Red Scare

11 Key excerpts on "Red Scare"

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  The Cold War at Home

  The Red Scare in Pennsylvania, 1945-1960

  • Philip Jenkins(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • The University of North Carolina Press

    (Publisher)

  4Red Scare Rampant, 1950–1953

  We are a nation at war.... The force that is killing our loved ones, the power that is fighting against our democracy, is Communist, Godless Russia. It is fantastic to fight Communism with all our strength abroad, and to ignore it here at home.

  —State Senator Albert R. Pechan, 19531

  In retrospect, it seems remarkable that the suppression of a national political movement aroused so little opposition, but the virulence of anti-Communist feeling arose from general fears of a new world war in which American Communists might become an alien fifth column. The new Red Scare had its roots in events of the late 1930s, when the Roosevelt administration had exaggerated the threat of domestic traitors in order to make Americans more willing to confront the Axis powers, portraying native Fascist sympathizers as the allies of foreign intelligence services. Between 1938 and 1942, popular media often reported on the likely dangers of espionage and sabotage, and some genuine incidents of both did occur. In their struggles against Fascism and militarism, Americans were subjected to constant propaganda about the absolute evil of the Nazi and Japanese regimes, charges that had been confirmed by the exposure of the atrocities committed by those totalitarian states.2 The hatred stirred in the early 1940s was soon redirected against international Communism—Red Fascism—a menace made still more threatening by its capacity to devastate the American homeland with nuclear weapons.3

  This international context is essential to understanding the escalation of the Red Scare into a perceived threat of clandestine warfare on American soil. An official campaign to uncover potential enemy sympathizers did much to shape public attitudes to domestic Communism, and the anti-Communist movement was repeatedly galvanized by the events of this underground war. The appearance of FBI

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  The Perils of Prosperity, 1914-1932

  • William E. Leuchtenburg(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • University of Chicago Press

    (Publisher)

  4

  Red Scare

  In the year 1919, Senator McKellar of Tennessee advocated sending native-born American citizens with radical beliefs to a penal colony in Guam. South Carolina’s James F. Byrnes asked for the intervention of the federal government to balk an uprising of Negroes that he declared Reds were planning in the South. Some New York schoolteachers were dismissed after a campaign to determine “Who’s Red and Who’s True Blue.” General Leonard Wood, the Army Chief of Staff, noted his approval of a minister’s call for the deportation of Bolshevists “in ships of stone with sails of lead, with the wrath of God for a breeze and with hell for their first port.” “If I had my way with these ornery wild-eyed Socialists and I. W. W.’s,” shouted the evangelist Billy Sunday, “I would stand them up before a firing squad and save space on our ships.” In Indiana a jury deliberated two minutes before acquitting Frank Petroni, who had shot and killed a man for yelling, “To hell with the United States!” The great Red Scare of 1919 was underway.

  Although there had been concern about radicalism, particularly anarchism, before the war, and although radicals had been censured during the war as pro-German, the Red Scare did not really begin until the creation of the Communists’ Third International in March, 1919. The Bolshevik Revolution of November, 1917, had awakened fears, but it was less the revolution itself than the spread of revolutionary principles to other countries that excited alarm. In March, 1919, Communist uprisings in Bavaria and Hungary aroused anxiety that bolshevism might engulf the Western world. Few doubted that a revolution in the United States had a high place on the Communists’ agenda. Karl Radek, the executive secretary of the Third International, boasted that money sent to Germany for the Spartacist uprising “was as nothing compared to the funds transmitted to New York for the purpose of spreading bolshevism in the United States.”

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  Spider Web

  The Birth of American Anticommunism

  • Nick Fischer(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • University of Illinois Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 2

  The First World War and the Origins of the Red Scare

  Don't you know that some man with eloquent tongue could put this whole country into a flame?…What an opportunity for some man without conscience to spring up and say: “This is the way. Follow me”—and lead in the paths of destruction!

