“Freedom for the Thought We Hate”
Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes on this day expressed the view that became one of the most famous in the history of the First Amendment: the First Amendment protects “freedom for the thought we hate.”
The case decided on this day involved Rosika Schwimmer, a Hungarian immigrant and pacifist who refused to take the oath of citizenship because she felt that the wording would commit her to taking up arms in violating of her beliefs. The 1906 Naturalization Act required applicants for citizenship to swear that they “will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and bear true faith and allegiance to the same.” Schwimmer defined the word “defend” to mean that she would be required to take up arms in the case of war.
The Supreme Court rejected her appeal in Schwimmer v. United States. In his dissent, Justice Holmes defended her right to refuse and wrote the now-famous phrase defending “Freedom for the thought we hate.”
In the decades ahead there would be many examples of the ACLU and its lawyers defending “freedom for the thought we hate.” On September 30, 1968 Eleanor Holmes Norton, African American staff lawyer for the ACLU, defended the right of George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, to speak in New York City. On May 22, 1978 the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the right of an American Nazi group to hold a demonstration in the heavily Jewish community of Skokie, Illinois. And on September 8, 1993 an African American lawyer, volunteering for the ACLU, defended the right of a KKK member to not turn over the group’s membership list to Texas officials.
Justice Holmes: “ . . . if there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought-not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.”
Learn more about Rosika Schwimmer: http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/schwimmer-rosika
Learn more about Justice Holmes: G. Edward White, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (2006)
Visit the Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Digital Suite at Harvard University