I’m going to take a few moments here, and talk about the first Red Scare.
I’ll give you a definition – this is the widespread fear of Communism and agents of
the Soviet Union after, even during, but mostly after the First World War.
I’m going to talk just a few minutes about this, because we’re going to have a second
Red Scare after the Second World War.
This second Red Scare is going to be much bigger, and it’s going to do much more damage
to the country.
The second Red Scare also goes by the name of McCarthyism, and again, we’ll talk about
this later.
The first Red Scare, if we can put it in context, I guess there are two contexts here.
First, Lenin has created the world’s first Communist state in the Soviet Union.
Of course, Communism is dreaded by Western capitalists.
Communism fundamentally undermines the ideas of Western society – private property, personal
autonomy, things like this.
So the creation of the Soviet Union would be one context to view this.
Another would be domestic labor unrest here in the United States.
We talked about the Industrial Revolution previously, and I remarked that it fundamentally
changes social relations among people.
Labor is seeking to get their share of the pie here, by the latter half of the 19th century
in the United States, and this creates disorder in society, and industry uses its own private
police forces, and uses government forces to put down labor unrest.
You’ll remember that we emerged from the First World War with these sort of 2 models
that are going to dominate the rest of the century – Lenin’s Communist Revolution
and Woodrow Wilson’s Democratic Revolutions around the world.
So there is tension here, ideologically, about what path we should follow.
You’ll remember also, that the Bolshevik’s – Lenin’s Bolshevik’s in Russia – were
so anathema to the Western policy makers and statesmen that the Russian’s were not even
invited to participate in the Versailles Treaty deliberations.
There’s two people here that I want you to be familiar with – A. Mitchell Palmer
is the attorney general of the United States and J. Edgar Hoover, you’ll see here a picture
of young Hoover, who is Director of the FBI, and will remain so until his death in 1972.
Hoover will come up again in our discussions.
Domestic ramifications of the Red Scare – Radical organizations, or organizations that are perceived
as radical, are shut down in this country.
People are deported.
There’s press censorship.
Journals, magazines, newspapers, that are perceived as being antiwar or anti-American
are attacked.
The Espionage Act is passed, so that the government can arrest you not on what you do, but on
how you think.
This, of course, is a fundamental violation of America’s First Amendment rights.
Widespread arrest of radicals – Palmer orders the FBI into people’s homes, into the factories,
Union headquarters, meeting halls, to arrest what is perceived as a disorderly, potentially
revolutionary part of our population.
The attorney general predicts there’s going to be a radical coup d’état in the United
States.
This, of course, is nonsense.
But it does hype up the fear of organized labor.
I’m going to end this little short lecture by pointing out that the 18th Amendment is
passed.
Here, what we think of as the progressive era, is also part of this Red Scare era, where
radicalism is associated with foreigners, radicalism is associated with drinking.
So these things tend to coincide here after the war, and in the early 1920s.
Again, I want you to keep this episode in mind, because it’s going to reemerge in
the late 40s and early 50s in the United States, in a much more virulent form, in a much more
damaging form as well.
So I’m going to stop there with the first Red Scare.
Thanks.