rallied the troops and the American populace to the Cause during its darkest days.

The first American Crisis appeared just in the nick of time — a week before Christmas 1776. Paine’s prose was so bracing that Gen. George Washington ordered it read to the troops before they crossed the icy Delaware River on Christmas night to assault Trenton the next morning. It isn’t hard to see why after reading the first essay’s immortal opening:

These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.

The Americans routed the Hessian mercenaries camping on the other side of the river during the Battle of Trenton. Hope returned to a cause that had looked all but lost. Paine once again proved that the pen can be just as mighty as the sword.

If Paine’s literary and revolutionary career had ended after America won the Revolutionary War, he no doubt would be considered a Founding Father today. His archnemesis, John Adams, worried that “History is to ascribe the American Revolution to Thomas Pain.” But it wasn’t to be. Paine soon plunged into the revolutionary politics engulfing France.

As the French Revolution descended into the Reign of Terror, Paine found himself imprisoned for arguing against King Louis XVI’s execution and completed what became his most infamous work: The Age of Reason. A deist, Paine provided a rationalist argument against revealed religion in his trademark style: plainspoken, ferocious, free-thinking. As usual, Paine pulled no punches, reserving his worst for the Bible and Christianity. “It is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine, and murder,” Paine wrote, “for the belief of a cruel God makes a cruel man.”

Paine saw his critique of revealed religion as all a piece with his critique of hereditary monarchy. “My motive and object in all my political works, beginning with Common Sense, the first work I ever published,” wrote Paine in 1806, “have been to rescue man from tyranny and false systems and false principles of government, and enable him to be free.” With The Age of Reason, Paine learned the hard way that there are some things that people do not want to be free from.

The work destroyed his reputation as the evangelicalism of the Second Great Awakening gathered force in the early republic. Longtime friends and former revolutionaries like Samuel Adams and Benjamin Rush abandoned him. Many of his contemporaries would have agreed with Benjamin Franklin’s daughter Sarah Bache, who wrote presciently to her father in a 1781 letter that “the most rational thing” Paine “could have done would have been to have died the instant he had finished his Common Sense.” Instead, Paine, ever the iconoclast, continued to express himself freely — and paid the price for his principles.

Two hundred and fifty years after his ink and quill ignited a revolution, Paine’s life and legacy are a reminder that what makes someone an American isn’t blood or soil. What makes an American is a sincere belief in the nation’s ideals: that we are a creedal nation defined by our belief in limited government, individual rights, and the consent of the governed.

And most importantly, that freedom is common sense.

This year, the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary. To commemorate the occasion, FIRE is proud to present the limited series “Figures of Speech,” looking at the heroes and villains of free speech in American history. We begin with Joseph McCarthy, the senator who became our censor-in-chief and gave us a new term for political oppression: McCarthyism.

Senator Joseph McCarthy’s drinking was legendary in Washington. Among the Beltway elite, perhaps only President Ulysses Grant and Sen. Ted Kennedy had better claims to the title of the “Washington drunk.” McCarthy drank so much and so often that he even hid booze in soft-drink bottles, earning himself the nickname “Pepsi-Cola Kid.” Journalists and colleagues described him showing up visibly intoxicated, sometimes before hearings. The irony is almost too on-the-nose for fiction: the face of moral panic in the 1950s was functioning through a fog of booze and rage.

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Born in 1908 to a Catholic farming family, McCarthy started out as a county judge. In 1946, he became a Republican senator by attacking wartime shortages, labor unrest, and Democratic incumbents. But what turned him into a national phenomenon was not a legislative achievement so much as favorable timing. After World War II, the Soviet Union acquired atomic weapons faster than expected, China fell to Mao, and the United States discovered genuine communist spy networks within its borders, made famous by the cases of Klaus Fuchs and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

Into this atmosphere McCarthy catapulted himself with a single speech, delivered in 1950 in the steel town of Wheeling, West Virginia. “While I cannot take the time to name all of the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring,” he declared, “I have here in my hand a list of 205 that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who, nevertheless, are still working and shaping the policy in the State Department.”

McCarthy had realized that in a media landscape of headlines and radio clips, allegations mattered more than proof. One could make terrifying accusations, keep them vague, and force everyone else to defend themselves. Social media was decades away, but spiritually, it had already arrived. As chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, he was able to subpoena witnesses, demand loyalty information, and stage nationally publicized hearings. He used public accusation, guilt by association, and theatrical hearings, amplified through nonstop media attention, to help create America’s Second Red Scare. Or simply, McCarthyism.

