Free Speech League

The Free Speech League was a progressive organization in the United States, in the first two decades of the twentieth century, that fought to support freedom of speech in the early years of the twentieth century. The League focused on combatting government censorship, particularly relating to political speech and sexual material.

The League's main advocates included Edward Bliss Foote, his son Edward Bond Foote, Emma Goldman, and Theodore Schroeder. Other free speech advocates of that era included Ezra Heywood, Ben Reitman, Moses Harman, and D. M. Bennett. The league was formed in 1902,. In 1908 its goals were reported as "freedom of peaceable assembly, of discussion and of propaganda; an uncensored press, telegraph and telephone; an uninspected express; an inviolable mail." To achieve these goals, the League worked through the press, public speaking and the courts, feeling that "the education of brains and quickening of consciences are first in order of time and effect." The League's Secretary at the time was A. C. Pleydell of 175 Broadway in New York. The League was officially incorporated on April 7, 1911 in Albany, NY. The league's charter included the goal: "by all lawful means to oppose every form of government censorship over any method for the expression, communication or transmission of ideas,... and to promote such legislative enactments and constitutional amendments, state and national, as will secure these ends."

One of the primary targets of the League was the . After the Civil War, a social purity movement grew in strength, aimed at outlawing vice in general, and prostitution and obscenity in particular. Composed primarily of Protestant moral reformers and middle-class women, the Victorian-era campaign also attacked contraception, which was viewed as an immoral practice which promoted prostitution and venereal disease. A leader of the purity movement was , a postal inspector who successfully lobbied for the passage of the 1873 , a federal law prohibiting mailing of any material deemed to be obscene or related to sex in any way. Many states also passed similar state laws (collectively known as the ), sometimes extending the federal law by outlawing the use of contraceptives, as well as their distribution. Comstock was proud of the fact that he was personally responsible for thousands of arrests and the destruction of hundreds of tons of books and pamphlets.

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