  —Woodrow Wilson

  W hile anticommunism had been an important element of American politics since the 1870s, the US entry into the First World War in April 1917, contributed greatly to the next phase of its development, the Red Scare of 1919–20. The effort required to bring a reluctant nation into the war and quash dissenting voices brought the federal government into the business of systematic rather than ad hoc industrial and political repression. The civil liberties of citizens who protested either the commitment to war or its effects were suppressed. Cultural conformity was asserted with unprecedented force and consistency. The place of nativism and antiradicalism in American politics and society became elevated. The compact between the federal government and American citizens was mediated by ideologies of political conformism and industrial quiescence and enforced by federal and public-private bureaucracies and agencies. And the experience of war strengthened capital and weakened workers’ and farmers’ movements. It also set political precedents that helped to spawn a new movement devoted to promoting the cause of anticommunism in American life.

  US participation in the war made possible the emergence of “modern” anticommunism in several ways. First, it expanded the use of draconian and quasi-legal methods of suppressing strikes and other activity that threatened industrial output. For example, the deployment of the US Army to put down industrial disturbances, which had not occurred since the Pullman strike, became standard practice. Second, it exacerbated social and political conformism by intensifying the association of nonconformists with treachery and subversion. This atmosphere of conformity and the widespread persecution of perceived rebels and dissidents soon carried over into the Red Scare and did much to establish the cultural censorship and repression associated with Cold War anticommunism. The war effort also provided political cover for big business to broaden its assault on labor organizations, beginning with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and then continuing with conservative craft unions. Business further used the war crisis to destroy numerous cooperative associations, just as it had previously destroyed the Knights of Labor. Republican and Democratic leaders used the war to pit the state against rival and smaller political parties. The outright destruction or neutering of organizations such as the Nonpartisan League and the Working Class Union was reminiscent of the treatment meted out to Civil War draft resisters and paved the way for subsequent assaults on the Union of Russian Workers, the Socialist Party of the United States, and the Communist and Communist Labor Parties.

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  Globalization of American Fear Culture

  The Empire in the Twenty-First Century

  • Geoffrey R. Skoll(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  During both periods, 1947 to about 1955 and 2001 to the present, propa- ganda stimulated a culture of fear that differed from scares of the past. The postwar Red Scare and the terrorism scare had four common features that differed from past political fear campaigns. First, Americans came to fear each other. During the postwar Red Scare, Americans could not be sure who was a communist and who was not so that everyone came under suspicion, but certain ethnic groups were more suspect, East European Jews, for exam- ple. Thomas F. Murphy, federal prosecutor in the Hiss case, said, “The Communist does not look like the popular conception of a communist. He does not have uncropped hair, he does not wear horn-rimmed glasses nor carry the Daily Worker. He doesn’t have baggy trousers” (Cumings 2010, 254 n. 13). In the twenty-first century, certain racial and ethnic markers attracted more suspicious attention than others—namely those of Middle Eastern appearance and the Muslim religion (Welch 2006). Second, during both scares, the enemy, communists and terrorists, presented threats against the nation as a whole and against each American individually. The threats were both personal and social. Third, the main call to action required cooperation with authorities, especially compliance with surveillance and a willingness to inform against fellow Americans. Finally, the Red Scare and the terrorism scare relied on, and overlapped with other anxieties of the times. For instance, the postwar Red Scare paralleled worries about juvenile delinquency and the terrorists scare grew from a decades-long fear of interpersonal violent crime. These four differences from earlier periods of fear qualify the Red Scare after the Second World War and the terrorism scare as moments in construct- ing a fear culture. The postwar Red Scare exhibited several phenomena that illustrate the collective construction of a fear culture.

