Sedition Act of 1918

Based on Wikipedia: Sedition Act of 1918

The Day America Made It Illegal to Complain

In May of 1918, with American soldiers dying in French trenches, Congress did something remarkable. It made criticism of the government a crime punishable by up to twenty years in prison.

Think about that for a moment. Twenty years—the same sentence you might get for armed robbery—for saying the wrong thing about the flag.

The Sedition Act of 1918 stands as one of the most dramatic restrictions on free speech in American history. It outlawed "disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language" about the United States government, its flag, or its armed forces. If your words caused others to view the American government with contempt, you could go to prison. The Postmaster General could even refuse to deliver your mail if he decided your letters contained unpatriotic sentiments.

How did the land of the free come to criminalize opinion? The answer involves mob violence, political calculation, and a president who had promised to keep America out of the Great War.

The Law Behind the Law

To understand the Sedition Act, you first need to understand what it actually was—and what it wasn't.

Despite its name, the Sedition Act of 1918 wasn't really a standalone law. It was a set of amendments to an earlier statute called the Espionage Act of 1917. That original law had made it a crime to interfere with the war effort, disrupt military recruitment, or help nations at war with America. But by 1918, many in Washington felt it didn't go far enough.

This distinction matters because court decisions never used the term "Sedition Act." Legally speaking, it was always the Espionage Act, just in its expanded form. Historians and lawyers have struggled to separate the two ever since, with studies finding it nearly impossible to disentangle prosecutions under the original law from those under its amendments.

Mobs in the Streets

The push for broader censorship didn't come from some abstract desire to suppress dissent. It came from violence.

Across America, vigilante groups had begun taking matters into their own hands. When someone said something deemed unpatriotic—praising Germany, questioning the draft, criticizing President Wilson—local mobs would sometimes attack them. The government faced an awkward situation: either prosecute unpopular speech itself, or watch citizens do the punishing through beatings and intimidation.

To some lawmakers, the solution seemed obvious. If the federal government could prosecute offensive speech, angry mobs wouldn't need to. The Sedition Act, in this view, wasn't about oppression—it was about restoring order by channeling public fury into courtrooms instead of street violence.

Whether this reasoning was sincere or merely convenient remains debatable.

The Political Calculus

President Woodrow Wilson and his Attorney General, Thomas Watt Gregory, approached the bill with something less than enthusiasm. They saw it as a political compromise, a way to avoid two things they wanted even less.

First, they feared congressional hearings that would embarrass the administration for failing to prosecute offensive speech under existing laws. Second, and more troubling, some proposals would have transferred prosecutorial authority from the Justice Department to the War Department. This would have created a kind of civilian court-martial system—military-style justice for civilians—with highly questionable constitutionality.

Faced with these alternatives, the Sedition Act seemed like the lesser evil.

The final vote wasn't even close. The Senate passed it 48 to 26. The House passed it 293 to 1.

That lone dissenting vote came from Meyer London, a Socialist congressman from New York. He stood entirely alone.

The Opposition That Wasn't

You might expect that a law criminalizing criticism of the government would face fierce opposition. And there was opposition—but it came from unexpected quarters.

The most vocal critics in the Senate were Republicans, particularly Henry Cabot Lodge and Hiram Johnson. Johnson defended free speech on principle. Lodge had a different complaint: he argued the Wilson administration hadn't even bothered to use the laws already on the books. Why pass new restrictions when the existing ones sat unused?

Former President Theodore Roosevelt, never one to stay quiet, also spoke against the law. Here was the man who had charged up San Juan Hill, criticizing a wartime measure as going too far.

Meanwhile, officials in the Justice Department who would actually have to enforce the law showed little enthusiasm. They hoped it might work as a kind of scarecrow—something that would quiet public demands for action without requiring many actual prosecutions.

Eugene Debs Goes to Prison

That hope proved naive. Federal authorities did prosecute, and they went after big targets.

Eugene Victor Debs was one of the most famous Americans of his era. He had run for president four times on the Socialist Party ticket, once receiving nearly a million votes. In June 1918, he gave a speech in Canton, Ohio, where he criticized the war and the draft.

For this, Debs was arrested, tried, and sentenced to ten years in federal prison.

He was sixty-three years old.

Debs entered the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary in April 1919 and remained there until December 1921, when President Warren Harding—a Republican who had defeated the Democrats partly by running against Wilsonian overreach—commuted his sentence to time served. Even then, Debs walked out of prison without his citizenship rights restored. He had been convicted of sedition, after all.

The Debs prosecution wasn't about stopping a real threat to national security. It was about making an example. If a four-time presidential candidate could go to prison for speaking against the war, what chance did ordinary Americans have?

The Anarchist from the Lower East Side

Another notable case involved Mollie Steimer, a young Jewish anarchist from New York's Lower East Side. She and several comrades had distributed leaflets opposing American intervention in the Russian Revolution—not the war in Europe, but the separate American military action in Russia that Wilson had ordered in 1918.

Steimer was convicted and her case went to the Supreme Court in Abrams v. United States. The Court upheld the conviction, ruling that the Sedition Act was constitutional.

But something important happened in that case. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who had previously supported restrictions on wartime speech, wrote a dissenting opinion that would echo through the next century of American law. He argued that the best test of truth was the power of an idea to get itself accepted in "the competition of the market."

This was the birth of what lawyers now call "the marketplace of ideas"—the concept that free and open debate, not government censorship, should determine which ideas prevail. Holmes lost the argument in 1919. But his dissent planted seeds that would eventually overturn everything the Sedition Act stood for.

The Postmaster as Censor

Perhaps the most effective tool of suppression wasn't the courtroom at all. It was the post office.

