ABSTRACT
"Never in the history of our country, since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798," announced a concerned young Harvard law professor, Zechariah Chafee, Jr., "has the meaning of free speech been the subject of such sharp controversy as today." Appearing as it did in a 1919 Harvard Law Review article, 1 amidst the unreasoning suspicion of dissent which pervaded the country during and just after World War I, this assessment, despite its somewhat dramatic tone, was not unwarranted. The xenophobia aroused by President Woodrow Wilson's call to arms, together with the fear and confusion engendered by the Bolshevik Revolution, had created an atmosphere in which the guarantees of the First Amendment were ignored by private citizen and public official alike. By the time the essay appeared, the Wisconsin socialist Victor Berger had been banned from Congress, Masses had been excluded from the mails, and more than 800 persons had been convicted in the federal courts under the most severe espionage and sedition legislation enacted in more than a century. 2
