Red Scare, 1919-1920

RED SCARE, 1919-1920. State repression of the Left that began after the US entry into World War I continued well after the November 1918 Armistice and reached new heights during the “Red Scare” in 1919-1920. With the major organized left opponents of the war, the Socialist Party of America (SP) and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) largely crippled, the main focus of state hostility shifted to the newly formed communist movement and anarchist activity.

The Armistice brought an abrupt cancellation of war orders and roll-backs of war-time labor concessions, increasing unemployment, unabated price inflation and an end to workers’ hopes for post-war improvements. With a recession soon underway, an unprecedented coast-to-coast strike wave came in 1919. Starting in February with the Seattle General Strike and followed by nationwide railway wild cats, the upsurge peaked with a fall offensive that included a Boston police strike in September. A massive shutdown of the steel industry, propelled by masses of unskilled and non-unionized and foreign-born workers soon followed as did a month-long coal miners’ strike in November. All along, the mainstream press and government sources heightened anti-red anxieties by portraying “alien anarchists” and “bolshevik bacilli” as the prime cause of the industrial unrest.

Other developments contributed to increasing fear. Far-off events, most notably Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution (October/November, 1917) and subsequent class upheavals across Europe and internationally provided a backdrop of trepidation for some and a revolutionary optimism on the Left. Reflecting that hope, delegates from a now hobbled SP and other left elements formed two communist parties at Chicago in early September 1919. With both vying for recognition from the Moscow-centered Communist International, the Communist Labor Party (CLP) and the Communist Party (CP) instantaneously became prime targets of government surveillance and harassment.

Beginning in June and extending into the fall and paralleling the industrial unrest of 1919, some twenty-six white racist mobs attacked Black communities place nationwide. Through the long “Red Summer” in numerous locales, the presence of armed Blacks, among them returned war veterans defending their neighborhoods, fueled white imagination. Many white officials and politicians framed such “fight backs” as the beginning of a Red-inspired insurrection, the result of communist incitement. With newspaper headlines claiming “Reds Incite Negro Rioters,” the White House accused Black veterans returning from Europe of being the “greatest medium in conveying Bolshevism to America.”

Congress increased appropriations to the Army’s Military Intelligence Division (MID)’s preexisting “Negro Subversion Section” to ramp up ongoing surveillance of numerous of civil rights leaders and suspected Black leftists. Overseen by the future FBI head J.Edgar Hoover, the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation (BI) exchanged weekly field office reports on “Negro Activities” and the “Negro agitation movement” with other federal agencies and state and local “red squads.”

A series of anarchist bombings that spring provoked widespread clamor for increased repression. In late April some thirty-six bombs, the majority detected before exploding, were mailed to anti-radical public figures across the country. Though later attributed to followers of the Italian anarcho-communist Luigi Galleani, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer charged that the bombs were part of a Bolshevik plot overthrow the government on May Day.

On May 1, police and veteran-led mobs attacked socialist gatherings in Boston, New York, Chicago and elsewhere. In New York, a crowd raided the Russian People’s House, beat attendees and burned books and papers. A mob trashed the socialist New York Call’s offices. In Cleveland, police and armed civilians attacked a May Day rally where they killed two, beat or shot and arrested 125. The press then blamed the “riots” on the “Reds” and “foreign agitators.”

Then, on June 2nd, nine coordinated bombings occurred at the homes of public officials and corporate heads in eight cities including the Washington residence of Attorney General Palmer. Palmer promptly set in motion plans for a nationally coordinated “anti-red” crack down. He soon announced the discovery of another impending “red insurrection” set for July 4. After the day passed without incident, the moment served to heighten anti-radical tempers. Thousands of troops, police and civilian auxiliaries were placed on “red alert” and deployed in a massive show of “homeland security.”

Assisting Federal operations that summer and fall, a number of volunteer civilian auxiliaries played a significant role as spies and anti-radical shock troops. For instance, patriotic veterans in the newly formed and MID-assisted American Legion carried out armed attacks on Wobbly halls, most infamous among them, the July 4 assault on the Centralia, Washingon, IWW hall and the resultant lynching of Wobbly militant Wesley Everest.

The period’s repression peaked in two Palmer Raids, overseen by the Attorney General’s lieutenant, Herbert Hoover. Coming in November 1919 and early January 1920, nationally coordinated sweeps rounded up thousands of suspected “bolsheviki” and anarchists. With the fall’s strike wave as backdrop, on November 7, Federal agents assisted by local police carried out raids in some eighteen cities. In New York, they arrested 650 citywide including 180 at the Union of Russian Workers hall, of which forty-three “enemy aliens” were held for deportation. The following night, separate raids by New York state deputies hit twenty-one additional socialist and anarchist gathering places and arrested hundreds more. The nationwide dragnet sent 249 “illegals” to “administrative detention” on Ellis Island. Arrested without warrants and denied due process, the detainees, among them anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, were deported to then Soviet Russia that December. In the second Palmer Raid (January 2, 1920), Federal agents coordinated dragnets, largely without warrant, in thirty-three cities in twenty-three states. They detained more than 10,000 suspects, among them nearly every local or national CP and CLP leader.

Many in custody were threatened and beaten. Others, searching for friends or relatives or innocently looking on, were also arrested. While citizens were released or handed over to local or state agencies, non-citizens were held without charges to await possible deportation. Many faced lengthy detentions without bail, on warrants filed after the fact, denial of counsel until late in the process, and administrative hearings rather than a day in court. While the majority eventually had their cases dismissed on technical grounds, 556 were deported under the October 1918 Immigration Act. Enacted just weeks before the Armistice, that major weapon in the anti-red arsenal authorized the Department of Immigration to deport without due process any alien advocates of broadly defined anarchism. The act not only criminalized activity but also membership in any “subversive” organization and made guilt by association a punishable offense.

The Red Scare soon ebbed as Palmer became increasingly discredited as an opportunistic political aspirant. The anti-radical and anti-immigrant animus continued, however, and spiked again with a September 16, 1920 Wall Street bombing that killed thirty-eight and injured hundreds. Later attributed to members the Galleanist circle responsible for the spring 1919 bombings, the bombing seemingly came as reprisal for the arrests of members Niccola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, then being held for robbery and murder in a Massachusetts jail.

Following the defeats of the 1919 strike wave, the overall labor movement declined sharply. Though isolated, militant sometimes massive strikes continued in textiles, coal and elsewhere, they too met with severe repression and red baiting. Additionally, the revolutionary upsurge abroad had long ebbed and the organizations potentially capable of providing some Left leadership — the IWW, the Socialist Party and the two fledgling CPs — were left devastated. With the Communist Party leadership underground for two years and with others deported, jailed or indicted and facing costly trials, its membership declined to perhaps 5,000. The constant nationwide red-baiting of the workers’ movement in tandem with the realities of multi-tiered, massive Red Scare repression had proven formidable. Its effects were long lasting as were the foundations of the surveillance state laid in the war years.

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Hagedorn, Ann. Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America, 1919. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007.

Jensen, Joan. Army Surveillance in America, 1775-1980, Part III: Legacy of World War I. New Haven: Yale, 1991.

Klein, Leo Robert. “Red Scare (1918-1921) Image Database” https://web.archive.org/web/20070108102203/http://newman.baruch.cuny.edu/digital/redscare/default.htm

Kornweibel, Theodore Jr. Seeing Red: Federal Campaigns Against Black Militancy, 1919-1925. Bloomington: Indiana, 1998.

Thomas, William H. Jr., Unsafe for Democracy: World War I and the U.S. Justice Department’s Covert Campaign to Suppress Dissent. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008.