[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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