This is an O-TM podcast Extra.

I'm Bob Garfield.

Here at WNYC, Brian Lairor hosts a live public affairs show.

And recently, he had a segment that was so up our alley, we decided to send it down our podcast feed. His guests were Columbia University

President Lee Bollinger and University of Chicago law professor Jeffrey Stone, editors of the

free speech century, a collection of essays by scholars marking 100 years since the Supreme Court issued the three

decisions that established the modern notion of free speech.

The fact is, whether it's fake news or money in politics, we're still arguing over the First

Amendment.

And their book lays out the origins of the argument just after the first World War.

Here's Brian.

How did modern free speech history start in 1919?

President Polinger.

You have a period of time in which the world was really coming apart in many ways.

Obviously, World War I was happening.

But there was also the Russian Revolution,

there was unrest in labor sectors. This was a time of enormous controversy in a sense of the

modern world was coming apart. And one of the things that happens in periods like this is that

intolerance goes up. And a lot of people were brought before courts for speeches

that they gave, including a candidate for president of the United States, Eugene Debs,

leader of the Socialist Party. And those cases work their way, some of them, a few of them,

three of them, up to the Supreme Court. And in a series of decisions, the court unanimously held the speech was not protected by the

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