Imagine waking up tomorrow, pouring yourself
a cup of coffee and just checking the news. You
read a story about a recent government decision
or, I don't know, a military deployment and you
strongly disagree with it. So you do what millions
of people do every single day. You go online
and write a highly critical post. Right, just
a standard reaction. Exactly. You use some colorful
language. You express your contempt for the administration.
Maybe you criticize the flag or the armed forces.
Now imagine that just a few hours later, federal
agents are knocking on your front door. And you
aren't just facing a fine or a slap on the wrist.
You are facing 20 years in a federal penitentiary
simply for the words you published. I mean, it
sounds like the plot of a dystopian novel, right?
Something entirely divorced from our modern understanding
of the First Amendment. It sounds completely
foreign to everything we are taught about freedom
of speech. But here is the reality for you, the
listener. This is not fiction. This was the actual
enforceable law of the land in the United States.
just over a century ago. Yeah, it really was.
Today, we are pulling our information from a
really comprehensive Wikipedia article detailing
the Sedition Act of 1918. And our mission for
this deep dive is to explore exactly how quickly
civil liberties and free speech can be entirely
suspended during a national crisis. We want to
look at who gets caught in the crossfire of these
sweeping laws, and perhaps most surprisingly,
how a piece of legislation this extreme ever
made it through Congress in the first place.
And I think today's deep dive is critical because
we aren't just looking at a dusty forgotten piece
of legislative history. We are analyzing a master
class, really a real world case study in the
sheer fragility of civil liberties. It demonstrates
how rapidly the foundation of constitutional
rights can shift when a society is gripped by
fear, conflict and this overwhelming desire for
national unity. OK, let's unpack this to really
understand the Sedition Act of 1918. We have
to look at the baseline. So the United States
was already deep into the First World War. And
the year prior, in 1917, the government had passed
the Espionage Act. Right, the precursor. Yeah.
And that initial act was primarily designed to
stop outright interference with the war effort.
Lawmakers wanted to disrupt anything that would
harm military recruitment or attempt to aid a
nation at war with the U .S. Which, you know,
that makes a certain tactical sense during a
major global conflict. But by 1918, lawmakers
suddenly decided that the Espionage Act just
didn't go far enough. What's fascinating here
is the bizarre, highly counterintuitive logic
they used to justify expanding that law. Because
the country was witnessing these intense instances
of public disorder. You had local groups of citizens...
Like mobs, basically. Yeah. essentially vigilante
mobs, taking it upon themselves to violently
attack people who were expressing unpopular speech
or anti -war sentiments. So people were physically
assaulted in the streets simply for stating they
didn't support the war effort. Yes, and the lawmakers
looked at this wartime violence and their takeaway
wasn't to crack down on the violent mobs. Instead,
some lawmakers argued that the public was acting
out because the federal government lacked the
authority to punish the unpopular speech itself.
Wait, what? I know. They pitched the Sedition
Act as a way to enhance the government authority
to punish dissenting speech, supposedly to prevent
these vigilante mobs from doing what the government
previously couldn't. It was framed, incredibly,
as a measure to maintain public order. That is
a staggering rationale. Yeah. Lock up the dissenters
so the mob doesn't get to them first. It's totally
backwards. But there is another layer to the
politics of this that stood out to me in the
source. You would assume... a law this heavy
-handed was the brainchild of some authoritarian
leader demanding absolute loyalty. Yet President
Woodrow Wilson and his attorney general Thomas
Watt Gregory, they didn't actually want this
bill. They viewed it as a political compromise.
Yeah, it came down to a bureaucratic turf war
and just a desperate need to save face. The Justice
Department was facing massive public and political
pressure. Critics felt the administration was
failing to prosecute offensive speech aggressively
enough. And Wilson and Gregory wanted to avoid
congressional hearings that would embarrass the
administration over this perceived weakness.
But wait, if Wilson and his attorney general
fundamentally didn't want this bill and they
thought it went too far, why didn't Wilson just
veto it? Was he really that afraid of bad PR
from a congressional hearing? It was more than
just bad PR. It was an existential threat to
the Justice Department's jurisdiction. There
were other proposals floating around Congress
that would have stripped prosecutorial authority
away from the Justice Department entirely and
handed it over to the War Department. Oh wow.
