The Abrams Case
and the Red Scare

In August 1918, New York City police arrested five Russian immigrants and charged them with violating the Espionage and Sedition Acts passed during World War I. The defendants were part of an anarchist group called Frayhayt (Freedom). Late in the summer of 1918, the group distributed two leaflets—one in Yiddish and one in English—that criticized President Wilson and the U.S. military intervention against Russia’s Bolshevik government. It also called for a general workers’ strike to protest Wilson’s policy. During police interrogations, Jacob Schwartz was beaten so badly that he died from his injuries. The other four defendants were tried and convicted in October 1918 and sentenced to between fifteen and twenty years in prison. When they appealed their convictions, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the verdict. In 1921 the defendants were deported to the Soviet Union.

Abrams v. United States upheld the “clear and present danger” principle first established in Schenck v. United States (1919). In the Schenck case, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the unanimous decision establishing that free speech could be legally restricted only if it posed a clear threat to public safety. Eight months later, Holmes changed his mind and broke with the majority of his fellow justices in their application of his “clear and present danger” test to the Abrams case. In his famous dissent (Document 21.7), Holmes insisted that the prosecution had failed to prove intent on the part of the anarchists to harm the United States and further argued that a threat must be “clear and imminent [emphasis added]” before free speech could be limited, even during wartime.

Like thousands of other anarchists, socialists, and Communists, the Abrams defendants were victims of the “Red scare” that suppressed radical activities during and immediately after World War I. The following documents explore different aspects of the Red scare and the Abrams case. As you examine these sources, consider to what extent national security concerns should allow the government to curtail free speech rights.