Abstract
On October 4, 1919, Louis Goldberg was arrested by officers of the New York City Police Department (NYPD) and charged with disorderly conduct for violating a police directive that public gatherings be addressed in the English language. Goldberg’s arrest came at a time of actual crisis in the local housing market, and of a perceived crisis, the Red Scare, at the national level, when foreign language speakers were considered to be sympathizers with radical causes. Goldberg was later released from custody and the charges against him were dismissed, but his preemptive arrest by the NYPD denied him the opportunity to address the gathered crowd for his intended purpose. Although a person could be arrested under the disorderly conduct statute for threatening a breach of the peace, the police arrested Goldberg without any basis for concluding that the impact of his speech was a threat to public order. Goldberg’s case thus illustrates the problems of the use of discretionary authority by police officers in their attempt to control public space. The incident also reveals the tensions that existed in the practice of police work between the maintenance of public order and the protection (or suppression) of basic individual rights, a tension mediated by the rule of law and the ability to utilize discretionary authority.
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Notes
See, e.g., Daniel A. Farber, William N. Eskridge Jr., and Philip P. Frickey, Constitutional Law: Themes for the Constitution’s Third Century 631–644, 3rd ed. ( St. Paul, MN: West, 2003 ).
Much of the background on tenant organizing for this chapter is taken from Joseph A. Spencer, “The Post-World War I Housing Crisis,” in Ronald Lawson and Mark Naison, eds., The Tenant Movement in New York City, 1904–1984 ( New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986 ).
Katherine Meyer, “A Study of Tenant Associations in New York City,” Master’s Thesis, Columbia University Department of Sociology, 1928, pp. 6–15.
Paul LeBlanc, A Short History of the US Working Class. ( New York: Humanity Books, 1999 ), pp. 69–71.
Melvin Urofsky, “A Note on the Expulsion of the Five Socialists,” New York History, 47 (1966), pp. 41–51.
David Thale, Civilizing New York City: Police Patrol, 1880–1935, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Chicago, 1995.
Dennis Baron, The English-Only Question ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990 ), pp. 126–127.
Kenneth T. Jackson, The Encyclopedia of New York City ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995 ).
Thomas Reppetto, The Blue Parade ( New York: Free Press 1978 ), p. 68.
James Richardson, The New York Police ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1970 ).
Marilynn S. Johnson, Street Justice: A History ofPolice Violence in New York City ( Boston: Beacon Press, 2003 ), pp. 14–16.
James Richardson, The New York Police ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1970 ).
Mark Naison, “From Eviction Resistance to Rent Control,” in Ronald Lawson and Mark Naison, eds., The Tenant Movement in New York City, 1904–1984 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press).
David Cole, The New McCarthyism: Repeating History in the War on Terror, 38 Harv. C.R.-C.L. Rev., 1, 7 (2003).
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© 2006 Stacy K. McGoldrick and Andrea McArdle
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Varga, J. (2006). “For Speaking Jewish in a Jewish Neighborhood”: Civil Rights and Community-Police Relations during the Postwar Red Scare, 1919–1922. In: McGoldrick, S.K., McArdle, A. (eds) Uniform Behavior. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403983312_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403983312_4
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