From the Argives: This Has All Happened Before. Tracking the University’s Discourse on Free Speech

Free speech debates are flaring across American campuses right now, whether they’re over protest encampments, invited speakers, or the limits of academic dissent. At the University, these arguments are nothing new. The Argus has served as the stage and record of campus free speech discourse since the 1870s, and the stakes have rarely felt low.

The earliest invocation of “free speech” in The Argus appeared not in a political piece, but in a reflection on religion losing its grip on public life. On Tuesday, April 30, 1878, The Argus published an article entitled “Is Pulpit Power Waning?” accredited to “H,” which named free speech as a defining feature of the modern age.

“When free speech and free thought are idolized, in an age like the present, the question, ‘Is Pulpit Power Waning?’ is not soon answered,” H wrote.

In the late nineteenth century, the phrase “free speech and free thought” carried associations to a broader secularizing movement, the same current that produced traveling freethinker lecture circuits and a booming anti-clerical press. While the University would not officially cut ties with the Methodist Church until 1937, and mandatory chapel attendance would not end until 1960, the question of how to handle cultural change remained a constant on campus. 

By the early 1920s, free speech had become a live legal emergency. The World War I–era Espionage and Sedition Acts had codified laws around the extent of free speech, and the newly founded American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was responding to the legal aftermath. Wesleyan’s Y.M.C.A. invited the ACLU’s founder, Roger Baldwin, to speak at the Eclectic Society. In an Argus article published on Thursday, Dec. 13, 1923, an uncredited author announced the talk, introducing Baldwin to the student body.

“Mr. Baldwin is a graduate of Harvard,” The Argus wrote. “After his graduation he entered the field of law, which occupied him professionally until the war broke out. Due to pacifistic motives, Mr. Baldwin refused to register for the draft, but accepted his lot of internment and spent the period of war in prison. Since his release he has put his legal experience to the defense of free speech, especially in the problems of labor and capital.”

While Baldwin’s defense of free speech may be admirable, the extension of such beliefs was quite controversial. The author added, almost as a footnote, that Baldwin “recently upheld the Ku Klux Klan in an open debate.”

Baldwin’s defense of the Klan’s right to organize reflected his broader civil liberty position that free speech protections must be universal, including all groups across the political spectrum. His visit to the University marked an early instance of Wesleyan’s speaker problem, as controversial guest speakers have remained a flash point for free speech disputes through today. 

The follow-up coverage of Baldwin’s talk, published on Monday, Dec. 17, 1923, recorded the speaker’s arguments in greater detail. According to the article, Baldwin began with a reference to the prosecution of Socialist Party of America leader Eugene V. Debs, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison under the Espionage Act for a speech opposing the draft and was still in federal prison at the time.

“Up to the war there had been no prosecution of free speech,” The Argus wrote, paraphrasing the lecture. “The old Jeffersonian doctrine, which was strongly believed in the past, was that social progress was based on unlimited social freedom. Deeds could be punished, but language could not.”

Baldwin also reminded his audience of the consequences of censorship and the slippery slope of free speech restrictions. 

“‘If you don’t meet these new forces which have come into the world with an open mind and an outstretched hand now, you will have to deal with them later with chaos and violence,’” The Argus wrote, quoting his talk.

Baldwin grounded his argument for radical free speech in political scandals at the center of political discourse at the time of his speech. 

“If opinions and beliefs are penalised, and people who bring in new ideas are deported, social progress and democracy are blocked and revolution is encouraged,” Baldwin said. “Radical ideas have good in them, and should only be discarded after consideration. To receive the radical challenge of old ideas with tolerance and welcome is the only way to peaceful social progress.”

The deportation Baldwin referenced would likely remind his audience of the recent 1919–20 Palmer Raids, still prominent in public memory, which led to the arrest and deportation of thousands accused of radical sympathies.

On Thursday, Dec. 8, 1927, still in the wake of federal free speech restrictions, The Argus’ editors published a profile of a hypothetical, ideal University professor dubbed “Shelton.”

