American Political Prisoners Prosecutions under the Espionage and Sedition Acts

Subjects:

• History » American History -- 1900 to 1945
• Political Science » Civil/Political/Human Rights
• Crime & Justice » Crime & Justice (general)

Awards:

• Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award

Reviews:

• Stephen M. Kohn is a beacon on a dark time in American history, as the legal foundations were laid for subversion of the Constitution in the name of pacifists who dared to organize or even think out loud. Nuclear resisters: this is a warning!
  —
  The Nuclear Resister

• Endorsement From
  from the foreword by Howard Zinn
  Professor Emeritus
  Boston University: What Stephen Kohn has done is to document what happened, with the kind of specific detail--names, places, punishments, the feelings of prisoners, the rationales of wardens and politicians--that brings history alive in the most immediate way, that goes behind statistics to individual human beings. He has been able to do this by an extraordinary feat of research, extracting from a reluctant government the records that are published for the first time in this book.

Table of Contents:

• Foreword by Howard Zinn
• Introduction
• Background to the Sedition Laws and Their Use During the World War I Era
• The Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917 and 1918: Then and Now
• The Selective Service Act
• Inside Golgotha: The Prison Experience of the World War I Sedition Act Inmates and Conscientious Objectors
• The Convictions
• Prison Discipline
• A Transfer to St. Elizabeth's Hospital for the Insane
• A Death
• The Most Indolent Man at Leavenworth
• Military Justice
• Isolation
• Relief from the Psychopathic Ward
• Release
• The Prisoners
• Federal Espionage and Sedition Act Prisoners
• State Anti-Sedition and Criminal Syndicalism Prisoners
• Political Prisoners Who Died While Incarcerated in Federal, Military, or State Prisons
• Conclusion
• Selected Bibliography
• Index