Right. If that had happened, it would have created
a system of civilian courts martial. The military
would have been prosecuting everyday civilians
for things they said. Wilson and Gregory found
the constitutionality of military trials for
civilians highly questionable. So the Sedition
Act, which was managed by civilian courts, was
swallowed as the lesser of two evils to keep
the War Department at bay. It's amazing how massive
historical shifts sometimes just come down to
departmental power struggles. Just protecting
their turf. Exactly. And despite that reluctance
at the very top, the bill sailed through Congress
with remarkable speed. In the House of Representatives,
the final vote was 293 to 1. That ratio is insane.
Out of nearly 300 representatives, only one single
person, Socialist Representative Meyer London
of New York, voted against making it illegal
to criticize the government. The Senate vote
was closer though. passing 48 to 26. And to maintain
strict impartiality regarding the political dynamics
of the time, we should really note who made up
that opposition. It came almost entirely from
Republicans in the Senate. Right, figures like
Henry Cabot Lodge and Hiram Johnson led the push
back there. Johnson specifically defended the
principle of free speech during the debates,
while Lodge pointed out that the administration
wasn't even effectively utilizing the laws that
were already on the books. Yeah. Even former
President Theodore Roosevelt publicly voiced
his opposition to the measure. But the momentum
of wartime paranoia pushed it through anyway.
Which brings us to the actual mechanics of the
law. The fine print. Yeah. The Sedition Act of
1918 was technically a set of amendments to the
1917 Espionage Act. But when you actually read
the text of the legislation, it is incredibly
broad. It explicitly forbade the use of disloyal,
profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about
the United States government, its flag, or its
armed forces. It also criminalized language that
caused others to view the American government
with contempt or any speech that interfered with
the sale of government bonds. The inclusion of
a word like scurrilous is deeply problematic
from a legal standpoint. It is entirely subjective.
Who defines what is scurrilous or abusive? Exactly.
It could be anything. When the language of a
law is that vague, it gives prosecutors immense
discretionary power to target almost anyone expressing
a dissenting thought. And the stakes were incredibly
high. A conviction under this act generally meant
a prison sentence ranging from five to 20 years.
20 years for a scurrilous comment. Just let that
sink in. And if we connect this to the bigger
picture, there is a mechanism in this law that
is often overlooked, but was devastatingly effective.
The Sedition Act granted the Postmaster General
the authority to refuse to deliver any mail that
met these vague standards for punishable speech.
So the Postmaster General essentially became
the arbiter of public discourse. Precisely. Blocking
mail in 1918 was akin to deplatforming someone
from the modern digital infrastructure today.
It completely severed their ability to organize,
to distribute newspapers or to share dissenting
ideas. The government had an incredibly effective
quiet tool for censoring printed materials and
entirely silencing activists before their words
even reached an audience. You don't even need
to risk a public trial at that point. Your ideas
are just physically intercepted and destroyed
in transit. So with this incredible broad law,
and the postmaster acting as the nation's content
moderator, the enforcement phase began. Now,
the act passed in May of 1918, which was just
a few months before Armistice Day in November,
ending the hostilities of World War I. Despite
that really narrow window, the enforcement was
aggressive. Overall, there were about 1 ,500
prosecutions carried out under the Espionage
and Sedition Acts, resulting in more than 1 ,000
convictions. A conviction rate of roughly two
thirds is staggering, especially considering
the short time frame. It highlights how aggressively
federal prosecutors pursued these cases and how
willing juries were to convict their fellow citizens
under the banner of patriotism. Looking at the
specific case studies provided really puts a
human face on this whole dragnet. Let's look
at William C. Edenborn. He was a naturalized
citizen originally from Germany and a wealthy
industrialist running a railroad business down
in New Orleans, Louisiana in April of 1918. Federal
authorities arrived at his business and arrested
him. Now, he wasn't accused of espionage or plotting
sabotage. He was accused of speaking disloyally
because he allegedly belittled the threat of
Germany to the security of the United States.
