Donalson focuses on how ordinary citizens used the Espionage and Sedition Acts of World War I for personal benefit and profit. He shows how the acts were used particularly but not exclusively against persons of German ancestry to settle family and neighborhood quarrels, workplace disputes, and political differences. These acts, intended to unify the nation in a time of war, instead undermined the concepts of free speech and presumption of innocence, and started the United States on the path of totalitarianism where any word or action could be interpreted as "disloyal" and result in federal action. The irony of it all was that, by the end of the war, it was the Bureau of Investigation that kept it from becoming, as Thomas Jefferson once said, a "reign of witches.".