To be clear, there were authentic communist threats to American democracy. In addition to Fuchs and the Rosenbergs passing atomic secrets to the Soviets, there was the Cambridge Five, British double-agents whose leaks impacted Western intelligence efforts. Kim Philby, one of their members, nearly became head of British intelligence in Washington. Then there was the Silvermaster Group, which had infiltrated U.S. government agencies, including the Treasury, the Board of Economic Warfare, and the White House. But McCarthy himself rarely uncovered major espionage himself, and historians generally agree that his actual investigative record was weak.

Nevertheless, he thrived because many establishment figures feared opposing him outright, and because many were willing to voluntarily do his dirty work for him — by firing people over opinions or, in some cases, over the mere suggestion of opinions that they might have. Universities, Hollywood studios, unions, publishers, and federal agencies often cooperated preemptively, creating blacklists and loyalty reviews to avoid becoming targets. The most damaging feature of McCarthyism was not simply government investigation, but the culture of fear that made institutions abandon free expression without being forced to do so. Newspapers who fired journalists, studios who blacklisted actors.

The irony was this was also how the Soviet Union and the East Germany Stasi operated — through voluntary compliance far more than coercion. Once dissent itself becomes professionally dangerous, formal censorship is almost unnecessary. McCarthy’s chilling effect on American intellectual and cultural life was profound. Teachers lost jobs, diplomats were purged, artists and screenwriters were ostracized, security clearances and publishing contracts were revoked. And often, the crime involved was nothing more than signing a petition, attending a left-wing meeting years before, criticizing U.S. policy, or refusing to name names.

Major figures damaged or destroyed by McCarthy’s anti-communist crusade included diplomat and China expert Owen Lattimore, broadcaster Edward R. Murrow (who fought back publicly), playwright Arthur Miller, and countless lesser-known teachers, civil servants, and artists.

The First Amendment remained formally intact throughout the McCarthy era, but constitutional rights on paper proved less meaningful once employers, universities, and cultural institutions decided that controversial speech carried unacceptable risk. What McCarthy demonstrated was how easily a free society can punish expression without ever formally outlawing it. As Judge Learned Hand famously said, “Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it.”

At the peak of his powers, McCarthy seemed invincible. In fact, it seemed the only person who could really bring him down was himself. And that’s exactly what happened. Partly it was his drinking, but the fatal dagger came when he destroyed himself during the televised hearings in 1954. His decisive mistake was attacking the U.S. Army, an institution vastly more trusted than the State Department or Hollywood liberals. The key moment came when he attacked a young lawyer from a prestigious firm with supposed communist associations.

Army counsel Joseph Welch McCarthy had mastered newspaper-era sensationalism, but the televised hearings that made him a national phenomenon also exposed his personal demeanor in ways that print could conceal. It crystallized a growing public realization that his politics depended on endless escalation without moral restraint. Welch simply put into words what the public was already beginning to realize when, during their exchange he snapped back with the immortal line, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?”

Once his aggressive and often baseless accusations were exposed, many Americans turned against him. Journalists, fellow senators, even President Eisenhower began pushing back. The Senate launched an investigation and, that same year, formally censured him for conduct “contrary to senatorial traditions,” effectively stripping him of influence. He remained in office but became politically radioactive, increasingly isolated, and consumed by his love of the bottle. Ironically, his downfall was facilitated by the same technology that had contributed to his rise. But more importantly, once other people stopped voluntarily complying, his power was gone.

In 1957, McCarthy died at the age of 48, physically ruined and politically disgraced. Yet the larger significance of his legacy lies less in his personal fall than in the recurring pattern he revealed in democratic politics, one that might even feel familiar to Americans today: Fear can make institutions abandon procedural norms voluntarily, media ecosystems can reward accusation over verification, and demagogues often rise not because they create public anxiety from nothing, but because they weaponize reasonable fears more ruthlessly than their rivals.

As America approaches 250 years of independence, moments like this can still teach us something about free speech. The enduring lesson of McCarthyism is that free speech is most vulnerable not when societies abandon liberty outright, but when frightened institutions convince themselves that suppressing dissent is the responsible thing to do.