By necessity, immigrants must think, act, and live experimentally when they arrive at their new destination. Given that the essay also possesses an experimental quality, it is unsurprising to find that in the United States – often called the land of immigration – the essayistic canon includes a vast corpus of writing by immigrants. Indeed, the dual or multiple identity of an immigrant-essayist is one of the most common in American writing. This chapter is concerned with a particular group of such immigrant-essayists: those who arrived in the United States as a result of exile from Germany. It focuses particularly on Hans Richter, Hannah Arendt, Theodor W. Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Kantorowicz, Thomas Mann, and Herbert Marcuse (as well as his student Angela Davis) who – like countless other artists, scholars, authors, directors, and other intellectuals – fled to the United States from war, persecution, and precarity in Europe during the 1930s and ’40s. The final section explores the works of Christa Wolf, an author who grew up in socialist East Germany and whose visits to the United States before and after the fall of the Iron Curtain strongly influenced her essayistic writing.

Alexis de Tocqueville is often described as a critic of American culture and modern democracy. Yet, as Alan Levine argues, there is an important difference between Tocqueville’s friendly criticisms of parts of American culture he finds wanting and other ideological critiques by “anti-American” thinkers such as Martin Heidegger and the Frankfurt School. Several factors separate Tocqueville from this European tradition of “Anti-Americanism.” Tocqueville’s criticisms are balanced by an appreciation of the virtues of American democracy and a recognition that these defects are hardly unique to America. His criticisms also take their root in empirical considerations of the complexities of American culture. Although the Frankfurt School and other influential critics often claim Tocqueville as inspiration for their complaints about mass society, they are ideologically motivated, ignore America’s redeeming virtues, and fault America uniquely for widely shared flaws of modernity.

Chapter 9 focuses on various theorists who make up the Anti-Free Speech Movement, starting with philosopher Herbert Marcuse. They suggest that the First Amendment has been interpreted too broadly to allow protection for speech they believe is intolerable, and that this should be reversed. The chapter examines those who have espoused critical race theory to develop arguments for suppressing hate speech, and feminists who advocate suppressing sexually oriented speech. The connection between these various theorists is that they argue that the First Amendment has gone too far, yet they vigorously deny that they support censorship. In doing so, they adopt the rhetoric and tactics designed by Anthony Comstock, Fredric Wertham, and Newton Minow before them.The chapter concludes that the purpose of the First Amendment is to block government from having the type of power these theorists advocate, and suggests that one way to preserve free speech is to use this list of characteristics as a means of identifying censors.

The Epilogue examines the state of free speech during the COVID-19 pandemic at a time when American politics is polarized and the state of public discourse is in shambles. Both sides claim victimhood and argue that the other side should be suppressed, illustrating the adage “free speech for me but not for thee.” Both sides even justify violence in support of their respective causes. But events of the past year reveal the danger of abandoning neutral principles when it comes to protecting speech. Lowering the legal barrier for what constitutes incitement may allow the prosecution of Donald Trump, but it would also put Black Lives Matter activists at risk. Safety can best be found in avoiding the mindset of the censor.

This chapter continues the historical investigation in subsequent decades, covering the Cold War, new interdisciplinary initiatives and hidden connections between key thinkers. We look particularly at the experimental interdisciplinarity of James March especially in light of Herbert Marcuse’s work and influences.