PRESS AND SPEECH FREEDOMS IN AMERICA, 1619-1995: A CHRONOLOGY edited by Louis Edward Ingelhart.  Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997. 367 pp. $75.00 Cloth. ISBN 0-313-30174-3.

Reviewed by David England, Department of Political Science, Arkansas State University.
 

As the United States prepares to enter the Third Millennium, deeply held and contrasting views on allowable expression are still with us in debates on V-chips, television and recording ratings systems, access to Internet pornography/obscenity, political speech via campaign contributions and speech codes. Professor Ingelhart has compiled an extensive chronological catalogue free from editorial comment of almost 2400 quotations, events, court cases, and technological innovations from colonial times to 1995 that illustrates that this lack of consensus is nothing new. In fact, that forced realization is one of the strengths of this book.

While adequately covering the earlier periods in the country=s history, roughly two-thirds of the work focuses on the 20th century and includes a separate chapter relating episodes occurring in 1995. Additionally, the author, in a good editorial decision, saves Supreme Court cases and quotations from the justices for a separate chapter.

Each extensively documented chapter of the work deals with a separate period of the nation=s history. Starting with a summary of general events and perspectives impacting on freedom of expression that occurred within each chapter=s time frame, the author then provides a year-by-year recounting of events, opinions, and developments affecting freedom of expression within that time frame. The scope is very wide including technological episodes (e.g., the 1690 opening of a paper mill in Germantown, PA), quotations from people in all walks of life from the political world (President Hoover linking the existence of free expression to free enterprise in 1928), the business of publishing (the slave Jupiter Hammond=s publication of several poems in 1761), the entertainment world (Judy Garland in 1947 urging Americans to speak up to preserve their freedom of conscience) and even the world of sports (Charles Barkley, the professional basketball player, complaining in 1995 that all the media tries to do is to create controversy).

In compiling the various items, the author attempts successfully to present episodes from all sides of the freedom of expression debate and no overt bias in selection is found (although the author is most assuredly a proponent of the freedom). Additionally, the presentation of each episode contains enough contextual information to make the episode understandable standing on its own. Professor Ingelhart is to be especially commended for his lucid presentation of the tests relating to freedom of expression developed by the Supreme Court.

This is not a work that will be read cover-to-cover at one sitting although it is fascinating to read in small bites. Nor is it a work that would be assigned for classroom instruction although it does quite strongly make the point that there is and always has been a lack of consensus on what freedom of expression really means in this country. By its very nature, the strength of the work is, of course, as a source book for research and teaching. To that end, the author has supplied excellent footnotes and indices of Supreme Court decisions, subjects and persons. Because of those strengths, the book should find its way into the university library and the collections of those scholars focusing on freedom of expression. It would also be valuable to the expression activist, either pro or con, as a source of polemical material.