![]() ![]() While more comprehensive, these passages were not much different than what had been in previous laws against spying and espionage.īut the Espionage Act went further. The part of the act dealing specifically with espionage contained standard clauses criminalizing "obtaining information respecting the national defense with intent or reason to believe that the information to be obtained is to be used to the injury of the United States" or obtaining such things as code books, signal books, sketches, photographs, photographic negatives, and blue prints with the intention of passing them on to the enemy. Sections of the act covered the following: vessels in ports of the United States, interference with foreign commerce by violent means, seizure of arms and other articles intended for export, enforcement of neutrality, passports, counterfeiting government seals, and search warrants. Thus the Wilson administration proposed and Congress passed the "Espionage Act of 1917." Much of the act simply served to supersede existing espionage laws. But Wilson and his cabinet had begun to express concern about what Attorney General thomas gregory referred to as "warfare by propaganda." With World War I raging in 1917, the administration of President woodrow wilson decided that there needed to be a law protecting the United States against "the insidious methods of internal hostile activities." While the United States had Espionage laws already on the books, it had not had a law against seditious expression since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 expired. Supreme Court decisions regarding freedom of speech that continue to be studied. While most of the Espionage Act was straightforward and non-controversial, parts of this legislation curtailed Freedom of Speech in such a way as to draw an outcry from civil libertarians. 217, 219), and an amendment to it passed in 1918 sometimes referred to as the Sedition Act, were an attempt to deal with the climate created in the country by World War I. Though Debs’ sentence was commuted in 1921 when the Sedition Act was repealed by Congress, major portions of the Espionage Act remain part of United States law to the present day.One of the most controversial laws ever passed in the United States, the Espionage Act of 1917 (ch. Supreme Court, where the court upheld his conviction. Debs appealed the decision, and the case eventually reached the U.S. Debs, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for a speech he made in 1918 in Canton, Ohio, criticizing the Espionage Act. One of the most famous activists arrested during this period, labor leader Eugene V. Edgar Hoover, liberally employed the Espionage and Sedition Acts to persecute left-wing political figures. Palmer–a former pacifist whose views on civil rights radically changed once he assumed the attorney general’s office during the Red Scare–and his right-hand man, J. Both pieces of legislation were aimed at socialists, pacifists and other anti-war activists during World War I and were used to punishing effect in the years immediately following the war, during a period characterized by the fear of communist influence and communist infiltration into American society that became known as the first Red Scare (a second would occur later, during the 1940s and 1950s, associated largely with Senator Joseph McCarthy). government, the flag, the Constitution or the military agitating against the production of necessary war materials or advocating, teaching or defending any of these acts. The Espionage Act was reinforced by the Sedition Act of the following year, which imposed similarly harsh penalties on anyone found guilty of making false statements that interfered with the prosecution of the war insulting or abusing the U.S. ![]() Anyone found guilty of such acts would be subject to a fine of $10,000 and a prison sentence of 20 years. armed forces prosecution of the war effort or to promote the success of the country’s enemies. Mitchell Palmer, the United States attorney general under President Woodrow Wilson, the Espionage Act essentially made it a crime for any person to convey information intended to interfere with the U.S. ![]() On June 15, 1917, some two months after America’s formal entrance into World War I against Germany, the United States Congress passes the Espionage Act.Įnforced largely by A. ![]()
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