Political speech, now one of the most highly-protected forms of speech in the United States, wasn't always protected. In times of stress, particularly times of war, free speech has been curtailed: Congress passed the Sedition Act of 1798 to silence critics of the Adams administration, and it passed the Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917/18 to silence critics of US participation in WW I. Both laws openly flouted constitutional free-speech guarantees. In a series of high-profiile cases over the course of the twentieth century, the US Supreme Court developed a First Amendment doctrine that gave more and more types of speech First Amendment protection. Starting with the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris in 2015, this chapter looks at increasing protections for political speech from 1791 to the present, including free speech for students. We assess the continuing impact of the doctrine that might be called "free speech, but." Yes, speech is protected, but there is still some speech considered outside the framework of legal protection.

This chapter explores the transformation of the world of the American worker wrought by the Great War.Before the war, American industry demanded an endless supply of cheap labor. This imperative structured all aspects of working-class life——labor conditions and pay, home and neighborhood, politics and labor organization, and even its heterogenous racial and national composition. It had brought into being a working class at once within and apart from mainstream America. The economic and political forces unleashed by the Great War made America’s workers both the objects and agents of immense change. With the drastic curtailment of immigration caused by wartime conditions, workers could no longer be viewed as replaceable cogs, mere labor inputs in the production process. Neither could the insularity of their communities be tolerated, for during war, government and industry demanded loyalty, even active allegiance. Yet workers seized on the possibilities presented by the war in a bid to chart their own course. Emerging from this maelstrom was a dramatically different relationship between workers, on one hand, and business and government, on the other, ending the epoch of mass immigration and putting in place the beginnings of a labor system that valued long-term employment and worker loyalty.