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The
Sedition Act of 1798
Top
Do you think the Sedition Act should be
re-enacted, in view of the dramatic change in the political climate -- with
politicians calling the Commander In Chief a liar, traitor, etc., or is
Freedom Of Speech the Trump Card?
There are four viewpoints on this page,
and links to two contrasting viewpoints to another page. Read them
all, then "opine!"
The Sedition Act of 1798
World War I and the
Suppression of Dissent, Part 1
World War I and
the Suppression of Dissent, Part 2
Anti-war goons guilty of Sedition!
Contrasting View
Source
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The Sedition Act of 1798
Posted on 03/29/2003 9:18:29 AM PST
by
cgbg
SECTION 1. Be it enacted by the Senate and
House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress
assembled, That if any persons shall unlawfully combine or conspire
together, with intent to oppose any measure or measures of the government of
the United States, which are or shall be directed by proper authority, or to
impede the operation of any law of the United States, or to intimidate or
prevent any person holding a place or office in or under the government of
the United States, from undertaking, performing or executing his trust or
duty, and if any person or persons, with intent as aforesaid, shall counsel,
advise or attempt to procure any insurrection, riot, unlawful assembly, or
combination, whether such conspiracy, threatening, counsel, advice, or
attempt shall have the proposed effect or not, he or they shall be deemed
guilty of a high misdemeanor, and on conviction, before any court of the
United States having jurisdiction thereof, shall be punished by a fine not
exceeding five thousand dollars, and by imprisonment during a term not less
than six months nor exceeding five years; and further, at the discretion of
the court may be ho]den to find sureties for his good behaviour in such sum,
and for such time, as the said court may direct.
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SEC. 2. And be it farther enacted, That if any person shall write, print,
utter or publish, or shall cause or procure to be written, printed, uttered
or published, or shall knowingly and willingly assist or aid in writing,
printing, uttering or publishing any false, scandalous and malicious writing
or writings against the government of the United States, or either house of
the Congress of the United States, or the President of the United States,
with intent to defame the said government, or either house of the said
Congress, or the said President, or to bring them, or either of them, into
contempt or disrepute; or to excite against them, or either or any of them,
the hatred of the good people of the United States, or to stir up sedition
within the United States, or to excite any unlawful combinations therein,
for opposing or resisting any law of the United States, or any act of the
President of the United States, done in pursuance of any such law, or of the
powers in him vested by the constitution of the United States, or to resist,
oppose, or defeat any such law or act, or to aid, encourage or abet any
hostile designs of any foreign nation against United States, their people or
government, then such person, being thereof convicted before any court of
the United States having jurisdiction thereof, shall be punished by a fine
not exceeding two thousand dollars, and by imprisonment not exceeding two
years.
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SEC. 3. And be it further enacted and
declared, That if any person shall be prosecuted under this act, for the
writing or publishing any libel aforesaid, it shall be lawful for the
defendant, upon the trial of the cause, to give in evidence in his defence,
the truth of the matter contained in Republication charged as a libel. And
the jury who shall try the cause, shall have a right to determine the law
and the fact, under the direction of the court, as in other cases.
SEC. 4. And be it further enacted, That this act shall continue and be in
force until the third day of March, one thousand eight hundred and one, and
no longer: Provided, that the expiration of the act shall not prevent or
defeat a prosecution and punishment of any offence against the law, during
the time it shall be in force.
APPROVED, July 14, 1798
Source
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Source
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World War I and the
Suppression of Dissent, Part 2
by
Wendy McElroy,
May 2002
IN THE SUMMER OF 1905, labor radicals
assembled in Chicago to found a new group — the Industrial Workers of the
World (IWW). It operated in competition with the more conservative American
Federation of Labor (AFL), then the most powerful labor group in the United
States. As well as embodying socialism, the IWW embraced less-restrictive
membership policies than the AFL. It actively organized and recruited among
migrant workers, blacks, and immigrants, from whom it received enthusiastic
support.
