By Rachel Grant, Membership Co-Chair, rlgrant6@gmail.com
AEJMC History Division Chair recently co-authored a book on Emma Goldman’s No-Conscription League and the First Amendment, and we recently had a chance to chat with her about the process of researching and co-authoring this thought-provoking manuscript.
Q: Can you describe the focus of your book?
A: The book examines the legal atmosphere and rampant xenophobia that contributed to Russian anarchist Emma Goldman’s deportation in 1919. We analyzed the communications for which she was arrested―writings in Mother Earth, a mass-mailed manifesto, and speeches related to compulsory military service during World War I―as well as the ensuing legal proceedings and media coverage. Ultimately, we placed Goldman’s Supreme Court appeal in the context of the more famous Schenck and Abrams trials to demonstrate her place in First Amendment history while providing insight into wartime censorship and the attitude of the mainstream press toward radical speech.
Q: How did you come across this subject? Why did it interest you?
A: Jared encountered a short version of Emma Goldman’s story when he was reading “Free Speech in the Forgotten Years.” As he started reading more about her, he noticed fascinating overlaps between her legal struggles and the traditional narrative that surrounds the Supreme Court’s “discovery” of the First Amendment in 1919, which is an era he had spent a lot of time looking at for his legal research projects.
The narrative of how the First Amendment has been interpreted is incredibly male, something Jared had noticed in teaching his undergraduate communication law classes. Most of his students are women. So, he saw Goldman’s story as a missing piece in a male-dominated narrative. She was every bit as important as Eugene Debs or other extremists who were hauled into the courts for their speech during that period, but her story had not been told from a legal perspective. Her arguments, which the Supreme Court considered in 1918, seemed to have no place in the story of the First Amendment’s development.
We were both intrigued about bringing Goldman’s story into the narrative.
Q: What archives or research materials did you use?
A: We relied heavily on the Emma Goldman Papers at archive.org for all facets of our investigation. In addition to containing Goldman’s personal and business letters, speeches, and pamphlets, it contains numerous government and legal documents related to her monitoring as an anarchist threat, her arrests, her trials, and her deportation.
Goldman’s autobiography “Living My Life” and Alice Wexler’s Goldman biography “An Intimate Life” were excellent resources for establishing Goldman’s background, timeline, and motivations. We found nearly the full run of Mother Earth magazine at HathiTrust Digital Library. To examine newspaper coverage, we searched Newspapers.com and the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America database.
Q: How does your book relate to journalism history? How is it relevant to the present?
A: Our book relates specifically to journalism history because Goldman was the editor of an anarchist magazine that served as a key means of communicating her ideology and gaining followers. Furthermore, it discusses how the media contributed to her notoriety as well as the editorial discourse on free expression that accompanied press coverage of her arrest and trial. More broadly, it focuses on a turning point for First Amendment law and argues that Goldman deserves more credit for her role in the transition of how the Supreme Court addressed free expression.
The strongest connection between our book and the present is the xenophobic atmosphere in which Goldman’s story was situated. Today, we see significant fear of certain ethnic groups, just as many Americans feared the Russians in Goldman’s time. Much like today, in the early 1910s, the American government created mechanisms to eject feared populations from the country and prevent them from entering. Descriptions in newspapers and Goldman’s writings strongly echo scenes in recent years of Muslims held up at American airports and Hispanic immigrants detained at the southern border. This xenophobia had First Amendment implications because we saw arguments for silencing the voices of people Americans feared, because their differences made their viewpoints dangerous.
Q: What advice do you have for other historians working/starting on book projects?
A: First of all, find a publisher who is truly interested in your work. We had a wonderful experience with Routledge, from the proposal stage all the way through publication, because everyone we dealt with there found our topic interesting and important. It also is helpful to think ahead while completing the research and writing stages of the project. The processes of gathering illustrations and indexing our book were easier because of notes we made earlier.
Expanding our project from a paper to a book was really seamless. We knew the legal and historical aspects of the subject had so much potential that it was really freeing just to be able to expand on them and to add more depth. Possibly one difference to look for when going from a history paper to a book proposal would be to find some kind of timeliness peg to pitch to publishers. We were really fortunate that Goldman’s moment, and the major First Amendment cases that followed, happened 100 years ago.
Other than that, don’t be afraid to try a book if you have a project you are really passionate about. It is especially easy to do when you have a great co-author to work with.
Erika J. Pribanic-Smith is an associate professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Arlington. She specializes in research examining political communication in newspapers and magazines of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Specifically, she focuses on political partisanship in the press as well as the use of editorials and letters to the editor to disseminate political ideology. A former president of the American Journalism Historians Association, Pribanic-Smith has published her research in journals such as American Periodicals, American Journalism, Journalism History, Kansas History,and Media History Monographs. She also is the author of several book chapters.
Jared Schroeder is an assistant professor of journalism at Southern Methodist University. His research focuses on how we should interpret the First Amendment, particularly in regard to the Supreme Court’s use of the marketplace of ideas theory and, importantly, as more and more discourse occurs in virtual spaces and artificially intelligent communicators are playing larger roles in influencing the ideas that citizens encounter, comment upon, and share online. He is the author of The Press Clause and Digital Technologies Fourth Wave (Routledge, 2018) as well as articles in journals such as Communication Law & Policy, The Review of Higher Education, First Amendment Studies, and the Journal of Media Law & Ethics.
Consider purchasing this volume through Routledge.