![]() ![]() Christopher Capozzola is Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This article was originally published in 2009. Within a few months, President Woodrow Wilson pardoned all three men, in part in response to a petition by 10,000 Philadelphia residents and the regret expressed publicly by their former prosecutor, U.S. Clarke urged the exoneration of another one of the defendants, a bookkeeper with no editorial input, who he believed was the victim of a “flagrant mistrial.” Clarke asserted that the First Amendment was not at issue in the case. He warned that such prosecutions would “threaten freedom of thought and of belief.” Brandeis dismissed the idea that mere editing and re-publication could be grounds for prosecution and insisted that the Tageblatt’s articles had been taken out of context. Brandeis, joined by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., vehemently disagreed. Brandeis said prosecutions threatened First Amendment freedom They agreed with the lower court arguments that the articles “weakened the spirit of recruiting” and that the Espionage Act’s restraints were neither “excessive nor ambiguous.”Ĭonvictions of two of the men, including Schaefer, were overturned because of insufficient evidence linking them to publication of the articles. (Two of the editors were also indicted for treason, but the charges were dismissed.) Supreme Court upheld espionage convictions, used clear and present danger testįive justices concurred with Justice Joseph McKenna’s opinion in asserting that the clear and present danger test supported three of the convictions. The government charged them with willfully mistranslating or abridging the original publications and thus violating the Espionage Act’s provisions forbidding “false reports” to hinder the U.S. On September 10, 1917, federal officials arrested Peter Schaefer and four colleagues at the Philadelphia Tageblatt, a left-leaning German-language newspaper featuring articles condensed and reprinted from other sources. Editors, colleagues found guilty of espionage for false reports hindering war with Germany The ruling represented one of a number of setbacks for civil liberties in the World War I era. 466 (1920), the Supreme Court upheld the convictions of three German-American newspaper publishers under the Espionage Act of 1917 based on the character of editorial changes they made to writings that they re-published. National Archives and Records Administration). It is in the public domain and available through the U.S. (Photo is from the War Department and was taken in 1918. ![]() ![]() United States (1920) upheld convictions of Darkow and two others, but overturned the others because of insufficient evidence linking them to publication of the articles. Darkow was among five people who were convicted in the case. Photo of Martin Darkow, managing editor of the German language newspaper Philadelphia Tageblatt, who was convicted of espionage under the Espionage Act of 1917 in connection with false news articles that the U.S. ![]()
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