Biography
Dr. Elizabeth Baer was the recording secretary of the Philadelphia Socialist Party who, with Charles Schenck, was prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917 for mailing 15,000 leaflets urging draftees to resist conscription as 'involuntary servitude' prohibited by the Thirteenth Amendment. Convicted in 1918, she was sentenced to 90 days in jail. The companion case Schenck v. United States (1919) produced Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes's famous 'clear and present danger' test.
