STATUS: Mostly incomplete.
Chapter 10 -- Cast Criticism as "Espionage" and Dissent as "Treason"

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If you don't know anything about the 1917 Espionage Act, it sounds kind of salutary. In 1917, the nation was at war; of course we need to root out spies during wartime. But its history is sinister.

In the nineteen-teens, a wave of left-wing activism swept the nation. Many of the activists working for better conditions and higher wages were also against the nation's entry into the war.  So as the country prepared for war, President Woodrow Wilson's communications machine issued a wave of propaganda to whip up war fervor. Congress quickly passed the 1917 Espionage and Trading with the Enemy Act, which criminalized antiwar remarks. Hundreds of American citizens were prosecuted for objecting to military recruitment or for speaking or writing things that could remotely be interpreted as dissent from the government's line. Citizens' meetings were raided by government spies and there were sweeping arrests without warrants. It was against the law under the 1917 Espionage Act to mail an antiwar opinion or even to advocate for a referendum on whether or not the United States should enter the war. Officials of the post office leaked files on antiwar "traitors" to newspapers.

Sentences were severe: A Kansas City man got ten years in prison for having written a letter to a newspaper. A mother of four criticized the war and got five years in jail. Eugene Debs, the Socialist candidate, tried to challenge the Act in 1918, invoking the First Amendment. Debs was found guilty and was sentenced to ten years."

The Palmer Raids were the culmination of these events. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer used the 1917 Espionage Act and the 1918 Sedition Act to gather information on 260,000 citizens; the raids arrested 10,000 citizens as well as immigrants in 1919. The mass arrests were warrantless and the authorities created fake documents to deport whom they could. Teachers, librarians, and working men and women were jailed. Scores in Connecticut alone were "beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death in futile efforts to extract confessions." But in spite of all these arrests and imprisonments, evidence to support Palmer's accusations of a revolutionary network never surfaced."

The pendulum swung back: a group of patriotic lawyers, led by future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, issued a report calling the raids and arrests "utterly illegal." Palmer's power waned.  Nonetheless, the fear remained. After the Palmer raids, many Americans were scared to subscribe to certain journals; teachers policed what they said in the classroom; editors weighed ) their words.  Dissent was muted for a decade.

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