According to The Great Influenza by John Barry, Attorney General Thomas Gregory demanded the Librarian of Congress report the names of those who had asked for certain books. My question is, which books? Did he actually go through with this, or was it just blowing smoke?
Mods, I wasn’t sure if this should go in GQ or CS.
Is that information footnoted or otherwised sourced?
One would assume that books about Communism or anarchism would have been the likely suspects given the time.
The Espionage Act of 1917 was a broad and sweeping measure that made very nearly any expression of dissent a federal crime. It included a number of books under its purview. People were arrested and given long sentences for printing, authoring, distributing of, or merely owning books, pamphlets, etc. that the US Attorneys considered “seditious”. I don’t know if any of these cases stemmed from using the resources of the LoC.
Side note: I’m puzzled by the author’s assumption that the Librarian of Congress had the authority, or even the capability to report those names. The LoC does not even today know what lending libraries check out. The LoC is not itself a lending library, either. You have to go to one of the Reading Rooms, request the materials you want, wait for the library staff to bring them to you, and return everything before you leave. It is, in other words, a library for professional researchers and congressional staff. A notional “seditious agitator” who did this at the LoC instead of, say, the DC public library would be both odd and foolish.
Of course, maybe some-one did, and some congresscritter fulminated about it in the House.
Also look up the Creel commission. one of the more disturbing ideas coming out of that particular nest of snakes was “…the essence of democratic society” was the ‘engineering of consent’…". Woodrow Wilson & friends weren’t quite the nice guys some textbooks paint them to be…
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I should have checked his sources :smack: However, he didn’t footnote anything in the text, though there might have been unnumbered end-notes.
I can’t believe I didn’t check that before I returned the book.
We must have had a lot of disloyal Americans back then, because when Eugene Debs ran for President from prison in 1920, he got about 900,000 votes. 
He was in prison under the espionage act for criticizing it.