The Forgotten Freedom of Assembly

The freedom of assembly has been at the heart of some of the most important social movements in American history: antebellum abolitionism, women\u27s suffrage in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the labor movement in the Progressive Era and after the New Deal, and the civil rights movement. Claims of assembly stood against the ideological tyranny that exploded during the first Red Scare in the years surrounding the First World War and the second Red Scare of 1950s McCarthyism. Abraham Lincoln once called \u27the right of the people peaceably to assemble\u27 part of \u27the Constitutional substitute for revolution\u27. In 1939, the popular press heralded it as one of the \u27four freedoms\u27 at the core of the Bill of Rights. And even as late as 1973, John Rawls characterized it as one of the \u27basic liberties\u27. But in the past thirty years, assembly has been reduced to a historical footnote in American law and political theory. Why has assembly so utterly disappeared from our democratic fabric? This article explores the history of the freedom of assembly and what we may have lost in losing sight of that history