Jad Abumrad

Hey, it's Latif.

This is Radiolab.

So just last week here on the show, we had a conversation between our own Simon Adler and law professor Kate Klonick talking about how the idea of free speech in this country is playing out and often not playing out online right now.

But these questions of free speech in the United States...

Go back literally to the beginning.

It's the first amendment for crying out loud.

And as we argue over what people should be seeing on these apps, on social media apps, it took me back to a story we did a couple years ago that feels like it gets to the origin of the modern notion of free speech.

In particular, the idea that there should be an open marketplace of ideas, right?

That's the reason any of these social media platforms are allowed to be as wild as they are because they are theoretically open marketplaces of ideas.

And as I told our then host, Jad Abumrad, surprisingly, that whole idea of the marketplace of ideas came from one moment and even more surprisingly, from one guy.

That story was told to me by this guy, Thomas Healy.

Who wrote a book about Oliver Wendell Holmes.

And, you know, Holmes, he's from this wealthy Boston family, fought in the Civil War on the Union side.

And by the time he's sitting on the Supreme Court, he's in his 70s and sort of an imposing figure.

But the most important thing to know about Oliver Wendell Holmes is that he was stridently anti-free speech as we know it today.

Until he changed his mind.

Huh.

And it happened.

That switch happened at a very particular moment in his life.

So, 1917, World War I is happening.