ABSTRACT
The trio of decisions—Schenck, Frohwerk, and Debs—may be understood as exempting wartime measures and activities from First Amendment protections. Eight months after these cases, the Court took up Abrams v. United States (1919), 1 with a ruling that offered further evidence of the degree to which the national mood entered judicial chambers. Being a wartime trial, it also played out against a backdrop of Liberty Loan rallies, patriotic parades, bands marching, martial music playing, and spectacles that established the courtroom’s atmospherics. 2 Newspapers carried daily listings of American soldiers who were the casualties of war and news items reporting daily battles, as Allied forces were entering their final combat. The “slacker” raids, widely headlined, led to the arrest of 1,500 “draft dodgers,” according to Attorney General Thomas Gregory, which only enhanced the hyperbolic nationalism of the time, as did the trials of eighty-three IWW members, including some notable socialists, such as Rose Pastor Stokes. The widely praised Sedition Act and the indictment of John Reed, a celebrated witness to the Bolshevik Revolution, likewise contributed to the fervent patriotic backdrop against which the trial was played out and the jury deliberated.
