| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.4

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to JAH online. About 280 words from this article are provided below; about 370 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the Organization of American Historians, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a member of the Organization of American Historians, you can:: • Join the OAH and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the Journal of American History.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two-hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the Journal of American History (86.1-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the Journal of American History.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Free Speech, "The People's Darling Privilege": Struggles for Freedom of Expression in American History. By Michael Kent Curtis. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. xii, 520 pp. $32.95, ISBN 0-8223-2529-2.)

This very fine book is a successor to the author's No State Shall Abridge (1990), a book that establishes as authoritatively as can be done the thesis that the privileges and immunities clause of the Fourteenth Amendment was intended to "incorporate" the Bill of Rights. Free Speech succeeds the earlier book in two important ways. 1

First, the incorporation thesis has always met with great resistance for the reason, among others, that the Fourteenth Amendment appeared to have an exclusively racial agenda, without a clear connection to the Bill of Rights. Michael Kent Curtis shows here that free speech issues loomed very large in the antebellum period, and that the Republicans who controlled Congress when the Fourteenth Amendment was written had many speech-related grievances on their mind. Both in the North and in the South there had been serious efforts to suppress antislavery speech, including suppression of Republican party speech in the South. Those efforts at suppression had sparked countermovements to defend speech, promoting the growth of a "free-speech tradition." Most of this tradition grew up outside the courts, for there was exceedingly little free speech constitutional law, and what there was frequently supported the suppressors. This was as true at the time of the Sedition Act as it was in the 1850s and during the war in the 1860s. After Curtis's book, nobody should be able to say that the Bill of Rights was unlikely to be on the minds of the drafters of the Fourteenth Amendment. . . .

There are about 370 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.