Geoffrey R. Stone, author of Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from the
Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism is Lawrence Lessig's guest blogger, and describes two historical instances of war-related civil rights infringement from WW1 and the Civil War.
Some 2,000 dissenters were prosecuted under these provisions. They
ranged from such obscure dissidents as Mollie Steimer, a 20-year-old
Russian-Jewish emigre who threw leaflets in Yiddish from a rooftop on
the lower East Side of New York, to such prominent figures as Eugene
Debs, the national leaders of the Socialist Party, who had received one
million votes for President in 1912 (6% of the total), who gave a
speech in Ohio criticizing Wilson for the draft and for his suppression
of free expression. Moreover, unlike the Sedition Act of 1798, where
the maximum jail term was 6 months, judges enforcing the World War I
legislation routinely sentenced people to prison terms of 10-20 years
in jail, and many of these people (like Mollie Steimer and Emma
Goldman) were deported for their dissent.
Via Lawrence Lessig
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