The Great Dissent

How Oliver Wendell Holmes Changed His Mind and Changed the History of Free Speech in America

By: Thomas Healy

Narrated by: Danny Campbell

No right seems more fundamental to American public life than freedom of speech. Yet well into the 20th century, that freedom was still an unfulfilled promise, with Americans regularly imprisoned merely for speaking out against government policies. Indeed, free speech as we know it comes less from the First Amendment than from a most unexpected source: Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. A lifelong skeptic, he disdained all individual rights, including the right to express one's political views. But in 1919, it was Holmes who wrote a dissenting opinion that would become the canonical affirmation of free speech in the United States. Why did Holmes change his mind? That question has puzzled historians for almost a century. Now, with the aid of newly discovered letters and confidential memos, law professor Thomas Healy reconstructs in vivid detail Holmes's journey from free-speech opponent to First Amendment hero. It is the story of a remarkable behind-the-scenes campaign by a group of progressives to bring a legal icon around to their way of thinking - and a deeply touching human narrative of an old man saved from loneliness and despair by a few unlikely young friends.

Beautifully written and exhaustively researched, The Great Dissent is intellectual history at its best, revealing how free debate can alter the life of a man and the legal landscape of an entire nation.

©2013 Thomas Healy (P)2013 Tantor

Critic reviews

"Engrossing... An exceptional account of the development of the Constitution's most basic right, and an illuminating story of remarkable friendships, scholarly communication, and the justice who actually changed his mind." ( Kirkus Starred Review)

If you like the law....

This book weaves together the biography of O.W.Holmes Jr. with the First Amendment history in the Supreme Court. It is surprising to learn how weak the law was to protect Freedom of Speech before the 1940s. We learn about the interrelationships between Holmes, Learned Hand, Cardozo, and Brandeis along with some of the academics who influenced our civil liberties. I also learned where the phrase "Clear and Present Danger" came from and that Holmes did not originate the oft-cited limitation of free speech by yelling Fire in a crowded theater. The legal philosophy is a little dense and I had to re-play some parts to figure it out.

One Of Those Great Historical Accounts...

of stories most people misunderstand and only know the half of. Give it a good read, and the next time someone says your "triggering speech" is like "someone shouting fire in a crowded theater," you will have a cogent and historically correct answer. Really enjoyable book.

I LOVED this book!

If you could sum up The Great Dissent in three words, what would they be?

A great book

Which scene was your favorite?

Listening to the dissent and realizing that it was going to become the majority opinion for the future of free speech.

If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?

The Great Dissent.

Any additional comments?

Oliver Wendell Holmes was a fascinating and amazingly smart man. The story of his life and times should be required reading for law students. It does not just discuss the law but shows how a variety of factors can change ones mind. It does not just tell a story, it shows an open minded philosophy that we all should have.

Taking every step with the era's vibrant thinkers

This author has done a wonderful job on many levels. He masterfully weaves together ideas, people, surrounding culture, institutions and events in service of this fine history.

We start with Holmes himself, a figure who (in ways unsuspected by me) bridged quite different eras in thought and national history. Holmes emerges as a bridge between quite disparate thinkers, many of whom might never have occupied the stage of history without him. For example, though a Boston brahmin of perfect pedigree, he risked that standing to stick up for important Jewish legal thinkers (and their ideas) who were being publicly painted with a broad brush of hysterical jingoism by some of Holmes' Harvard elite colleagues. Holmes even at 77 had a remarkable nimbleness, if sometimes slow, with perking his ears to a good new idea, and (despite sometimes giving short shrift in legal opinions, at least for awhile), staying with the ideas, keeping his vigorous discussions open with others, through gnawing unease and rethinking. Ultimately, he emerged at the far side, with formulations many people may take for granted today as "just the way things are."

As a result, I do not fear in posting this review that some bureaucrat might think my opinions seditious and have me arrested, as happened in this (WW1) era aplenty. Holmes (even within his own head, beginning as a Civil War vet wounded in action, his family swords posted prominently in his home, and as shown in his sequence of legal opinions) spans a part of this emergence from a more warlord/absolutist/paternalist state ("right or wrong," as goes the phrase quoted to him here) toward a more complete logical spread of the Enlightenment (via the US Constitution) to allow mere opinion to circulate, even during wartime. This process was very uneven, I see here, and was something like, three steps forward, two steps back, at points like this (the WW1 era and its aftermath). And, we still see echoes of these themes today.

Fundamental to a free society

With the election of Donald Trump this is perhaps the most important book to read.