Sedition Act of 1918

And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share
No one dared
Disturb the sound of silence
--Simon & Garfunkel

In addition to other activities such as the Committee on Public Information that 'encouraged' domestic support for US involvement in WWI, the Wilson administration orchestrated passage of the Sedition Act of 1918. A year earlier, the Espionage Act had been passed that made it a crime to convey any information deemed to interfere with the prosecution of the war effort.

The Sedition Act broadened the scope of this legislation to to include speech that cast the government or war effort in a negative light. Enforcement of the Act was accomplished not only thru formal legal channels, but also via various patriotic groups that were essentially deputized by the federal government to surveil prospective anti-war activity and, if need be, make citizen arrests of people deemed to be in violation of the Act.

The name of the game, as promoted by President Wilson, was to intimidate people into silence and submission about the war effort.

The law was challenged in court to no avail, as a Wilson-friendly Supreme Court upheld the Sedition Act in Abrams v. United States (1919). Although major portions of the Espionage Act remain law today, the Sedition Act was repealed in 1920 when much Wilsonian wartime legislation was swept away.

Subsequently, the Brandenburg ruling has inspired claims that legislation similar to the Sedition Act would never pass constitutional muster today.  Of course, that is what our founding ancestors surely believed when they inked the Constitution originally.