250 U.S. 616 (1919) (U.S. Supreme Court)
Abrams v. United States is a landmark World War I-era speech case in which the Supreme Court affirmed the convictions of radical immigrants who scattered leaflets denouncing U.S.
Does the First Amendment prohibit Congress from criminalizing the distribution of leaflets that criticize U.S. war policy and urge workers to strike in munitions plants when such speech is found to have been made with the intent to hinder the war effort?
Under the Espionage Act of 1917 as amended by the Sedition Act of 1918, Congress may punish the willful utterance or distribution of language intended to incite resistance to the war or to urge the curtailment of production of essential war materials with the specific intent to hinder the United States in the prosecution of the war. During wartime, speech that has the natural and probable effect of obstructing the war effort, and that is uttered with such intent, is not protected by the First Amendment. (Holmes's dissent would confine punishment to speech posing a clear and present danger of an immediate substantive evil Congress has a right to prevent.)
Affirmed. The Supreme Court upheld the defendants' convictions, concluding that their leaflets, urging a strike in munitions production and condemning U.S. military action, were intended to hinder the war effort and therefore fell outside First Amendment protection under the Sedition Act.
Abrams entrenched the Court's early, deferential approach to wartime suppression of speech by upholding the Sedition Act convictions on the basis of intent and bad tendency. Yet the case is doctrinally pivotal because Holmes's dissent became the intellectual wellspring of modern free speech jurisprudence. His clear-and-present-danger refinement influenced later opinions, including Brandeis's Whitney concurrence and, decades later, Brandenburg v. Ohio's imminence-based incitement test. Abrams thus stands as a cautionary tale about speech restrictions in times of crisis and a foundational text for the principle that political dissent occupies a preferred place under the First Amendment.