On a sweltering August afternoon in 1918, on the fourth floor of a hat factory on east 93rd Street in Manhattan, a young Russian immigrant named Hyman Rosansky tossed anti-war flyers out the window to the street below. The flyers urged workers to stage a general strike opposing American involvement in World War I and encouraged young men to boycott the draft. A pedestrian on the street handed one of the flyers to a local cop on the beat. A few hours later, Rosansky and several colleagues were arrested and charged under the Sedition Act of 1918 for impeding American war production and inciting resistance to the draft.

Their case, Abrams vs. the United States , went all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court where the defendants argued that their speech was protected by the First Amendment.

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