 Leaders such as William
“Big Bill” Haywood thought all workers should organize into a single
industrial union to avoid the possibility of individual trade unions’ being
pitted against each other. The IWW employed a grassroots approach: the
executive was purposefully weak; membership was open to everyone; local
strikes were encouraged. Thus, under American-born leaders, the IWW became
the most prominent voice of immigrant workers, who were often snubbed by
other labor organizations.
Conflict with authority
was inevitable, even before World War I. Part of the reason was the IWW’s
willingness to use bare-knuckle tactics, such as sabotage and violent
confrontation with strike-breakers. But the unresolvable conflict was
ideological. To the IWW, the government was a tool of capitalist
exploitation. To the authorities, the IWW was a revolutionary organization
that sought to overthrow the existing government.
Thus, when 165 IWW
leaders were arrested in 1917, charges ranged from treason to the use of
intimidation in labor disputes.
In June 1917, Congress
enacted the Espionage Act (for text see
www.staff.uiuc.edu/~rcunning/espact.htm), which prescribed heavy fines
and prison sentences for vaguely defined anti-war activities. The Act was
quickly used against the IWW. In September, IWW meeting halls across the
nation were raided by government agents. More than 160 IWW officers,
members, and sympathizers were arrested.
One hundred and one
defendants went on trial in April 1918, including IWW head Big Bill Haywood.
After five months, the trial ended in a “guilty” verdict for all, with
Haywood and 14 others each receiving sentences of 20 years in prison.
Collectively, the defendants were fined a total of $2,500,000. The IWW was
virtually destroyed.
The shattering of the IWW
caused little public protest, as most people associated it with
un-Americanism — a charge fueled by the large number of minorities and
foreigners in its membership. Even the language of the IWW was deemed
unpatriotic because its impassioned rhetoric too closely mirrored that of
socialists in other lands. An incident known as the Bisbee Deportation
illustrates the depth of the public hatred toward the IWW and foreigners.
In the mining town of
Bisbee, Arizona, the IWW recruited members among Mexican and European
workers who routinely labored at lower-paying jobs than native-born
Americans. In June 1917, the IWW presented a list of demands to Bisbee’s
mining companies, including an end to discrimination against minority and
foreign workers. When the companies turned down every demand, a strike was
called.
Then a rumor erupted: the
IWW had been infiltrated by pro-Germans. At 2 a.m., hundreds of armed
vigilantes rounded up nearly 1,200 men, whom they forced into 24 cattle cars
of a train, shipped them to New Mexico, and abandoned them in a remote area.
The deportees were without shelter for weeks until U.S. troops escorted them
to facilities where many were held for months.
The authorities in Bisbee
guarded all roads into town to prevent the men, or any other undesirables,
from entering. Other local workers were put on trial and deported if found
guilty of disloyalty to the mining companies. A federal commission
investigated the deportations but found no federal laws had been violated.
The matter was referred to the state of Arizona, which took no action
against the mining companies.
A report in the Los
Angeles Times (July 15, 1917) captured the general public’s response:
On our own soil is an enemy ...
preaching revolution and invoking anarchy ... the I.W.W.’s. From Butte to
Bisbee, from Seattle to Leadville, that international organization, filled
with foreigners, officered by convicts, and attempting vaguely to guise
its sabotage behind the specious title of “Industrial Workers of the
World,” is in open warfare against our government.
The Bisbee deportation
was coordinated by private vigilantes from whom the government often
received enthusiastic support. Queen Silver, who attended IWW meetings in
Los Angeles as a child, recounted in her writings,
When the [IWW] person got up to
make a collection speech that was a signal to all the American Legion
people in the audience to arrest the one or two people who were beside
them, as they had been deputized to do. Mother was one of the people
arrested. They were all turned loose later on. It was harassment.
Grace Verne Silver — the
arrested mother — was not taken to the police station. A private business
interest, the Merchants and Manufacturers Association, maintained files on
radicals for the police and Grace was detained there.
The American public had
shown a willingness to tolerate and even to participate in the rounding up,
harassment, and forced “deportation” of native-born Americans. The forced
deportation of foreign-born radicals from U.S. territory would soon follow.