“Professor Shelton has courage,” The Argus wrote. “He is not afraid of losing his job for saying exactly what he thinks. Through the efforts of the American Association of University Professors, he is now secure from dismissal on that score. … (If the faculty were made exactly like a sales force in the ease of hiring and firing, it would be a death-blow to free speech.)”

While Shelton is a fictional professor, the stakes he faced were not. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) had been actively opposing politically motivated faculty dismissals since 1915, and by the early 1930s, the issue had become a nationwide concern. The author added that Shelton “thinks of himself and the student as partners in the search for truth,” a stance that continues to threaten job security in academia.

In 1935, President James L. McConaughy and Student Body President Gilbert H. Clee ’35 traveled to Hartford to testify against Connecticut’s proposed Oath of Allegiance Bill, which would have required teachers at tax-exempt institutions to swear loyalty to the state and federal constitutions as a condition of employment. The Argus published a report of the event on Thursday, March 28, 1935. 

“The bill is receiving much opposition from educators all over the state, who claim that the legislation would bar free speech, make education too subservient to the state, and would be a potent weapon in times of crises,” The Argus wrote.

Loyalty oath campaigns became prevalent on many American campuses in the early 1930s, often driven by veterans’ organizations concerned about pacifist and socialist student activism. Connecticut’s bill ultimately failed, partially due to organized opposition from educators, including McConaughy.

The following year, the Wesleyan Student Senate protested a decision made at Connecticut State College, where the board of trustees declared that public discussion questioning military training on campus could be grounds for removal. The Senate’s resolution was published in The Argus on Monday, May 13, 1935.

“Believing [the] above quoted resolution to be an unprecedented violation of free speech and a threat to academic freedom in American educational institutions, we, the Senate of Wesleyan University, protest the resolution and ask that it be rescinded,” the Senate minutes reproduced in The Argus record.

The policy they were responding to read, in part:

“‘[A]ny formal public agitation or formal public discussion on the campus promoted by individuals or college staff, or by individual students, which reflect on military training or instruction will subject such individuals to cause for removal.’”

Connecticut State’s board response was part of a broader wave of campus anti-war organizing in the interwar period, including the Oxford Pledge, in which students publicly refused to participate in future wars.

In a letter to the editor published March 28, 1940, Ed C. Johnson ’41 responded to another student who had invoked Soviet censorship as evidence of American freedom’s superiority.

“[H]ere in the United States, as in virtually every other country, be it a dictatorship or a democracy, we have freedom of speech on everything except the one fundamental issue upon which the doctrine of free speech was originally founded—that is, the right to advocate any change in the form of government,” Johnson wrote.

Less than a year before the United States joined World War II, Johnson spoke to the dynamic between national and global free speech restrictions.

“Here in America we don’t clamp a man in a concentration camp when he talks out of turn,” Johnson wrote. “Oh, no siree, we do things in a much more subtle and civilized manner. We hale a ‘radical’ before the courts, we go through all the legal trappings, and then we sentence him on a far fetched juridical technicality.”

Johnson sent his letter to the editor shortly after the Smith Act of 1940 was passed, which made it a federal crime to advocate the overthrow of the government, a law used to prosecute Communist Party of the United States of America members and sympathizers for decades to come. 

“Now no matter what we may think of Communism, Socialism, or Fascism, for heaven’s sake let’s give everyone a right to his say or else let us once and for all quit kidding ourselves about all this ballyhoo of American ‘democracy, liberty and freedom,’” Johnson wrote.

Hope Cognata can be reached at hcognata@wesleyan.edu.

“From the Argives” is a column that explores The Argus’ archives (Argives) and any interesting, topical, poignant, or comical stories that have been published in the past. Given The Argus’ long history on campus and the ever-shifting viewpoints of its student body, the material, subject matter, and perspectives expressed in the archived article may be insensitive or outdated, and do not reflect the views of any current member of The Argus. If you have any questions about the original article or its publication, please contact Head Archivists Hope Cognata at hcognata@wesleyan.eduand Lara Anlar at lanlar@wesleyan.edu.