Other free speech advocates of the era included Ezra Heywood, Ben Reitman, Moses Harman, and D. M. Bennett.
[2] In 1908, its goals were reported as "freedom of peaceable assembly, of discussion and of propaganda; an uncensored press, telegraph and telephone; an uninspected express; an inviolable mail."
To achieve its goals, the League worked through the press, public speaking and the courts and felt that "the education of brains and quickening of consciences are first in order of time and effect."
[4] Its charter included the goal "by all lawful means to oppose every form of government censorship over any method for the expression, communication or transmission of ideas... and to promote such legislative enactments and constitutional amendments, state and national, as will secure these ends.
After the American Civil War, a social purity movement grew in strength and wasbaimed at outlawing vice in general and prostitution and obscenity in particular.
[5] Composed primarily of Protestant moral reformers and middle-class women, the Victorian-era campaign also attacked contraception, which was viewed as an immoral practice that promoted prostitution and venereal disease.