The end of World War I
As America entered the
last year of World War I, 1918, “patriotic” fervor seemed to swell. In May,
the Sedition Act (see
www.lib.byu.edu/~rdh/wwi/ 1918/usspy.html for text) imposed “a fine of
not more than $10,000 or imprisonment for not more than twenty years, or
both ...” upon anyone disposed to “utter, print, write, or publish any
disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of
government of the United States.”
In October 1918, Congress
passed the Alien Act, by which “any alien who, at any time after entering
the United States, is found to have been at the time of entry, or to have
become thereafter, a member of any anarchist organization” could be
deported.
Libertarians of the day,
including Albert Jay Nock, H.L. Mencken, Randolph Bourne, and Oswald
Garrison Villard spoke out in protest against such measures. But most voices
still remained silent.
The various acts of 1917
and 1918 were used to destroy what was left of the left wing in America.
Victor Berger, the first socialist elected to Congress, was sentenced to 20
years in prison for hindering the war effort. (While Berger was free on
appeal, his constituency returned him to Congress.) The socialist labor
leader Eugene V. Debs was sentenced to 10 years in prison for making an
anti-war speech.
On November 11, 1918, the
Allies and Germany signed an armistice: the war was over.
But political panic —
partly stemming from the Bolshevik Revolution — gripped America. In 1919,
strikes broke out, crippling some segments of industry; sometimes fierce
violence broke out on both sides. Race riots shook cities across America,
including Chicago, where five days of rioting left 38 people dead, several
injured, and about a thousand homeless: the race riots were called the “Red
Summer” of 1919.
One event was pivotal: on
May 1, 1919, several bombs were delivered through the mail to prominent
figures, including Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer; this was the
beginning of the “Red Scare.” The surviving Palmer blamed communists, who he
believed were overwhelmingly immigrants. In his essay “The Case against the
‘Reds’,” Palmer explained:
>My information showed that
communism in this country was an organization of thousands of aliens who
were direct allies of Trotzky. Aliens of the same misshapen caste of mind
and indecencies of character, and it showed that they were making the same
glittering promises of lawlessness, of criminal autocracy to Americans,
that they had made to the Russian peasants (see
http://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/hist409/palmer.html for the full text).
The Palmer raids
With the power to deport,
Palmer and his assistant John Edgar Hoover launched a crusade against the
radical left.
Beginning in the fall of
1919, between 5,000 and 10,000 suspected alien residents were arrested
without warrants in what became known as the Palmer Raids. No evidence of a
proposed revolution was uncovered; many of those arrested were found to be
American citizens affiliated with a union or the “wrong” political party.
The vast majority of arrestees were eventually released but hundreds of
“enemy aliens” — including the anarchist Emma Goldman, a naturalized citizen
who was “denaturalized” — were eventually deported to the Soviet Union.
The Supreme Court failed
to uphold the constitutional rights of the American citizens arrested under
the acts. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. justified the
repression in a famous decision in which he stated that when the exercise of
free speech constituted a “clear and present danger” to America — “danger”
as defined by the government — the authorities could legitimately suspend
the First Amendment.
The Palmer Raids
continued into 1920. As anti-war scientists and protesters, union members,
and socialist leaders continued to be brutally arrested without warrants and
held without trial, however, public approval shifted away.
Opposition began to
organize. For example, in 1920 the American Civil Liberties Union formed to
protest the violation of constitutional rights such as arrest without
warrant, unreasonable search and seizure, the denial of due process, and
police brutality. Its first director, Roger Baldwin, was a pacifist and a
member of the IWW.
Palmer himself suffered a
series of embarrassments that hurried the demise of his political influence.
For example, he predicted a communist uprising on May 1, 1920, and caused
such panic that the New York State legislature refused to seat five
Socialists who had been elected. When the uprising did not occur, sharp
resentment and skepticism replaced panic.
By 1921, the Red Scare
was effectively over. It stands as a reminder of how national-security
interests can be used by government to suppress dissenting political ideas
even beyond the period of warfare. This is especially true when those
expressing the ideas can be vilified as “foreign.” Indeed, any segregated
group that threatened the political status quo came under suspicion.
