Sedition Act of 1918: Burleson's Mail Ban, Debs and Holmes' Dissent

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

In May 1918, during the First World War, Congress amended the Espionage Act of 1917 to make disloyal, profane, scurrilous or abusive language about the U.S. government, the military or the flag a federal crime punishable by five to 20 years in prison. President Woodrow Wilson and Attorney General Thomas Watt Gregory pushed the law partly in response to vigilante mobs that were forcing people to kiss the flag, tarring and feathering them and in some cases lynching German Americans and antiwar activists, and partly to head off proposals that would have let the War Department try civilians. The House passed it 293 to 1, with socialist Meyer London the lone no vote, while the Senate passed it 48 to 26 over objections from Henry Cabot Lodge and Hiram Johnson.

Between May and the November armistice, the Justice Department brought about 1,500 prosecutions and won more than 1,000 convictions. Postmaster General Albert Burleson stripped dissenting publications of their second class mailing permits, and western prosecutors used the law against IWW strikes in Arizona copper mines and Pacific Northwest spruce camps. After the war, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer campaigned for a permanent peacetime version, and Congress considered more than 70 bills before repealing the act on December 13, 1920. The Supreme Court upheld the law in Abrams v. United States, but Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes' dissent introduced the marketplace of ideas.

• Eugene V. Debs received a 10 year sentence for a June 1918 speech in Canton, Ohio, and began serving it in April 1919, after the fighting had ended.
• German born railroad industrialist William C. Edenborn was arrested in New Orleans for allegedly downplaying the threat Germany posed to the United States.
• Marie Equi and Mollie Steimer were both convicted after the armistice had effectively ended the war.
• In June 1920 the Christian Science Monitor turned on Palmer, writing that an excess of radicalism had been met with an excess of suppression.
• President Warren G. Harding later began granting clemency to most of those convicted, including Debs.