“Fuck the Draft” Ruled Protected Speech
The Supreme Court on this day overturned the conviction Robert Paul Cohen who had walked through the Los Angeles County Courthouse on April 26, 1968, with the words “Fuck the Draft” on the back of his jacket as an anti-Vietnam War protest.
In Cohen v. California Justice John Marshall Harlan, II’s majority opinion is notable for the weight he gave to the emotional aspects of the message Cohen was communicating about the Vietnam War.
The Vietnam War generated a number of important civil liberties crises. The issues involved include (1) the lack of a Congressional Declaration of War as required by the Constitution (June 3, 1970); (2) threats to freedom of the press in the Pentagon Papers case (June 30, 1971); (3) spying on the anti-war movement by the CIA (August 15, 1967); (4) threats to freedom of expression, for example high school student protests (February 24, 1969); censorship of television programs (February 25, 1968); and directly and indirectly some of the events that led to the Watergate Scandal (May 9, 1969; January 27, 1972).
Justice Harlan: “This case may seem at first blush too inconsequential to find its way into our books, but the issue it presents is of no small constitutional significance…The constitutional right of free expression is powerful medicine in a society as diverse and populous as ours. It is designed and intended to remove governmental restraints from the arena of public discussion, putting the decision as to what views shall be voiced largely into the hands of each of us, in the hope that use of such freedom will ultimately produce a more capable citizenry and more perfect polity . . . Much linguistic expression serves a dual communicative function: it conveys not only ideas capable of relatively precise, detached explication, but otherwise inexpressible emotions as well. In fact, words are often chosen as much for their emotive as their cognitive force.”
Listen to the oral arguments before the Supreme Court: http://www.oyez.org/cases/1970-1979/1970/1970_299
Learn more about the case here.
Learn more about the anti-Vietnam War movement: Thomas Powers, The War at Home: Vietnam and the American People, 1964–1968 (1973)
Read first-hand accounts of 1960s-1970s radicals: Clara Bingham, Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost its Mind and Found its Soul (2016)