![Eugene Debs, at center with flowers, who was serving a prison sentence for violating the Espionage Act, on the day he was notified of his nomination for the presidency on the socialist ticket by a delegation of leading socialist](/uofsc/images/post_images/2021/05_post_conversation_free_speech.jpg)
Free speech wasn't so free 103 years ago, when 'seditious' and 'unpatriotic' speech was criminalized in the US
May 13, 2021, Eric P. Robinson
The United States government – in the midst of World War I – undertook unprecedented efforts to control and restrict what it saw as “unpatriotic” speech through passage of the Sedition Act of 1918. The restrictions – and the courts’ reactions to them – mark an important landmark in testing the limits of the First Amendment, and the beginnings of the current understanding of free speech in the U.S.