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  Terrorism in America

  • J. Lutz(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  The Interwar Years 81 Two aspects of the Red Scare are particularly important. First, the paranoia and the violence drew upon the anti-immigrant feelings that were shared by many “native-born” Americans. The antiforeign feel- ings of the previous century manifested themselves in the extreme patriotism exhibited during World War I and the opposition to the IWW. The Red Scare became another outbreak of nativism. While much of the violence was unplanned, individuals took advantage of the situation to express their distrust and fear, and eventually more organized groups took advantage of the public sentiment. 28 The link- age of opposition to radical and anarchist ideas with nativism is not surprising. The political ideas in question originated in Europe, and they were in that sense foreign to the United States. Followers of these ideologies were also likely to be recent immigrants. Approximately 90 percent of the 60,000 members of the Communist Party in 1919 were foreign. 29 The connection between being foreign and radical ideas was linked in the public’s mind by the fact that many of the iden- tifiable anarchists were Italian, Slavic, or Spanish. 30 Italian migrants in the country were treated with suspicion by virtually everyone. They were excluded even from membership in the American Federation of Labor because of their origin. It is not surprising, therefore, that many of them drifted into anarchist groups. 31 The person who (prematurely) set the bomb off at Attorney General Palmer’s residence in Washington, DC, in June 1919 died in the blast. While he could not be identified conclusively, investigators were able to conclude that he was probably an Italian alien from Philadelphia. 32 The other important aspect of the Red Scare, of course, is that government authorities were central to the persecutions and activities.

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  Red Scare

  Right-Wing Hysteria, Fifties Fanaticism, and Their Legacy in Texas

  • Don Carleton(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • University of Texas Press

    (Publisher)

  FIVE THE Red Scare BEGINS

  Men who fear witches soon find themselves surrounded by them .

  —Kai Erickson

  Those were the days when the Communist obsession was like Montezuma’s Revenge to a tourist in Mexico. Everybody was on the run .

  —Methodist bishop W. Kenneth Pope 1

  The Red Scare in Houston, just as with the nation as a whole, has no specific beginning date. There is no single event that in hindsight can be said to have announced the start of an era. This is because a “Red Scare” has been simmering just beneath the thin skin of American tolerance since the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in 1917. After the first Red Scare following World War I, however, it took the Cold War to bring extreme anti-Communism back out into the open as a defining characteristic of American society.

  As noted in a previous chapter, Houston’s conservative power elite escalated its extreme anti-Communist rhetoric in the late 1940s. By that time some Houstonians were beginning to perceive that the use of Red Scare tactics might be the easiest way to ensure success in contests over public issues. The controversy over zoning in 1947 is an example of this new awareness. In previous years when the question of land use zoning became a subject of public debate, Houston’s antizoning faction had emphasized that governmental regulation of land development was functionally unworkable and prone to corruption. Even in 1947 a “Report to the Mayor by the Committee against Zoning” stressed that zoning would slow urban growth and that automobiles and freeways would eventually decentralize the business district, making functional segregation unnecessary. As one student of this movement has noted, the antizoning faction developed an “intelligent and rational critique” of zoning’s shortcomings. In presenting the issue to the public, however, antizoners avoided this rational argument. Rather than attempting to explain a somewhat complicated position, the antizoners took advantage of the growing Red Scare and simply portrayed zoning as a “threat to the American Way of Life.” Advertisements, for example, argued that under zoning physicians and dentists could not have home offices and that this was the “first step toward socialized medicine.” An ironical aspect of this debate was that the antizoners, consisting mainly of small businessmen and real estate speculators, opposed the 8-F Crowd led by Jesse Jones. The Red Scare environment that Jones and the power elite had so actively cultivated was turned against them in this case. The city was entertained by the spectacle of Hugh Roy Cullen calling Jesse Jones’ zoning plan “un-American.” Houstonians soundly defeated the zoning proposal in an election on January 31, 1948, with 68 percent voting against and only 31 percent voting for land use planning.2

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  American–Soviet Relations

  From the Russian Revolution to the Fall of Communism

  • Peter G. Boyle(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The Red Scare arose partly from rational concerns over Soviet expansionist ambitions and possible infiltration into the US government of American Communists whose ideological allegiance to the Soviet Union was stronger than their national loyalty to the United States. To a much greater extent, however, McCarthyism arose from irrational and emotional factors within American society in the late 1940s and early 1950s. McCarthy’s charge that there were 205 members of the Communist Party employed by the State Department in 1950 provided a vivid example of the irrationality of McCarthyism. McCarthy’s accusation, when considered in a literal sense, was staggering. Its absurdity in a literal sense was easily demonstrable, but this missed the deeper significance of McCarthy’s accusations. McCarthy had hit a responsive chord in the fears, anxieties, suspicions, frustrations and other such emotional concerns of Americans of the time. An analysis of these emotional responses of the American people during the Red Scare reveals significant aspects of American attitudes towards Communism which played an important role in shaping American policy towards the Soviet Union.

