[2] The act also allowed the Postmaster General to refuse to deliver mail that met those same standards for punishable speech or opinion.

For example, one historian reports that "some fifteen hundred prosecutions were carried out under the Espionage and Sedition Acts, resulting in more than a thousand convictions".

[12] While much of the debate focused on the law's precise language, there was considerable opposition in the Senate, almost entirely from Republicans, especially Henry Cabot Lodge and Hiram Johnson.

[15] Officials in the Justice Department who had little enthusiasm for the law nevertheless hoped that even without generating many prosecutions it would help quiet public calls for more government action against those thought to be insufficiently patriotic.

[19] In April 1918, the government arrested industrialist William C. Edenborn, a naturalized citizen from Germany, at his railroad business in New Orleans, Louisiana.

[20] In June 1918, the Socialist Party figure Eugene V. Debs of Indiana was arrested for violating the Sedition Act by undermining the government's conscription efforts.

[23] He sent a circular outlining his rationale to newspaper editors in January 1919, citing the dangerous foreign-language press and radical attempts to create unrest in African American communities.

[28] The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Sedition Act in Abrams v. United States (1919),[29] as applied to people urging curtailment of production of essential war materiel.

Subsequent Supreme Court decisions, such as Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), make it unlikely that similar legislation would be considered constitutional today.