1917 October 6

Trading With the Enemy Act Passed – Used to Censor Foreign Language Press

 

The 1917 Trading with the Enemy Act, passed in the first months of U.S. involvement in World War I, gave the federal government extraordinary powers to regulate foreign language newspapers regarding their coverage of wartime news.

The law gave the government power to review articles on the war to be published in foreign languages and the censor parts of or completely prohibit their publication The law became a powerful tool for controlling foreign language newspapers, many of which were vocal opponents of U.S. involvement in the war, and which were censored when the Post Office declared them “unmailable.”

In an era before radio, television, and the internet, newspapers and magazines were the principal means of mass communication. When the Post Office banned the publications of the American Socialist Party, the largest and most vocal opponent of World War I, the party was severely crippled and never fully recovered.

The Trading with the Enemy Act has been amended several times since World War I.

Learn more: Paul L. Murphy, World War One and the Origin of Civil Liberties in the United States (1979)

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