You are a goddamn racketeer and a damn fascist, and the whole government of Rochester are fascists.

Or agents of fascists. On April 6,1940, a man named walter chplinski spoke those words in anger to a police officer in

rochester new hampshire he was arrested prosecuted and convicted under a new hampshire statute

that made it a crime to say something offensive or derisive or annoying to somebody lawfully in the street.

He appealed his case all the way to the United States Supreme Court.

In a 1942, the court ruled against him in the famous case, Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire.

The court articulated an exception to the free speech protections of the First Amendment,

the so-called fighting words doctrine.

And the court said that some words, by their very utterance, inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace,

and therefore can be punished by the government. All of that is well known.

Even if very little of the fighting words doctrine survives, people invoke it every

day to argue for restrictions on upsetting or offensive speech. But here's what most people don't

know. Why was Walter Chaplinsky angry? Why was he talking to a police officer in the first place?

Why would the authorities of Rochester, New

Hampshire, bother to prosecute such a petty offense, and why would the Supreme Court choose

such a small incident to announce such an important doctrine? Was Walter Chplinsky's case really

about preventing breaches of the peace? Or was it about something less admirable, something darker in American

culture? To answer those questions, we have to go back further earlier than Walter

Trapinski's 1940 outburst. We have to go back to November of 35 to a letter written by a 10-year-old

boy in Minersville, Pennsylvania.

I'm Ken White, and this is Make No Law,

a First Amendment podcast from propat.com, produced by the Legal Talk Network.

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