Vice Presidential Nominee Calvin Coolidge: Sedition Must Be Repressed
In his acceptance speech as the Vice Presidential nominee of the Republican Party on this day, Calvin Coolidge declared that sedition must be repressed.
His remarks reflected the continuing anti-radical hysteria that had marked the World War I years and the post-war Red Scare (see the notorious Palmer Raids, on November 7, 1919, and January 2, 1920). In the 1920s federal prosecutions for sedition essentially stopped (although spying on political groups continued) but California and some other states continued to prosecute radicals under their state criminal syndicalism laws.
See the 1903 New York State Criminal Anarchy law, which provided a model for other states. And see the California Criminal Syndicalism law, which was the most widely used state law in the 1920s.
As Governor of Massachusetts in 1919, Coolidge became famous for suppressing a strike by Boston police officers. Coolidge became President in 1923 upon the death of President Warren G. Harding, serving until 1929.
Read: David Greenberg, Calvin Coolidge (2007)
Learn more: Geoffrey Stone, Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism (2004)