Trampling The Constitution

May 16, 1918:

The Sedition Act of 1918 is passed by the U.S. Congress, making criticism of the government an imprisonable offense.
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. "
It forbade the use of "disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language" about the United States government, its flag, or its armed forces or that caused others to view the American government or its institutions with contempt. Those convicted under the act generally received sentences of imprisonment for 5 to 20 years. The act also allowed the Postmaster General to refuse to deliver mail that met those same standards for punishable speech or opinion. It applied only to times "when the United States is in war." It was repealed on December 13, 1920.
Though the legislation enacted in 1918 is commonly called the Sedition Act, it was actually a set of amendments to the Espionage Act. Therefore many studies of the Espionage Act and the Sedition Act find it difficult to report about the two "acts" separately. For example, one historian reports that "some fifteen hundred prosecutions were carried out under the Espionage and Sedition Acts, resulting in more than a thousand convictions." Court decisions do not use the shorthand term Sedition Act, but the correct legal term for the law, the Espionage Act, whether as originally enacted or as amended in 1918.
In June 1918, the Socialist Party figure Eugene V. Debs of Indiana was arrested for violating the Sedition Act by undermining the government's conscription efforts. He was sentenced to ten years in prison. He served his sentence in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary from April 13, 1919 until December 1921, when President Harding commuted Debs' sentence to time served, effective on December 25, Christmas Day.
In March 1919, President Wilson, at the suggestion of Attorney General Thomas Watt Gregory released or reduced the sentences of some two hundred prisoners convicted under the Espionage Act or the Sedition Act.
With the act rendered inoperative by the end of hostilities, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer waged a public campaign, not unrelated to his own campaign for the Democratic nomination for president, in favor of a peacetime version of the Sedition Act. He sent a circular outlining his rationale to newspaper editors in January 1919, citing the dangerous foreign-language press and radical attempts to create unrest in African American communities. He testified in favor of such a law in early June 1920. At one point Congress had more than 70 versions of proposed language and amendments for such a bill, but it took no action on the controversial proposal during the campaign year of 1920. After a court decision later in June cited Palmer's anti-radical campaign for its abuse of power, the conservative Christian Science Monitor found itself unable to support him any more, writing on June 25, 1920: "What appeared to be an excess of radicalism...was certainly met with...an excess of suppression." The Alien Registration Act of 1940 was the first American peacetime sedition act.
The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Sedition Act in Abrams v. United States (1919),, although Oliver Wendell Holmes used his dissenting opinion to make a commentary on the marketplace of ideas. Subsequent Supreme Court decisions, such as Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969, make it unlikely that similar legislation would be considered constitutional today.
Congress repealed the Sedition Act on December 13, 1920.

The freedoms we take for granted are always at risk, especially during wartime.