A long-overdue biography of the legendary civil liberties lawyersdash;a vital and contrary figure who both defended Ulysses and fawned over J. Edgar Hoover.
In the 1930s and squo;40s, Morris Ernst was one of Americassquo;s best-known liberal lawyers. The ACLUasquo;s general counsel for decades, Ernst was renowned for his audacious fights against artistic censorship. He successfully defended Ulysses against obscenity charges, litigated groundbreaking reproductive rights cases, and supported the widespread expansion of protections for sexual expression, union organizing, and public speech. Yet Ernst was also a man of stark contradictions, waging a personal battle against Communism, defending an autocrat, and aligning himself with J. Edgar Hooverhsquo;s inflammatory crusades.
Arriving at a moment when issues of privacy, artistic freedom, and personal expression are freshly relevant, The Rise and Fall of Morris Ernst, Free Speech Renegade brings this singularly complex figure into a timely new light. As Samantha Barbas squo;s eloquent and compelling biography makes ironically clear, Ernst both transformed free speech in America and inflicted damage to the cause of civil liberties. Drawing on Ernst squo;s voluminous cache of publications and papers, Barbas follows the life of this singular idealist from his pugnacious early career to his legal triumphs of the 1930s and ?squo;40s and his later idiosyncratic zealotry. As she shows, today?squo;s challenges to free speech and the exercise of political power make Morris Ernst?squo;s battles as pertinent as ever.
