Entry by the United States into World War One prompted swift passage of the
Espionage and Trading-with-the-Enemy Acts in 1917. Like today’s Patriot Act, these
measures allowed for federal authorities to pursue “suspicious” citizens and resident
aliens such as Mexican anarchist Ricardo Flores Magón. Indeed, it was following the
publication of Magón’s newspaper Regeneración during the winter of 1918 that police
arrested Ricardo on March 21st. They charged him with sending “politically dangerous”
and “indecent” materials through the mail. On July 18, 1918 Judge Benjamin F. Bledsoe
convicted the Mexican radical and sentenced him to twenty-one years in prison. Flores
Magón was incarcerated at the McNeil Island Penitentiary near Seattle, Washington
before being transferred to Leavenworth, Kansas in early November 1919. On the
morning of November 22, 1922 he died of a heart attack. Ricardo was fifty years old.