In a matter of fact, the very image of "shouting 'fire' in a crowded theater" came from a Supreme Court ruling in favor of a flagrantly unconstitutional law against free speech. Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, in defense of the Supreme Court's 1918 ruling in favor of the Sedition Act, that "The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic ... The question in every case is whether the words ... create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent". And all the while this was brought about when Eugene Debs (followed by Charles Schenck) went to jail merely for trashing the United States and the war and took it all the way to the Supreme Court -- their shouts were hardly a "false" declaration of fire, nor the phosphorus for a "clear and present danger". Basically the Supreme Court ruled, at least temporarily, there there was for all intents and purposes no First Amendment.