  The irrational features of the Red Scare can perhaps be demonstrated with respect to four developments: increasing anxiety over Communists in government at a time when new security procedures had greatly reduced the dangers of Communist penetration; the accusations of ‘soft on Communism’ against firm anti-Communists such as Dean Acheson and George Marshall; the ludicrous nature of the ‘Reds under the bed’ search for Communists in every walk of American life; and the embodiment of the crusade against godless Communism in so unsuitable a champion as Joseph McCarthy, a thoroughly reprehensible charlatan.

  Communist infiltration into American government peaked in the 1930s and during the Second World War. With the expansion of the federal bureaucracy during the New Deal and the Second World War, opportunities for penetration into government by Communists presented themselves, at a time when Communist strategy in the Popular Front era in the later 1930s and during the Second World War encouraged Communists to take positions within the US government. The number and importance of Communists in government is impossible to ascertain precisely, by the very nature of the evidence, or lack of evidence in the case of successful infiltrators and spies. From FBI surveillance, however, and especially from the testimony of former Communists who recanted, such as Whittaker Chambers, Elizabeth Bentley and Louis Budenz, it would appear that, as Earl Latham writes, ‘members of the Communist Party and their supporters occupied numerous positions in the Federal service. . . . The evidence does not seem to warrant the conclusion that the influence of these functionaries was very substantial’.2

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  Rethinking the Red Scare

  The Lusk Committee and New York's Crusade Against Radicalism, 1919-1923

  • Todd J. Pfannestiel(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  26

  Nonetheless, these “parlor Bolsheviks” seemed dangerous to the general public, which overestimated the size and influence of the threat as they blamed most of the country’s ills on Bolshevism. Traveling through the U.S. at the time, a British journalist captured the essence of the emerging national hysteria when he observed “No one will forget the feverish condition of the public mind; it was hag-ridden by the spectre of Bolshevism.” Comparing the condition to a nightmare, he recalled the words of one person who feared the conformity that repression forced upon the nation. “‘America,’ as one I was with at the time said, ‘is the land of liberty—liberty to keep in step.’”27

  The difficult months of transition from war to peace and the presence of a concerted radical movement in the country set the stage for the hysteria that became the Red Scare; all that remained was for a catalyst to link the two and provide the spark. The popular press and public officials were more than willing to oblige. As early as December, 1918, the Hartford Courant declared that the red flag, symbolic of a political system antagonistic to Americanism, had been raised from coast to coast. At the same time, the Wall Street Journal commended New York City’s Mayor John Hylan for outlawing public displays of any red flag within the city. Furthermore, Boston’s Christian Science Monitor maintained that serious investigation into Bolshevik activities in the United States should occur.28

  Events at the end of the year appeared to corroborate such concern. On the final day of December, 1918, when a series of bomb explosions in Philadelphia wrecked the homes of three Pennsylvania government officials, a police inspector declared it was part of a nationwide Bolshevik plot. The police immediately seized a leader of the Revolutionary Labor Party because of his past demonstrations and activities. Although the authorities released him three days later for lack of evidence, Captain J.C.Mills of the Philadelphia police department nevertheless warned that outbreaks could be expected at any time in any part of the nation. Taking Mills’ warning to heart, New York City police stationed special guards at the City Hall and Court House, increased the number of regular patrolmen on duty, and gave detectives special assignments to watch every suspected anarchist.29

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  Popular Perceptions of Soviet Politics in the 1920s

