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The U.S. Supreme Court cases of Schenck v. United States (1919) and Abrams v. United States (1919), known collectively as the “espionage cases,” represent important milestones in the history of American civil liberties. Decided in the aftermath of World War I, the cases dealt with the important question, “who has the right to criticize the government, especially during wartime?” Although the freedom of speech was guaranteed to American citizens by the Bill of Rights in 1791, for most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries dissenters who criticized America's war efforts often faced intimidation, violence, and legal action. World War I, a very controversial war, proved no exception. In 1918 Congress passed a Sedition Act, making it a crime to “willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about American involvement in the Great War. Yet dissident groups—Americans of German and Irish dissent, pacifists, and socialists—bitterly opposed the war. American socialists in particular dismissed the conflict as an attempt by monarchs and capitalists on both sides of the Atlantic to divide the working classes of their respective countries. Charles T. Schenck, Secretary General of the Socialist Party of America, and Jacob Abrams, a recently arrived Russian refugee, were two individuals prosecuted under the Sedition Act. Their cases would not only test the willingness of the U.S. Supreme and the American public to tolerate dissent during wartime but would help establish the “clear and present danger” doctrine which would guide future free speech cases for the next century.
The film below discusses Schenck v. United States (1919), Abrams v. United States (1919), and the constitutional issues involved in both cases. |
