[The following is in regards to the Sedition Act of 1918. Context of the law, courtesy of Wikipedia: “The Sedition Act of 1918 (Pub.L. 65–150, 40 Stat. 553, enacted May 16, 1918) was an Act of the United States Congress that extended the Espionage Act of 1917 to cover a broader range of offenses, notably speech and the expression of opinion that cast the government or the war effort in a negative light or interfered with the sale of government bonds.”]
The new Sedition Act made it punishable by twenty years in jail to “utter, print, write or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the government of the United States.” One could go to jail for cursing the government, or criticizing it, even if what one said was true. Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the Supreme Court opinion that found the act constitutional – after the war ended, upholding lengthy prison terms for the defendants – arguing that the First Amendment did not protect speech if “the words used… create a clear and present danger.”
To enforce that law, the head of what became the Federal Bureau of Investigation agreed to make a volunteer group called the American Protective League an adjunct to the Justice Department, and authorized them to carry badges identifying them as “Secret Service.” Within a few months the APL would have ninety thousand members. Within a year, two hundred thousand APL members were operating in a thousand communities.
In Chicago a “flying squad” of league members and police trailed, harassed, and beat members of the International Workers of the World. In Arizona, league members and vigilantes locked twelve hundred IWW members and their “collaborators” into boxcars and left them on a siding in the desert across the stat line in New Mexico. In Rockford, Illinois, the army asked the league for help in gaining confessions from twenty-one black soldiers accused of assaulting white women. Throughout the country, the league’s American Vigilance Patrol targeted “seditious street oratory,” sometimes calling upon the police to arrest speakers for disorderly conduct, sometimes acting more… directly. And everywhere the league spied on neighbors, investigated “slackers” and “food hoarders,” demanded to know why people didn’t buy – or didn’t buy more – Liberty Bonds.
States outlawed the teaching of German, while an Iowa politician warned that “ninety percent of all the men and women who teach the German language are traitors.” Conversations in German on the streets or over the telephone became suspicious. Sauerkraut was renamed “Liberty cabbage.” The Cleveland Plain Dealer stated, “What the nation demands is that treason, whether thinly veiled or quite unmarked, be stamped out.” Every day the Providence Journal carried a banner warning, “Every German or Austrian in the United States unless known by years of association should be treated as a spy.” The Illinois Bar Association declared that lawyers who defended draft resistors were “unpatriotic” and “unprofessional.” Columbia University president Nicholas Murray Butler, a national leader of the Republican Party, fired faculty critical of the government and observed, “What had been tolerable became intolerable now. What had been wrongheadedness was now sedition. What had been folly was now treason.”
Source:
Barry, John M. “The Tinderbox.” The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History. Penguin Books, 2009. 124-25. Print.
Further Reading:
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