Biography
Emanuel Baltzer was the lead defendant among roughly two dozen German-Russian socialist farmers from South Dakota prosecuted under the Espionage Act in 1918. Their offense was signing and circulating a petition to the governor that complained about how draft quotas were apportioned among counties, objected to war debt, and threatened to vote him out of office. Convicted, fined, and sent to the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, the farmers appealed to the Supreme Court in Baltzer v. United States. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes drafted a forceful dissent defending their right to petition, and rather than allow it to be published the government confessed error, the case was sent back, and the charges were dropped in 1919. The suppressed Holmes dissent, unpublished for decades, is now seen as a milestone on his path to the modern First Amendment.
