Throughout World War I the government feared socialism, and did many things to try to cut down on its growth. Congress passed the Espionage Act in June of 1917 as an act against people who were against the war. The Post Office Department began taking away the mailing privileges of newspapers and magazines that printed antiwar articles. Also, a great number of people were mistreated physically for refusing to fight in a war they did not believe in. .
Form its title one would suppose the Espionage Act was an act against spying, but in reality it was used to imprison Americans who spoke or wrote against the war. Zinn says, "Two months after the law passes, a Socialist named Charles Shcneck was arrested in Philadelphia for printing and distributing fifteen thousand leaflets that denounced the draft law and the war.Schneck was indicted, tried, found guilty, and sentenced to six months in jail for violating the Espionage Act." Throughout the war, thousands of people were tried for violating the act, and almost all were found guilty, even though many of them were only exercising their Constitutional right of freedom of speech.
Magazines and books were restricted from being mailed because they promoted socialist ideas. "The Masses, a socialist magazine of politics, literature, and art, was banned form the mails. It had carried an editorial by Max Eastman in the summer of 1917, saying, among other things: 'For what specific purposes are you shipping our bodies, and the bodies of our sons, to Europe? For my part, I do not recognize the right of a government to draft me to a war whore purposes I do not believe in.'" Other magazines were taken out of circulation because they also were either against the war, or socialist.
Individual citizens refused to fight in the war because they did not agree with it. There was a man in South Dakota names Free Fairchild that said that if he were of conscription age and had no dependents and here were drafted, that he would refuse to serve.
