During the war, about half the socialists supported the war, most famously Walter Lippmann. The other half were under attack for obstructing the draft and the Courts held they went beyond the bounds of free speech when they encouraged young men to break the law and not register for the draft. Howard Zinn, historian on the left, says: "The patriotic fervor of war invoked. The courts and jails [were used to reinforce the idea that certain ideas, certain kinds of resistance, could not be tolerated". The government crackdown on dissenting radicalism paralleled public outrage towards opponents of the war. Several groups were formed on the local and national levels to stop the socialists from undermining the draft laws. The American Vigilante Patrol, a subdivision of the American Defense Society, was formed with the purpose "to put an end to seditious street oratory". The American Protective League was a new private group that kept track of cases of "disloyalty". It eventually claimed it had found 3,000,000 such cases: "Even if these figures are exaggerated, the very size and scope of the League gives a clue to the amount of 'disloyalty'".