Long before cranks built followings on the internet, some of them got modestly famous by standing on soapboxes and shouting:
There is nothing in American civic life today like Chicago’s old “Bughouse Square.” From the 1890s to the mid-1960s, it was a hotspot for soapbox speakers: radicals, evangelists, cranks, poets, philosophers, and eccentrics. Anyone with a perspective outside the mainstream gathered there nightly to declaim from their improvised podiums. The ethos, as one newspaper put it, was “free speech and the louder the better.” People actually came to listen, too, in crowds.
Bughouse Square (properly named Washington Square Park) might be the most famous free-speech center, but the practice of soapboxing stretched from sea to shining sea. New York City had its own crew of “peripatetic philosophers.” Hubert Harrison, known as the “Black Socrates,” delivered his critiques of capital right in front of the New York Stock Exchange. Then there was Portia Willis, the “suffrage beauty,” who drew in crowds with her looks and kept them with her wits.
This was an intensely competitive activity; people of that era had high standards for oratory and would not listen to boring speeches. They booed and threw rotten cabbages. But this was a real channel for the spread of ideas, especially radical ideas, and many Americans learned about left-wing thought and sectarian religion for soapbox orators.
The darker side of this kind of freewheeling oratory was violence; the police regulary attacked crowds listening to socialist or anarchist speakers and sometimes the crowds attacked speakers they disliked. Which is one reason, I suppose, that all the photographs I have found today show mostly or entirely male crowds.
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