The Edenborn case illustrates that wealth and
social status didn't insulate you if your speech
was deemed insufficiently patriotic. He merely
expressed an opinion minimizing a foreign threat,
and that was enough to trigger a federal arrest.
It shows how low the bar for prosecution had
actually fallen. And the government also specifically
went after prominent politicians. figures to
set an example. In June of 1918, they arrested
Eugene V. Debs in Canton, Ohio. And Debs wasn't
just a casual critic. He was a major, highly
visible figure in the Socialist Party. He had
run for president multiple times. Debs is a fascinating
case because his arrest was directly tied to
a public speech that authorities claimed undermined
conscription efforts. For delivering a political
speech, this major national figure was sentenced
to 10 years in prison. Ten years. Yes, he actually
served his sentence in the Atlanta federal penitentiary
starting in April 1919. What's remarkable is
that he ran for president of the United States
in the 1920 election from inside his prison cell,
eventually receiving nearly a million votes.
That is wild. He remained in prison until December
1921 when President Warren G. Harding finally
commuted his sentence. The idea of a prominent
political leader today being locked in a federal
penitentiary for 10 years because they criticize
military policy is just difficult to process.
And the enforcement varied greatly depending
on where you were in the country. The history
notes that prosecutions were particularly intense
in the western states where the industrial workers
of the world, the IWW labor union, was highly
active. Right, the Wobblies. Exactly. Which brings
us to Molly Steimer, another notable activist
convicted under the amended act, and Marie Equi.
The Marie Equi case is where the government's
timeline completely falls apart for me, so she
was arrested for giving a speech at the IWW Hall
in Portland, Oregon. But the timing of her conviction
is the real story here. Ah, yes. The timeline
of the Acre case really highlights the sheer
bureaucratic momentum of these prosecutions.
Here's where it gets really interesting. Marie
Equi was convicted for her speech after the war
was already over. The hostilities had ended,
the supposed emergency that justified the law
had passed, and yet she was still prosecuted
and convicted. How is that even legally justifiable
when the law itself was intrinsically tied to
wartime? It perfectly illustrates how once a
mechanism of suppression is activated, it doesn't
just immediately switch off because the original
threat is gone. The machinery of prosecution
was already in motion. The Sedition Act explicitly
stated it only applied to times when the United
States is in war. But the formal peace treaties
hadn't been signed. And honestly, some powerful
officials in the Justice Department wanted to
keep that machinery running for domestic purposes.
Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer was one of
those officials, right? The war ends, but the
paranoia doesn't. Exactly. The environment in
1919 was incredibly volatile. You had the aftermath
of the Russian Revolution, massive domestic labor
strikes, and a series of anarchist bombings in
the United States. This was the birth of the
first Red Scare. And A. Mitchell Palmer capitalized
on this national anxiety. He waged a highly public
campaign to create a permanent peacetime version
of the Sedition Act. Peacetime. Right. And his
push for this legislation was not unrelated to
his own political ambitions. He was actively
campaigning for the Democratic nomination for
president, and he wanted to brand himself as
the ultimate law and order candidate tough on
radicalism. In January of 1919, Palmer sent a
circular out to newspaper editors outlining his
rationale for peacetime censorship. He cited
what he viewed as the dangerous foreign language
press in America. He also pointed to radical
attempts to create unrest within African -American
communities. He was clearly using the fear of
domestic radicalism and racial unrest as the
bogeyman to justify extending wartime suppression
into everyday peacetime American life. He even
went to Congress in June 1920 to testify in favor
of this peacetime law. And Congress was certainly
listening at first. At one point, there were
more than 70 different versions of proposed language
and amendments for a peacetime sedition act floating
around the legislature. Seventy different versions.
But Palmer eventually overplayed his hand, didn't
he? He pushed far too hard, and the backlash
was severe. Despite those 70 proposed versions,
Congress ultimately took no action on the controversial
proposal during that 1920 campaign year. The
political tides had turned. Later in June, a
court decision explicitly cited Palmer's anti
-radical campaign for its blatant abuse of power.
Wow. Even the conservative press turned on him.
The Christian Science Monitor wrote a scathing
rebuke, essentially stating they could no longer
support him. They wrote that his actions, quote,
appeared to be an excess of radicalism and was
certainly met with an excess of suppression.
