How much do you know about the 1917 Espionage Act Lieberman and Feinstein champion?

[snagglepuss]

Naomi Woolf says the act is terrifying, it's impossible not to agree after reading about it's history and consequences.


snip


I call on all American citizens to rise up and insist on repeal of the Espionage Act immediately. We have little time to waste. The Assange assault is theater of a particularly deadly kind, and America will not recover from the use of the Espionage Act as a cudgel to threaten journalists, editors and news outlets with. I call on major funders of Feinstein's and Lieberman;s campaigns to put their donations in escrow accounts and notify the staffers of those Senators that the funds willonly be released if they drop their traitorous invocation of the Espionage Act. I call on all Americans to understand once for all: this is not about Julian Assange. This, my fellow citizens, is about you.


snip


The Espionage Act was crafted in 1917 -- because President Woodrow Wilson wanted a war and, faced with the troublesome First Amendment, wished to criminalize speech critical of his war.


snip


The Espionage Act was used to round these citizens by the thousands for the newly minted 'crime' of their exercising their First Amendment Rights. A movie producer who showed British cruelty in a film about the Revolutionary War (since the British were our allies in World War I) got a ten-year sentence under the Espionage act in 1917, and the film was seized; poet E.E. Cummings spent three and a half months in a military detention camp under the Espionage Act for the 'crime' of saying that he did not hate Germans. Esteemed Judge Learned Hand wrote that the wording of the Espionage Act was so vague that it would threaten the American tradition of freedom itself. Many were held in prison for weeks in brutal conditions without due process; some, in Connecticut -- Lieberman's home state -- were severely beaten while they were held in prison. The arrests and beatings were widely publicized and had a profound effect, terrorizing those who would otherwise speak out.

Presidential candidate Eugene Debs received a ten-year prison sentence in 1918 under the Espionage Act for daring to read the First Amendment in public. The roundup of ordinary citizens -- charged with the Espionage Act -- who were jailed for daring to criticize the government was so effective in deterring others from speaking up that the Act silenced dissent in this country for a decade.




http://www.huffingtonpost.com/naomi-wolf/post_1394_b_795001.html

[Demeter]

1. It's a Piece of Fascist Shit for Fascists to Wave About

and if the shoe fits, both Joe and DiFi can wear it.

[katty]

2. Jo and Di should pack up and pledge allegiance to Israel

and AIPAC

[starroute]

3. It led directly to the formation of the ACLU

http://everything2.com/title/American+Civil+Liberties+Union

When the Espionage Act came up for review in the Supreme Court, "free speech" claims lost every time. The Espionage Act made it a crime to interfere with military recruiting efforts. In the first case the Court reviewed, Schenck, a Socialist, made an anti-war pamphlet which compared the draft to slavery and advocated resistance to conscription. The Supreme Court affirmed the conviction of Schenck and his associates under the Espionage Act. "When a nation is at war," Justice Holmes wrote for the Court, "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 and that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right." Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47 (1919). This opinion is the one in which Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. wrote: "The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic." . . .

Then Holmes himself began to have doubts. He and Louis Brandeis dissented in Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616 (1919). On August 23, 1918, six (6) Russian-Jewish anarchists based in New York were arrested, and charged under the Espionage Act for publishing anti-war literature. Only five (5) were tried; the sixth was so badly beaten by the police in the course of his arrest that he died. Justices Holmes and Brandeis dissented because they did not think that pamphleteering by five unknown anarchists constituted a "clear and present danger" to recruiting efforts, or the national security of the United States. . . .

During the Red Scare of 1919-20, A. Mitchell Palmer, the attorney general and his special assistant, J. Edgar Hoover, used the Espionage Act and the Sedition Act to launch a campaign against radicals and left-wing organizations. Thousands were arrested and hundreds were given long prison sentences. Among those arrested and imprisoned was a former social worker, Roger Baldwin. When the United States entered World War I, Baldwin joined the American Union Against Militarism (AUAM). Baldwin was involved specifically in a branch of the AUAM known as the National Civil Liberties Bureau (NCLB), which defended conscientious objectors. In 1918 Baldwin himself was called up for military service, but refused to serve. He was sentenced to a year in jail. After his release in 1919 Baldwin joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Baldwin then resolved to organize a legal response to the Palmer Raids.

In January 1920, Baldwin joined with Norman Thomas, Jane Addams, Crystal Eastman, Clarence Darrow, John Dewey, Abraham Muste, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Upton Sinclair to form the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Baldwin was appointed as the first executive director of the ACLU and over the next thirty five (35) years was involved in its campaigns. Unsurprisingly, the Union's first major campaign was fighting Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer.

[snagglepuss]

4. Thanks for posting. This is an eye-opener. I have realized how little I know

about this era. Not 100% clueless but close. What is terrifying is that the intervening years of progress can be relatively speaking easily wiped away.

[Mopar151]

6. Yes, this seems to be the big goal of the old, well funded right

They, thanks to stories learned at grandad's knee, see these as the halcyon days of their world. Those right-wingers who know some of the ugly facts of that time work endlessly to keep them out of the "big picture".

[Bennyboy]

5. K and R'd

[bemildred]

7. The fact that our government is so intent on shutting people up tells you all you need to know.

About what kind of people they are, about their intentions, about what they think of the public.