  Disenchantment of the Dreamers

  • O. Velikanova(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  The experience of total war with the mobilization of all national resources led to a shift of balance between the civil and military sectors of national economies in favour of a higher level of militarization. The comprehensive mobilization of people for war, while limiting their political participation, was a common feature of all the major belligerents. 9 The USSR contributed to these international tensions with its vacillating foreign policy and, most of all, through Comintern activities that aimed to destabilize ‘imperialism’. Mistrust and military or conspiratorial scares were regular occurrences in a world divided into two camps. In 1919–20, a ‘Red Scare’ of imminent communist revolution spread in the United States, resulting in the arrest of 6000 suspected socialists and anarchists. The subversive activities of the Comintern caused a similar Red Scare in Great Britain in October 1924, contributing to the downfall of the Labour Government and increasing tensions in Anglo-Soviet relations. A more artificial war scare followed the statement of US Secretary of State, F. B. Kellogg, on January 24, 1927, that Bolshevik agents stood behind the Liberal revolution in Nicaragua. This short-term international crisis 10 coincided with the beginning of a war scare in the USSR. The alarmist statements of politicians found willing ears in the population during moments of instability and crisis. In a world polarized by antagonistic ideologies, governments and people watched every moment for hostile agents and real, or imagined, enemies. In the USSR, the proclivity to see the threat of war was founded on the traumatic experiences of the 1914–22 period. The memory of 1918–20, when internal peasants’ revolts and Civil War were combined with foreign intervention, still haunted the Bolsheviks in the 1920s. It became a formative experience for the generation of revolution. R

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  Red War on the Family

  Sex, Gender, and Americanism in the First Red Scare

  • Erica J Ryan(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Temple University Press

    (Publisher)

  The long nativist tradition was integral to how American political culture absorbed or rejected immigrants and dissenters; in this light, the scare stands as an overt period of active nativism rather than an irrational explosion of hysteria. 15 The groundswell of activism in the American labor movement after the war further fueled the insecurity behind the scare. Many workers, bound through pledges and patriotism, did not strike in wartime. But as wages failed to compete with rising costs, disgruntled workers reacted aggressively. In the fall of 1919, Americans witnessed three spectacular strikes. On September 9, 1,117 of Boston’s 1,544 policemen walked off the job, to the horror of many, including President Wilson, who publicly denounced them. A nationwide Americanism versus Bolshevism / 23 steel strike began on September 22, and by the close of the first week, some 365,000 workers had joined the work stoppage. Coal miners struck next, on November 1. Even though the federal government enjoined the United Mine Workers from striking, at least 100,000 stayed out of mines across the country on that day. 16 By the end of 1919, more than 3,600 strikes had been called, af-fecting some four million workers. 17 It was a stunning display of power. Underscoring the weight of these strikes was a tendency by conservatives and the government to associate radical labor with the cataclysm of revolu-tion, a trend that persisted from the war years. Some working-class radicals certainly viewed the Russian Revolution as holding great promise, and many firmly believed it was only a matter of time before American workers joined the workers of the world. A small but evident truly radical movement existed in America for decades before the Russian Revolution, buoyed by unskilled workers left out of the American Federation of Labor, middle-class reform-ers, religious leaders, the Socialist Party, immigrant anarchists, and pacifists, to name a few.

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  McCarthyism and the Red Scare

  A Reference Guide

  • William T. Walker(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 2 THE Red Scare AFTER WORLD WAR II AND MCCARTHY’ S EARLY YEARS IN THE SENATE W ith the attack on Pearl Harbor and American entrance into World War II against Germany, Japan, Italy, and their allies, the United States became an ally of the Soviet Union. Since the Russian Revolution, a large segment of U.S. citizens had opposed the Marxist-Leninist regime that emerged to dominate the new Soviet state. Anxieties over the spread of communism and its cultural accoutrements— materialism, communal property, godlessness, and its denunciation of individuality—continued through the 1920s and 1930s. However, with the war, the Soviet Union became a critical strategic ally to the United States and Great Britain; the Soviets would bear the greatest human burden in defeating Hitler’s Germany—more than 26 million Soviets died as a result of the war. U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who recognized the Soviet Union in 1933, believed that the Soviet Union and the United States, although very different from one another, represented the new forces for a better world in the mid-20th century. Roosevelt thought that he could persuade the leader of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, to abandon his paranoia in world affairs and enter into a durable post-imperial partner- ship for the good of all peoples. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, a defender of the old order associated with imperialism, had a more sober and, as it turned out, correct assessment of Stalin and Soviet ambitions 16 MCCARTHYISM AND THE Red Scare during and after the war. Throughout the war, the “Big Three” projected an image of unity and friendship when they met at the Teheran and Yalta Conferences; but by late 1944, it became evident that they had different war aims.

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