Schenck v. United States

Audience

With most Supreme Court rulings, the intended purpose is to establish a legal precedent regarding the legal rights afforded under the Constitution or the limitations on powers granted to the state and federal governments. In the case of Schenck v. United States, the audience rested with legal scholars looking to define the limitations the US government could impose in times of war on the rights and freedoms of citizens in the United States.

Schenck was not the first wartime case to go before the Supreme Court regarding the suppression of certain rights guaranteed by the Constitution in a time of war. Nearly a half century earlier, Abraham Lincoln had declared the suspension of habeas corpus (rights of the person in court) in the opening months of the Civil War in order to allow for military authorities to silence rebels and dissenters who might prevent the movement of troops around the capital in response to the southern rebellion. In the 1861 case of Ex parte Merryman, Chief Justice Roger Taney ruled that the president could not suspend habeas corpus; only Congress could. The case of Charles Schenck therefore became the first test on whether a law passed by the legislative branch and restricting the rights of citizens in times of war would be protected by the Constitution.

The ruling also sent a clear message to the left-wing Socialist organizations that were growing in power and influence during the early twentieth century that while their right to speak against the government would be protected under the First Amendment, their ability to mobilize against the government would be significantly limited. Political leaders like Eugene Debs found themselves the target of federal prosecutors anytime they spoke against the war effort even in the loosest of tones. (Debs was arrested, for example, for announcing that war should be declared by the people rather than politicians.) Given the growing concerns that the Socialist movement would evolve into the same sort of movement that was seeing the overthrow of czarist Russia, Schenck sent a clear statement that any effort to oust the government—even if it was just through words or a refusal to act—would be met with the full force of the American judicial system, further empowering the growing number of conservatives that would eventually lead to the election of Warren G. Harding in 1920.