American Propaganda
Illustration: a First World War field-intelligence collage of trench maps, wireless transmission logs and aerial reconnaissance photographs.

Case studies

No censor's office, but a postmaster, a prosecutor and a prison

Illustration, not an archive object

What it said

Censorship is usually silent. It is a blank column or an issue that never arrives. The American version in 1917 and 1918 had a voice, though, and it is worth hearing before the statutes. Two years before the country entered the war, Woodrow Wilson told Congress, in his annual message of 7 December 1915, what he thought of some of his own people. Citizens born under other flags, he said, had

poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life

such creatures of passion, disloyalty, and anarchy must be crushed out

Woodrow Wilson, Third Annual Message to Congress, 7 December 1915 (Miller Center). Two separate phrases from the message, as quoted on the FRAME case study.

The word "disloyal" did not stay in a speech. By 1918 it was part of a federal crime. In July of that year the Committee on Public Information ran an advertisement titled "Spies and Lies" in The Delineator. It asked readers to report the man who spreads pessimistic stories or cries for peace to the Department of Justice. The same war also put out a voluntary code: on 28 May 1917 the committee issued its Preliminary Statement to the Press of the United States, which sorted war news into "dangerous," "questionable" and "routine."

Who made it and why

Congress and the executive built the American system in four pieces.

  • The Espionage Act, 15 June 1917. In wartime it was a crime to wilfully make false reports or false statements with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the military or naval forces, or to obstruct recruiting. Title XII made violating matter nonmailable. That one clause handed the Post Office a power over what reached readers.
  • The Post Office. Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson's department used it. It ruled the August 1917 issue of The Masses, a socialist monthly, out of the mails. It took away the second-class mailing privilege of Victor Berger's Milwaukee Leader.
  • The Trading with the Enemy Act, 6 October 1917. Section 19 barred foreign-language papers from printing news or comment about the war or the government unless they filed a sworn English translation with the postmaster first or held a permit. An executive order put the Postmaster General in charge and created a Censorship Board for messages crossing the border.
  • The Sedition Act, 16 May 1918. This amendment reached any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States, among other things.

The stated reason was the safety of the forces. In Schenck, Justice Holmes gave the government's view its best sentence: When a nation is at war many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight.

The other belligerents went further and earlier. Britain passed the Defence of the Realm Act on 8 August 1914 and ran a Press Bureau. Germany's war declaration of 31 July 1914 put press control in the hands of army corps commanders under an 1851 Prussian siege law. France's law of 5 August 1914 let military news appear only after the War Ministry's press bureau released it, and censored columns ran blank. Those systems are covered in full on the FRAME page. They matter here only as a contrast: the United States had no general prior review of its domestic papers.

What it got right or wrong

A law against lying about troop movements to help the enemy, or against physically obstructing a draft, protects soldiers. A government at war can keep real military secrets. That part of the case is not hard.

The rest was wrong. A statute that punishes "disloyal" or "abusive" language about the government punishes opinion. Excluding a magazine from the mails for its politics is a press license by another name. Making a foreign-language paper get a permit before it can comment on its own government's war treats a citizen's language as probable guilt.

The cases make the cost concrete. Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist Party's best-known leader and a former presidential candidate, spoke against the war in Canton, Ohio, on 16 June 1918. He was convicted that September and given ten years. On 10 November 1919 the Supreme Court upheld, 7 to 2, the convictions in Abrams of Russian-born immigrants who had thrown leaflets against American intervention in Russia. Those were sentences for words, not for spying.

The "Spies and Lies" copy deserves its own sentence. It put a man who "cries for peace" in the same paragraph as a spy, and it pointed readers at the Justice Department. A government should not train citizens to treat a neighbor's pessimism as a lead.

The best of the record came from judges

The best of the American record in these years came from judges, and some of it came fast. On 24 July 1917, in Masses Publishing Co. v. Patten, Judge Learned Hand ordered the magazine mailed:

To assimilate agitation, legitimate as such, with direct incitement to violent resistance, is to disregard the tolerance of all methods of political agitation which in normal times is a safeguard of free government.

Learned Hand, Masses Publishing Co. v. Patten, 244 F. 535 (S.D.N.Y. 1917). Reversed, 246 F. 24 (2d Cir., 2 November 1917).

The Second Circuit reversed him that November. The Supreme Court later upheld the Milwaukee Leader exclusion (255 U.S. 407, 1921) over the dissents of Brandeis and Holmes. On 3 March 1919, in Schenck, a unanimous Court upheld a conviction for draft-resistance leaflets and wrote the "clear and present danger" test. A week later, Debs was also unanimous.

Then Holmes changed his ground. Dissenting in Abrams, with Brandeis, he wrote:

the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., dissenting, Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616 (1919).

That dissent is the libertarian reading of the whole episode, written by a member of the Court that upheld the convictions. Answer bad speech with better speech. Punish acts, and words only where they are the direct trigger of an act. A postmaster is not a judge of political truth.

The republic also corrected itself, if slowly. Debs ran for president from the Atlanta penitentiary in 1920 and drew about 914,000 votes. Congress voted in December 1920 to repeal the 1918 amendments, and the repeal became law on 3 March 1921. On 23 December 1921 President Harding commuted the sentences of Debs and 23 others, effective Christmas Day. The 1917 Act itself stayed on the books.

Its legacy

American restriction in this war showed up where a citizen could find it: in a statute, a postal ruling, an indictment and a reported opinion. That visibility is why Hand could rule within weeks, why Holmes's dissent could be read, and why voters could cast ballots for a man in prison. It is a real difference from a blank column nobody can sue over. It does not excuse the prison terms.

A generation later, home-front posters such as the 1942 Loose Lips Might Sink Ships sheet again told civilians that careless talk helps the enemy. That poster asked people to keep quiet about things like ship movements and carried no penalty. The 1918 law reached "disloyal" opinion and sent people to prison. The 1917 Act itself was still on the books when the poster appeared. For the publicity side of the same war, see the Committee on Public Information and the Four Minute Men.

Sources

  • Espionage Act, 15 June 1917, ch. 30, 40 Stat. 217; Trading with the Enemy Act, 6 October 1917, § 19; Sedition Act, 16 May 1918, 40 Stat. 553; repeal by the Act of 3 March 1921.
  • Committee on Public Information, Preliminary Statement to the Press of the United States (1917), Library of Congress.
  • Committee on Public Information, "Spies and Lies" advertisement, The Delineator, July 1918.
  • Woodrow Wilson, Third Annual Message to Congress, 7 December 1915 (Miller Center).
  • Masses Publishing Co. v. Patten, 244 F. 535 (S.D.N.Y. 1917), reversed, 246 F. 24 (2d Cir. 1917).
  • United States ex rel. Milwaukee Social Democratic Publishing Co. v. Burleson, 255 U.S. 407 (1921).
  • Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47 (1919); Debs v. United States, 249 U.S. 211 (1919); Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616 (1919).
  • National Archives at Chicago, "Eugene V. Debs: Canton speech"; The First Amendment Encyclopedia, "Debs v. United States" and "Sedition Act of 1918."
  • Defence of the Realm Act 1914 (4 & 5 Geo. 5 c. 29); Prussian Law on the State of Siege, 4 June 1851; Loi du 5 août 1914, as summarized on the FRAME case study.
  • FRAME case study "Wartime censorship in the First World War: Britain, Germany, France and the United States," for the chronology and the Debs vote total.