Sedition Acts

SEDITION ACTS

SEDITION ACTS. Two national sedition acts had been passed in the United States by the end of the twentieth century. The first, passed by the Federalist-dominated Congress of 1798, aimed to halt Republican attacks on the government and to ferret out pro-French sympathizers in case of war with France. Two complementary alien acts allowed the government to deport French and pro-French foreigners who were generally supporters of the Democratic-Republican Party. The second sedition act, passed during World War I, targeted subversives, such as pacifists or "Bolsheviks," who interfered with the war effort.

The Sedition Act of 1798 reestablished the English common law on seditious libel, with some important changes. The new law accepted the idea of jury determination of sedition and also allowed truth to be considered in defense. But the Sedition Act did not clearly differentiate between malicious libel and political opinionation. The conviction of several newspaper editors and a Republican congressman confirmed fears that the law was being used to settle political scores. The act expired in 1801, before its constitutionality could be tested, and during President Thomas Jefferson's tenure in office, all persons convicted under the act were pardoned. In 1964 the Supreme Court flatly declared it inconsistent with the First Amendment in New York Times v. Sullivan.

The Sedition Act of 1918 made it a felony to interfere in the war effort; to insult the government, the Constitution, or the armed forces; or "by word or act [to] oppose the cause of the United States." This act departed from the 1798 measure in its emphasis on criticism of the government and its symbols. Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis D. Brandeis opposed the Sedition Act of 1918 in their dissenting opinions in Abrams v. United States (1919). The Sedition Act hastened the spread of wartime xenophobic hysteria, climaxing in the red scare and the Palmer raids. The scare had run its course by the early 1920s, and the Sedition Act was repealed in 1921. Similar acts passed by the states resulted in litigation reaching the Supreme Court. The most notable decision in this area was Gitlow v. New York (1925), in which the Court began extending the strictures of the First Amendment to the states.

Although the Alien Registration Act of 1940, better known as the Smith Act, is not called a sedition act, it had that as a major purpose. Rather than forbidding criticism of government officers, the Smith Act prohibited advocacy of forceful overthrow of the government and made it a crime to belong to an organization subsequently found to advocate forceful removal of the government. Rarely used during World War II, in the late 1940s the Smith Act became the main legal weapon in the government's battle against communists. In the late 1950s and 1960s, the Supreme Court blunted the Smith Act by raising the evidentiary standard for prosecutions brought under it. And in Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) the Court dismantled the theoretical underpinning of seditious libel when it ruled that even the most extremist political speech, apart from political action, was protected under the First Amendment.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

De Conde, Alexander. The Quasi-War: The Politics and Diplomacy of the Undeclared War with France, 1797–1801. New York: Scribners, 1966.

Levy, Leonard W. Legacy of Suppression. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960.

———. Emergence of a Free Press. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Miller, John C. Crisis in Freedom: The Alien and Sedition Acts. Boston: Little, Brown, 1951.

Steele, Richard W. Free Speech in the Good War. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999.

Joseph A. Dowling / a. r.

See also Alien and Sedition Laws ; Enemy Aliens in the World Wars ; Federalist Party ; First Amendment ; France, Quasi-War with ; Loyalty Oaths ; Newspapers ; Pacifism ; Smith Act .