World War I and the American Constitution

Writing in 1919 to reflect on freedom of speech during World War I, the Harvard University law professor Zechariah Chafee Jr. exclaimed, “never in the history of our country, since the Alien and Sedition laws of 1798, has the meaning of free speech been the subject of such controversy as to-day” (Zechariah Chafee Jr., “Freedom of Speech in War Time,” Havard Law Review, June 1919, p. 952). Scholars are still untangling America's truncated experience one hundred years after the nation's entry into the war. In World War I and the American Constitution William G. Ross, the Lucille Stewart Beeson Professor of Law at Samford University and the author of A Muted Fury (2014), offers a well-researched and engaging study of how the war shaped constitutional interpretations beyond just the controversy of free speech. Ross argues that “postwar Supreme Court decisions ... were the predicate for the nationalization of the Bill of Rights and the court's modern role as the guardian of personal liberties” (pp. 2–3). He examines key aspects of Americans' wartime experience through eight chapters on military conscription, economic regulations, labor, enfranchisement of women, prohibition of alcohol, racial minorities, personal liberties, and the League of Nations. Through each chapter, Ross narrates the immediate prewar milieu to contextualize how wartime decisions broke the mold of federal noninterference in state activities. His mastery of the details of the multitude of cases arising during the wartime period offers readers context for judicial actions during the war

Civil liberties · Constitution · Context (archaeology · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Supreme court · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Law