An excess of suppression. That's a powerful phrase.
But while Congress was backing away from a peacetime
act, what was the Supreme Court doing about the
convictions that had already happened during
the war? Did they step in and strike down the
1918 Sedition Act to protect the First Amendment?
Surprisingly, they didn't. In fact, the Supreme
Court actually upheld the constitutionality of
the Sedition Act. The landmark case was Abrams
v. United States in 1919. The court upheld the
convictions of individuals who were distributing
leaflets urging the curtailment of production
of essential war materials. OK, so they let it
stand. Yes. The majority of the court relied
on the legal standard of the time, the clear
and present danger test, arguing that during
wartime, dissenting speech intrinsically damages
the war effort and therefore can be punished.
They reinforce the government's power to suppress
speech when the nation's security is perceived
to be at risk. But there's a vital piece of legal
philosophy that came out of that Supreme Court
case, a famous dissenting opinion that changed
how we view free speech today. Yes, absolutely.
While the majority upheld the act, Justice Oliver
Wendell Holmes wrote a brilliant dissenting opinion.
He argued that unless speech poses an immediate,
tangible danger, the government has no business
regulating it. It was in this descent that he
birthed the concept we now call the marketplace
of ideas. The marketplace of ideas. Right. Holmes
argued that the best test of truth is the power
of a thought to get itself accepted in the competition
of the market. You don't suppress bad ideas with
20 -year prison sentences. You defeat them with
better ideas. And it is important to note, for
modern context, that subsequent Supreme Court
decisions over the decades, specifically rulings
like Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969, have dramatically
shifted the legal landscape toward Holmes' view.
Under modern rulings, the Sedition Act of 1918
would almost certainly be considered unconstitutional
today. Yeah, thankfully. And Congress eventually
officially repealed the Sedition Act on December
13, 1920, as part of a sweeping repeal of wartime
laws. And in 1921, the new president, Woodrow
Wilson, offered clemency to most of the individuals
who are still sitting in prison under the act.
A quiet end to a very loud piece of history.
Exactly. So what does this all mean? We started
by talking about the hypothetical horror of facing
20 years in prison for a critical social media
post. We've traced the panic of 1918, the vigilante
logic, the thousands of rapid convictions, the
targeting of political opponents, and the eventual
repeal. When we look at all these facts, what
is the core takeaway for the listener? The Sedition
Act of 1918 proves, with historical certainty,
that during times of immense national fear or
conflict, a government's instinct to control
the narrative can easily override constitutional
rights. It shows us that the noble desire to
protect the public from a perceived threat can
morph incredibly quickly into a mechanism for
punishing unpopular opinions. Civil liberties
aren't self -executing. They are fragile, and
they require constant vigilance, especially when
society feels the most vulnerable to external
or internal. threats. It's a stark reminder of
how thin the line between national security and
authoritarian suppression really is. This raises
an important question though for everyone listening.
What stands out to you the most about this history?
Is it the sheer volume of convictions in such
a short window of time? Is it the fact that almost
the entire House of Representatives voted to
criminalize dissenting speech? Or is it how easily
the fundamental right to free expression was
discarded the moment it became inconvenient for
the government's wartime narrative? That is exactly
what we want you to be thinking about. And as
we wrap up this deep dive, I want to leave you
with one final lingering thought to mull over.
We discussed how, in 1918, the government utilized
the Postmaster General to physically stop the
delivery of dissenting ideas. It was an incredibly
effective way to silence opposition by cutting
off their distribution network. Well, if a major
global conflict broke out tomorrow and national
panic set in again, you obviously wouldn't be
relying on the Postmaster General for your news.
But who controls the flow of your information
today? And if a modern sweeping emergency measure
were passed, how easily could a digital switch
be flipped by an internet service provider or
a major tech platform to block what you were
allowed to read, share, or say online long before
the courts ever get a chance to intervene? That
is a heavy thought, but an absolutely necessary
one to consider. It is. Thank you for joining
us on this deep dive into the Sedition Act of
1918. We hope you walk away with a richer understanding
of this turbulent chapter in history. Keep asking
questions, keep exploring the past, and we will
catch you on the next deep dive.