Civil Liberties during the Great War

During any war, public suspicion will turn towards anyone who looks or thinks differently than the rest of the population. There have been innumerable cases of this in American history, including the Sedition and Espionage Acts, and the American Public League during World War I.
The Espionage Act of 1917 made it illegal for any American citizen to interfere with the war effort, help another country, or escape the draft. The Sedition Act, which built upon the Espionage Act, punished individuals who dared to speak out against the war. Anyone who dared to cross the line the acts set could be thrown in jail for 5-20 years. Out of the entire American population, it was the political dissenters who bore the worst of the repression. Senator Eugene V. Debs urged socialists to resist militarism, and he was thrown in prison for years. Debs even ran for president in the election of 1920 while still in jail.
Robert Goldstein was an American filmmaker who created a film about the American Revolution called The Spirit of '76. The film depicted the cruelty of the British soldiers during the rebellion. Because the government feared that the film would create anti-British feelings towards America's ally, they prosecuted Goldstein under the Espionage Act. The filmmaker received a 10-year sentence and was charged $5000, which is worth over $100,000 today.
The enforcement of the acts was left up to the local US Attorneys. The US Attorney General, Thomas Gregory, instructed the Postmaster General to discontinue delivering anti-American or pro-German mail. This included letters, magazines, and newspapers. Through the violation of their privacy, Americans were thus only exposed to material that the government wanted them to see.
The American Public League(APL) was a private organization made up of citizens that worked with the Justice Department's Bureau of Investigation to identify possible alien spies and saboteurs of the war effort. The volunteers wore "official" badges, intimidated and harassed people, detained more than 40,000 people, and staged raids on private homes. The acts of the APL caused a sense of distrust among the various groups of the US population, which had the opposite effect the government intended.

With the passage of the Espionage and Sedition Acts, along with the formation of the American Public League, the civil liberties of American people were repressed during WWI. It is interesting how individualism was encouraged during times of peace, but during times of war, the government required that all Americans have similar feelings about the war. During wartime, fear and hate was not exclusive to the battlefield; the fear of the government that the American people were not fully behind the war led to the suppression of civil liberties.