The Sedition Act gave the Postmaster General authority to refuse delivery of any mail that contained seditious content. In an era before television, before radio had become widespread, before the internet was even imaginable, printed matter traveling through the mail was how ideas spread. Newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, letters—all of it depended on the postal service.

The Postmaster General could simply decide that a publication was disloyal and cut off its circulation. No trial. No jury. No appeal. Just silence.

For radical publications and foreign-language newspapers, this power was devastating. You could print whatever you wanted, but if the post office wouldn't carry it, who would ever read it?

Geography of Enforcement

The law's application was wildly uneven across the country.

U.S. Attorneys initially had considerable discretion in deciding which cases to pursue. Some were eager to prosecute; others held back. Attorney General Gregory eventually tried to standardize enforcement by requiring his approval before new cases could be filed—but this didn't happen until just weeks before the war ended.

The heaviest enforcement occurred in Western states, particularly where the Industrial Workers of the World—the radical labor union known as the "Wobblies"—was active. The I.W.W. had organized miners, loggers, and agricultural workers throughout the West, and local authorities saw the Sedition Act as a useful weapon against labor organizing.

In Portland, Oregon, a physician and activist named Marie Equi was arrested simply for giving a speech at the local I.W.W. hall. Her conviction came after the armistice—after the war was already over—but the law had been broken while hostilities continued, and that was enough.

The Industrialist's Arrest

Not everyone prosecuted was a radical. In April 1918, authorities in New Orleans arrested William C. Edenborn, a wealthy industrialist and railroad owner.

Edenborn's crime? He had allegedly spoken "disloyally" by downplaying the threat Germany posed to American security.

Edenborn had been born in Germany and became a naturalized American citizen. He had built a successful business empire in Louisiana. But his German birth and his skepticism about German military capabilities made him a target. In wartime America, even industrialists could find themselves accused of sedition.

Too Late to Matter?

Here's an irony worth noting: the Sedition Act was passed in May 1918. The armistice ending World War One came in November 1918.

Six months. The law that criminalized criticism of the war effort was only in effect for six months of actual warfare.

This timing meant relatively few prosecutions occurred under the Sedition Act specifically, as opposed to the earlier Espionage Act. But those prosecutions continued well after the guns fell silent. Cases that began during the war took months or years to work through the courts. People were tried, convicted, and imprisoned for wartime speech long after peace had returned.

In March 1919—four months after the armistice—President Wilson, at the suggestion of Attorney General Gregory, released or reduced the sentences of about two hundred prisoners convicted under both acts. It was a gesture toward reconciliation, an acknowledgment that the wartime emergency had passed.

But many remained in prison. Eugene Debs wouldn't walk free for nearly three more years.

The Push for Peacetime Sedition

The end of war should have meant the end of wartime restrictions. It didn't work out that way.

Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer—Gregory's successor—launched a public campaign for a peacetime version of the Sedition Act. His motivations were not entirely pure. Palmer had presidential ambitions, and he saw anti-radical crusading as his path to the Democratic nomination in 1920.

In January 1919, Palmer sent a letter to newspaper editors across the country warning of two threats: the "dangerous foreign-language press" and radical attempts to stir unrest in African American communities. In June 1920, he testified before Congress urging passage of a permanent sedition law.

Congress took no action. More than seventy different versions of peacetime sedition legislation were proposed, but in an election year, nobody wanted to own such a controversial measure. The proposals died without a vote.

Palmer's overreach eventually caught up with him. His "Palmer Raids" of 1919 and 1920—mass arrests of suspected radicals, often without warrants—drew condemnation even from conservatives. The Christian Science Monitor, hardly a radical publication, wrote in June 1920 that "what appeared to be an excess of radicalism was certainly met with an excess of suppression."

Palmer did not get the Democratic nomination. He faded from public life.

The Act Dies, the Questions Remain

On December 13, 1920, Congress repealed the Sedition Act as part of a broader rollback of wartime laws. The experiment in criminalizing dissent was over.

Or was it?

The Sedition Act of 1918 was not America's first sedition law. The original Sedition Act of 1798, passed during the quasi-war with France, had outlawed false statements criticizing the government. It expired in 1801 and was never renewed, regarded by later generations as a shameful overreach by the Federalist Party.

And America would pass another sedition law. The Smith Act of 1940, enacted as war clouds gathered in Europe and Asia, became the first peacetime sedition statute in American history. Decades later, it would be used to prosecute alleged Communist agents during the Cold War.

The pattern keeps repeating. War or the threat of war arrives. The government expands its power to punish speech. The emergency passes. The restrictions recede—but never entirely. Each crisis leaves behind precedents, legal doctrines, institutional habits of surveillance and suspicion.

The Long Shadow

Today, the Sedition Act of 1918 would almost certainly be ruled unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court's 1969 decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio established that the government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless it is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action." General criticism of the government—even harsh, profane, scurrilous criticism—cannot be criminalized.

Oliver Wendell Holmes's dissent won, eventually. The marketplace of ideas became constitutional doctrine. The government that once imprisoned Eugene Debs for a speech now protects flag-burning as free expression.

But that protection is not automatic. It exists because courts chose to interpret the First Amendment broadly, and because later generations decided that the Sedition Act represented a mistake. Had things gone differently—had the Abrams majority view prevailed, had peacetime sedition laws passed in the 1920s—American free speech might look very different today.

The Sedition Act of 1918 lasted only two and a half years on the books. Its prosecutions numbered in the hundreds, not thousands. But it demonstrated something important about democratic societies under stress: the instinct to silence criticism is always there, waiting for a crisis to give it justification.

The question is never whether that instinct will arise. The question is whether a society will resist it.