Gitlow's Left Wing Manifesto: An Analysis

Quickly reacting to the McKinley assassination, the New York Legislature in 1902 passed a law that made it a felony to advocate the “doctrine that organized government must be overthrown by force or violence . . . or by unlawful means.” That criminal anarchy statute came about because New York authorities felt frustrated by their inability to prosecute the real perpetrators of the crime, anarchist orator Emma Goldman (whose lectures the assassin had attended) and her like, for the McKinley murder. The purpose of the criminal anarchy statute was to outlaw dangerous doctrines before any consequences occurred or were likely to occur. It was passed to supply a basis for future prosecutions of people like Emma Goldman and Ben Gitlow. After the
Gitlow neither wrote nor edited it. He was the business manager of a magazine called Revolutionary Age, which had published the Manifesto in July 1919. In typical overheated, Communist polemical style, the Manifesto reviewed the rise of socialism, condemned “moderate Socialism” for relying on democratic means, and advocated a “Communist Revolution” by a militant socialism based on antagonism between classes. It referred favorably to mobilizing the “power of the proletariat in action” through mass industrial revolts, political strikes, and “revolutionary mass action” for the purpose of destroying the parliamentary state and replacing it with Communist Socialism and a dictatorship of the
Americans, Laughlin wrote, should “be on their guard” against a movement that “may undermine and endanger our cherished institutions of liberty and equality.” The danger could be averted, said Laughlin, if “immigration is properly supervised and restricted,” so that the “propaganda of class prejudice and hatred—by a very small minority, mostly of foreign birth,” will not “take root in America.” These “pernicious doctrines,” Laughlin went on, should be rejected by “God-fearing, liberty-loving Americans.” It is, unfortunately, easy to imagine something similar being said today on the campaign trail, though, one hopes, not in a judicial opinion. Ironically, Laughlin’s comments are the truly “pernicious doctrines.” A year later, Gitlow fared no better in the highest state court, the New York Court of Appeals. Five of the seven judges there voted to affirm. Like the Appellate Division, Judge Frederick Crane’s opinion focused on and quoted at length from the Manifesto, concluding that it “advocated the destruction of the state and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat” by means of mass strikes. It found the criminal anarchy law constitutional because freedom of speech does “not protect the violation of liberty or permit attempts to destroy that