I agree repression has always existed in the U.S, but the difference is scale. In WWI the country was smaller, less centralized, and suppression was cruder - l

I agree repression has always existed in the U.S, but the difference is scale. In WWI the country was smaller, less centralized, and suppression was cruder - local violence, language bans, mobs. By WWII the U.S. was far larger, more cohesive, and had a strong federal state; without that scale and central capacity, something like internment would have been much harder to pull off.