For example, blacks. Race
became tangled with labor interests and political intolerance. When black
laborers migrated northward en masse to the industrial cities, race riots
were sparked.
The lynching of blacks
increased dramatically and black Americans became victims of the Red Scare,
as well. The Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey — one of the most powerful black
voices in America — was targeted by the FBI for deportation and an
organization he founded, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, was
infiltrated and discredited by federal agents.
The journalist H.L.
Mencken, who himself fell under government suspicion for his German descent
and love of German culture, commented on the folly of trading fundamental
liberties for security. He wrote of Holmes’s “clear and present danger”
opinion:
One finds a clear statement of
the doctrine that, in war time, the rights guaranteed by the First
Amendment cease to have any substance, and may be set aside by any jury
that has been sufficiently inflamed by a district attorney itching for
higher office.... I find it hard to reconcile such notions with any
plausible concept of liberalism. (Quoted at
http://apollo3.com/~jameso/first5.html.)
Source
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FreeRepublic.com
"A Conservative News Forum"
Anti-war goons guilty of Sedition!
My Brain! | 3/22/04 | K. D. Cook
Posted on 03/22/2004 5:19:39 AM PST
by
cybersaint
I am appalled at the lack of respect being
shown by so many in this country, for this country.
It is now considered protected free speech
to shred and burn our symbol of freedom, the American flag, and to destroy
other peoples property in the process.
I am referring to the three
anti-American/anti-war people that trespassed none the less, on another mans
property and utterly destroyed his 9-11 memorial display. They trashed 87
flags, and shredded banners in supporting our troops while local law
enforcement (I use this term lightly in this case) stood by and watched
claiming that it was their right of free speech to destroy this other man‘s
property.
You’ve got to be kidding!
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This is not an issue of free speech, these
individuals committed a crime while the fuzz stood by with their heads up
there rear ends, Ah our tax dollars at work.
Am I the only one that has a problem with
this? Should most Americans have a problem with what these individuals did?
Certainly, we all should, and this kind of blatant disrespect for our nation
should make us all angry, and should light a fire under us to stand up and
defend this nation against fruity anti-war people, who are out of control.
There are several anti-war groups in this
country that are planning domestic attacks here at home while our brave
fighting men and women are risking their lives to make the world a little
safer for the rest of us. These groups are planning to stage acts of civil
disobedience, vowing to bring the war home to the rest of us by blocking
roads, and disrupting everyday commerce.
These people are nothing short of domestic
terrorists, and need to be dealt with harshly. True Americans must rise up
and say “enough is enough”! It is time to support President Bush, and to
stand behind our military one hundred percent!
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Once we start dropping bombs on Iraq, and
these domestic terrorist/anti-war freaks start their attack on the rest of
us, It will be time for us to take action. We must prompt the authorities to
place the anti-war leaders under arrest, and charge them with violating the
U.S. Sedition Act of 1918 which is a portion of the amendment to Section
three of the Espionage act of June 15. 1917. Section three.
We also must nail all those who went over
to Iraq to act as human shields, they are all guilty, and must answer for
their crimes against this nation.
The U.S. Sedition Act reads as follows:
Whoever, when the United
States is at war, shall willfully make or convey false reports or false
statements with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the
military or naval forces or the United States, or to promote the success
of it‘s enemies…
Shall willfully utter,
print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive
language about the form of government of the United States, or the
Constitution of the United States, or the military or naval forces of the
United States…
or shall willfully
display the flag of any foreign enemy….. And whoever shall by word or act
support or favor the cause of any country with which the United States is
at war or by word or act oppose the cause of the United States therein,
shall be punished by a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment for
not more than twenty years, or both….
Still thinking about acting like a jerk by
protesting against America, and creating chaos in our streets, better think
about it again, because were not going to take it from you.
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We will hold you accountable for your
actions, and you may be prosecuted under the above law for crimes against
the United States of America.
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