Biography
Jacob Frohwerk was a Kansas City newspaperman prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917 for a series of articles in the German-language Missouri Staats-Zeitung criticizing American involvement in the First World War. He was arrested with the paper’s publisher, Carl Gleeser, on January 26, 1918, indicted on April 23, convicted on June 28 and sentenced the next day to ten years and a $500 fine. He remained free on a $7,500 appeal bond while his case went to the Supreme Court, which affirmed the conviction unanimously on March 10, 1919 in Frohwerk v. United States, 249 U.S. 204 — Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes writing, one of the trio of Espionage Act decisions handed down with Schenck and Debs that spring — rejecting his First Amendment defense. He entered the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth on May 31, 1919 as prisoner 14036, assigned to cell B-175, having arranged an extra day of liberty to visit his daughter’s grave before surrendering. Nineteen days later, on June 19, 1919, President Woodrow Wilson commuted the ten-year term to one year and one day. Parole-eligible from September 29, he was approved by the parole board on January 6, 1920 and released on January 10 — paperwork having pushed him a day past the expected January 9 — after exactly thirty-two weeks inside. Born about 1864–65 in Germany (no reliable exact birth date has been located), he died at his Kansas City, Kansas home on November 19, 1949, aged about 84.
