The Great Red Scare (Februrary 1968 | Volume: 19, Issue: 2)

The Great Red Scare

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Authors: Allan L. Damon

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Februrary 1968 | Volume 19, Issue 2

In November, 1919, and again in January, 1920, federal agents of the Department of Justice conducted a series of lightning-like raids on private houses and public buildings in cities across the United States and took into custody upwards of three thousand aliens suspected of plotting to overthrow the government. The mass arrests were enthusiastically acclaimed as Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s answer to “the sinister agitation of men and women aliens … either in the pay or under the criminal spell of Trotsky and Lenine.” Indeed, within hours of the January roundup, William J. Flynn of the Bureau of Investigation (now the F.B.I.) told newsmen, “I believe that with these raids the backbone of the radical movement in America is broken.”

If, as some have said, A. Mitchell Palmer was “a nervous man,” he had a great deal of company in the spring and summer of 1919. Only a year later, William Alien White was to write a friend, “What a God-damned world this is! … If anyone had told me ten years ago that our country would be what it is today … I should have questioned his reason.” It was a sentiment that many Americans had known in the months following World War I; for amidst the normal but unsettling confusions that marked the nation’s transition from war to peace, there had appeared signs of deep-seated dislocations seemingly unlike any the country had experienced before.

There was, to begin with, considerable uncertainty over the peace treaty that Wilson had brought back from Versailles. As the Senate and the nation argued over its terms, a bitter debate on the League of Nations unleashed political passions lately held in check by a wartime truce. A business recession had set in, and although it was not unexpected, its crippling effects were intensified by a series of explosive industrial disputes.

Labor and management had been uneasy partners under federal controls during the war; now they were again familiar antagonists in what, by the year’s end, totalled 3,600 separate strikes. Collective bargaining, higher wages, shorter work days, and union recognition were generally the issues at stake, but as violence and instability mounted—riots were common that year—the labor unrest took on a sinister cast. Inevitably there were those who remembered the old slogan of the discredited and now nearly defunct Industrial Workers of the World: “Every strike is a little revolution and a dress rehearsal for the big one.” Typical headlines of the day proclaimed: “Red Peril Here” … “Reds Directing Strike” … “Test for Revolution.” By autumn, the widely respected Literary Digest warned, “Outside of Russia, the storm center of Bolshevism is in the United States.”

There seemed to be, indeed, cause for alarm. Communism had triumphed in Russia and in Hungary; semi-anarchy reigned in postwar Germany; and there was political unrest in Poland, Italy, India, and China. The Third International had been organized in the spring of 1919 with world-wide revolution