The Red Scare took place between 1919 and 1920 as a backlash against the recent successes, in Europe and the United States, of radicals and progressive who were calling
For sweeping economic and political reforms. The peak of the Red Scare hysteria took place in January 1920 when Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer coordinated raids against numerous labor unions and political groups and arrested hundreds of suspected radicals. The primary impetus behind Palmer’s actions was the recent upsurge in labor militancy and fear that the Russian Revolution of 1917 would inspire similar actions in the United States.
The withdrawal of Russia from World War I in 1918 and the Bolshevik call for the worldwide overthrow of capitalism resulted in suspicion of a broad range of labor and political activism in the United States. During the war, President WooDROW Wilson had attempted to keep labor disputes in check by creating an accord between labor and employers in which the federal government arbitrated disputes in exchange for labor’s pledge not to strike. Labor unrest mounted as the war reached its conclusion. Workers and union leaders felt they had not received their fair share of wartime profits and that inflation, which reached 69 percent between 1914 and 1918, had largely eroded any gains they had made. When military expenditures and overtime pay came to a halt following the war, labor unrest increased. Frustrated by loss of real wages and wage cuts, and inspired by labor militancy in Russia and western Europe, more than 4 million American workers walked off the job in 1919. Nor was political unrest limited to the workplace, as progressives and socialists gained a significant following among middle-class men and women, the intelligentsia, working-class immigrants, and African Americans. Membership in labor unions and radical political organizations peaked between 1918 and 1920. By 1920, the Socialist Party of America had over 150,000 members, and Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs received almost 1 million votes. Membership in the United Mine Workers of America topped the 500,000 mark, and nearly 5 million workers belonged to labor unions.
Concern about radicalism and the growing strength of organized labor escalated following the war as a wave of strikes spread throughout the country, including strikes by miners, textile workers, a police strike in Boston, and the Seattle General Strike. The wave of unrest prompted Attorney General Palmer to conclude that a Bolshevik plot had been hatched to overthrow the country. He responded by launching an all-out effort to contain what he thought was a “Red Menace.” After a series of bombings at the homes of Palmer and other government officials, he launched a series of raids against resident immigrant radicals, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and factions of the Communist Party. The largest raid took place on January 2, 1920, when approximately 10,000 suspected communists and communist sympathizers were arrested and held without bail. Many of those arrested, particularly those who were recent immigrants, were deported.
The Red Scare also directed attention toward African Americans. Opposition to Jim Crow laws and the lynching of African Americans intensified after World War I as thousands of black soldiers returned home with a renewed determination to bring the fight for democracy back home. Between April and October of 1919, there were 25 race riots and dozens of African Americans were lynched. For the Department of Justice, however, the real threat lay in organized resistance, and government surveillance of African Americans increased during and after the war.
The Red Scare of 1919-20 had a chilling effect on labor unions and progressive politics throughout the 1920s. Union membership, which reached an all-time high of 5 million in 1921, plummeted throughout the rest of the decade. Similarly, support for the IWW and the Socialist Party peaked in 1919-20. Within the course of the next decade, membership in radical organizations plummeted.
Further reading: Peter H. Buckingham, America Sees Red: Anticommunism in America, 1870s to 1980s (Claremont, Calif.: Regina Books, 1988); Robert K. Murray, Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919-1920 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955).
—Robert Gordon
Reed, John (1887-1920) journalist, activist, communist organizer
John Reed was one of the few American journalists in Russia during its 1917 revolution. Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World recounted for an appalled and fascinated American audience the revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power. Reed was born in Portland, Oregon, grew up in a wealthy family, and attended Harvard University, from which he graduated in 1910. After spending several years as a struggling journalist and poet, Reed began to write for progressive and socialist magazines, including the New Review and The Masses. Gradually, Reed became a radical labor and political activist. In 1914 he was arrested for addressing a gathering of striking silk workers in Paterson, New Jersey. Reed also spent four months traveling with Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, and in 1914 he published his account of the Mexican Revolution in Insurgent Mexico.
By the beginning of World War I, Reed had established himself as one of the leading radical journalists and political activists in the country. He agreed to work as a war correspondent for Metropolitan Magazine. During the war, Reed met and became friendly with Bolshevik leader Vladimir I. Lenin. In 1917, when Lenin and the Bolsheviks decided to move against the provisional government that had overthrown Czar Nicholas II, Reed and his wife, journalist Louise Bryant, were eyewitnesses to the October
Revolution. Reed’s dispatches portrayed Lenin and the Bolsheviks in a very positive light. Carried first in the radical journal, The Masses, the dispatches were then consolidated into Ten Days That Shook the World. Reed’s romanticized portrayal of the Russian Revolution helped the American Communist Party recruit new members between 1917 and 1919, but it also earned him the hostility of American political leaders. Upon his return to the United States, Reed became increasingly active in the Communist Party; and in 1919, he became one of the leaders of the Communist Labor Party when it splintered off from the larger organization. Later that year, Reed was forced to flee the country when his affiliation with communism caused him to be charged with treason. He spent his exile helping Lenin and the newly created Bolshevik government to consolidate their power, resist Western invasions, and fight a bitter civil war. Less than a year later in 1920, Reed contracted typhus and died in Moscow at the age of 33. Reed’s influence continued well after his death. His life was memorialized in 1981 when Warren Beatty portrayed Reed in the Academy Award-winning movie, Reds.
See also Greenwich Village; radical and labor press.
Further reading: James Wilson, John Reed for the Masses (Jefferson, N. C.: McFarland, 1987); Robert A. Rosenstone, Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed (New York: Knopf, 1975).
—Robert Gordon
World History
