Skip to main content

Age of Dissent

By


It is time to start thinking of our next reading group, and I can't imagine a better subject than free speech.  Thomas Healy, a former federal appeals court law clerk has written an account of the landmark case in which Oliver Wendell Holmes changed the course of history.  The Great Dissent has received sterling reviews and at a little more than 300 pages can be easily digested in the course of a month.

Also worth noting is that Holmes was a great friend of Henry and William James.  He came out of the strong intellectual ferment of Boston.  Was an active abolitionist at a young age, enlisted in the Massachusetts militia, suffering wounds at Antietam and Chancellorsville during the Civil War.

In his dissent of the verdict reached by the Supreme Court on the Abrams case, Holmes seemed to go back on his earlier Scheneck decision, but he didn't see the pamphlets being distributed by Abrams as representing a clear and present danger to the United States.  This paved the way for much looser interpretations of the first amendment.

Comments

  1. avrdsOctober 25, 2013 at 2:29 AM

    I'll be distracted with other books for awhile. Reading This Town right now. I love all that gossip.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro
228 comments
Read more

Dylan in America

By
Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan.  Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose.  Looks like only yesterday.  Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.
182 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more