The ruling in Fox v. Washington (1915), dealing with an article on nude
bathing, was issued before the Court recognized that the First Amendment
limited state governments.
Bad Tendency Test
The bad tendency test was mostly used to determine whether criticism of World War I was protected by the First Amendment. The end result of the bad tendency test was that during the wartime era the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the government’s anti-seditious behavior almost without fail. Among the most well-known cases related to the First Amendment were Abrams v. United States (1919), Gitlow v. New York (1925), and Whitney v. California (1927).