"Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech or of the press." Judging these words by what they say, they form a mandate, clear in meaning, absolute in force. Yet for the greater part of two centuries they have been treated by Congress, the Supreme Court and the nation as a flexible admonition, applied with varying degrees of strictness and laxity. In general, the protection of freedom has been lax when there was most need to be strict, with gains in strictness when there was little to risk by being lax. (Rutland, 1955)
For such an anomaly there is but one explanation--fear of the freedom that the words proclaim. Blessed with a form of government that requires universal liberty of thought and expression, blessed with a social and economic system built on that same foundation, the American people have created the danger they fear by denying to themselves the liberties they cherish. The abridgments of freedom are not thrust upon the nation by a hereditary monarch, hereditary peers, proprietors of entailed estates and crown-appointed judges, as they were in England from the Middle Ages up to the middle of the nineteenth century. In the United States the denials of liberty are a by-product of the power of the people to establish or destroy that liberty. Guarantees planted in a written Constitution as a safeguard against impulsive legislatures, arbitrary executives and thoughtless popular majorities have been reduced to feeble maxims unheeded by those who give them that misnomer.
Fear, translated into a supposed necessity for self-preservation, produced the first great denial of freedom in passage of the Sedition Act of 1798. Fifty years later its unconstitutionality was acknowledged and asserted by Congress, in the wording of the act reimbursing the descendants of those who had paid illegal fines............
