The Naturalization Act changed the time of residence necessary for citizenship (and thus voting) from five to 14 years. Coincidentally, immigrants tended to vote Republican. The Alien Act and the Alien Enemies Act gave the President the power to imprison or deport aliens suspected of activities posing a threat to the national government.

The Sedition Act posed the biggest challenge to civil liberties, undermining the core of the First Amendment protections of free speech and press. It prohibited spoken or written criticism of the government, the Congress, or the President.

Read the Alien and Sedition Acts

Lincoln's action meant that individuals could be arrested and held without formal charges being lodged against them. The ruling brought Lincoln into conflict with the Chief Justice of the United States, Roger B. Taney. The case was that of John Merryman, a Southern sympathizer who had organized soldiers to burn bridges in Maryland. Taney ruled that Lincoln's order violated Article 1, Section 9, of the U.S. Constitution, which gave only Congress the power to suspend habeas corpus. Lincoln ignored the ruling. Congress ratified the suspension in 1863.

Civil War scholars generally point to the large pockets of anti-war sentiment in the Union states as a justification for his wartime suspension of civil liberties. Today there are many "Confederate" Web sites which label Lincoln a "dictator" for these wartime acts.

Read Justice Taney's Merryman opinion

The repression of dissident views continued after the war was over, under Wilson's Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and his assistant, J. Edgar Hoover. In December of 1919, in their most famous act, Palmer's agents seized 249 resident aliens who were promptly shipped to the Soviet Union.

All manner of ideas were suspect in this climate — union activities, feminists, advocates of birth control and proponents of Cubism all found themselves under suspicion. In 1920, THE NATION documented the case of "The Most Brainiest Man," a Connecticut clothing salesmen was sentenced to sixth months in jail simply for saying Lenin was smart.

See more images of The Red Scare

Soon after the bombing of Pear Harbor, President Roosevelt, also quoted above, signed Executive Order 9066, which authorized the military to remove Japanese-Americans from America's West Coast. The removal was designed to protect military bases and manufacturing plants from "Fifth Column" sabotage or Japanese attack.

In this case it was not foreign nationals who were moved into camp, but also American citizens of Japanese descent. In total 110,000 persons of Japanese ancestry were relocated from the West Coast to 10 American concentration camps in seven states: California, Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Colorado and Arkansas. The relocated consisted of both the Issei, first-generation immigrants who were barred from U.S. citizenship, and their children, the Nisei, born in this country as U. S. citizens. Two-thirds of those incarcerated were U.S. citizens. Those citizens were forced to sell their businesses, homes and farms at rock-bottom prices — they lost their hold on their American lives and citizenship.

In 1980, President Jimmy Carter signed legislation to create the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC). In 1983, the CWRIC issued its findings in PERSONAL JUSTICE DENIED, concluding that the incarceration of Japanese Americans had not been justified by military necessity.

With the The Civil Liberties Act of 1988: Redress for Japanese Americans the U.S. apologized to Japanese Americans for this grave injustice and this Act was signed into law, authorizing the payments of $20,000 to each person who had been evacuated in the 1940s.

Read Executive Order No. 9066

Senator Joseph McCarthy's name has become a byword for the abuse of civil liberties and the malignant use of publicity to silence people of dissenting viewpoints. However, what we generally lump under the rubric of McCarthyism has longer, deeper roots.

A main implement of the Cold War Red Scare was the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), set up by Congress under Martin Dies in 1938 to investigate people suspected of unpatriotic behavior. By 1947 HUAC had turned its attention to Hollywood and the public airwaves. The Committee called many people to testify about "Communist" influence in the industry. Those testifying were encouraged to "name names" of those they knew with ties to the Communist Party or with leftist agendas (anything from labor activism to support for Spanish Civil War refugees to civil rights activism). Ten "unfriendly witnesses" took the Fifth Amendment but were found guilty of contempt of Congress and each was sentenced to between six and twelve months in prison.

Soon after, in June, 1950, came the publication of RED CHANNELS, a pamphlet written by former FBI agents purporting to list the of leftists in the entertainment industry deserving of blacklisting for their leftist views.

On 9th February, 1950, Joseph McCarthy, a senator from Wisconsin, made a speech claiming to have a list of 205 people in the State Department known to be members of the American Communist Party. The list of names was not a secret and had been in fact published by the Secretary of State in 1946. McCarthy and his friend, J. Edgar Hoover, were off and running — instituting four years of hearings in the superheated atmosphere of the Cold War. Many of the domestic spying techniques employed under Hoover's stewardship of the F.B.I. at this time were later ruled unconstitutional.