During the First World War it was the task of the U.S. Department of Justice, using the newly passed Espionage Act and its later Sedition Act amendment, to prosecute and convict those who opposed America's entry into the conflict. Historian William H. Thomas Jr. shows that the Justice Department did not stop at this official charge but went much further--paying cautionary visits to suspected dissenters, pressuring them to express support of the war effort, or intimidating them into silence.