Randolph Bourne was an American intellectual journalist who flourished for a few years in the second decade of the 20th century. Bourne wrote mostly for magazines during this period and The New Republic in particular — until his radically antiwar views on the eve of the US government's intervention in World War I got him fired. He moved over to The Seven Arts, a newly launched magazine with a smaller circulation than The New Republic and one less well suited to Bourne's particular talents and interests, since its primary focus was the arts, rather than social and political issues. He was able to publish only six antiwar articles in The Seven Arts before its doors were closed by an owner fearful of the Wilson administration and its Sedition Act of 1918, which made it a crime to criticize the Constitution, the government, the military, or the flag. Only a few months after The Seven Arts ceased publication, Randolph Bourne died, a victim of the flu epidemic that killed more than 25 million people in 1918 and 1919, nearly a million of them in the United States.