[On September 19th, 1985, Congress held hearings over the concept of parental advisory warnings for music. So this week, I’ll commemorate that complex anniversary by highlighting histories of censorship in America, leading up to a weekend post on the very fraught state of these issues in 2025.]
On three frustrating
examples of federal censorship under the aegis of the Sedition Act.
In 1918,
Congress passed the
Sedition Act, a follow-up to the 1917 Espionage Act and a law which made it
illegal to “willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous,
or abusive language” about a wide range of topics including the government, the
Constitution, the military, and the flag. In lieu of a full first paragraph, I’ll
ask you to check out this
prior post where I discussed these two laws, and then come on back for a few
examples of how the Sedition Act in particular was applied to censor Americans.
Welcome
back! In Chapter 5 of Of Thee I Sing, I write about a couple examples of
federal censorship under these laws: “The Postmaster
General refused to mail copies of The
Jeffersonian, a newsletter published by the Southern populist and
anti-war activist Tom Watson; when Watson fought
back in court a federal judge called the publication and its pacifist
sentiments “poison” … And eight members of the religious organization the Watch
Tower Bible and Tract Society were convicted
under the Espionage Act, based on charges stemming largely from the
following sentence in their anti-war book The Finished Mystery:
‘And yet under the guise of patriotism civil governments of the earth demand of
peace-loving men the sacrifice of themselves and their loved ones and the
butchery of their fellows, and hail it as a duty demanded by the laws of
heaven.’” Defining pacificism and critical patriotism as “sedition” and “espionage”
are pitch-perfect examples of the kind of vague rationalizations for censorship
I discussed in yesterday’s post.
Even more
vague and broad was the use
of the law to charge and jail the prominent socialist leader Eugene Debs.
Debs had pledged his support to three men imprisoned for violating the Espionage
and Sedition Acts, and based only on those words of his he too was charged; as he
wrote to a friend, “I am expecting nothing but conviction under a law
flagrantly unconstitutional and which was framed especially for the suppression
of free speech.” Not only was he frustratingly correct, but the Supreme Court would
go on to uphold his conviction in Debs v. United States (1919).
When words of support can be legally censored—and indeed can lead to legal
charges and criminal convictions—we’re only a very short distance away from “thought
police,” which is, I would argue, the ultimate goal of all forms of censorship.
Next
censored history tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Censorship histories or current events you’d highlight?
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