Red Scare: FBI and the Origins of Anticommunism in the United states, 1919-1943

Red Scare: FBi and the Origins of Anticommunism in the United States, 1919-1943. By Regin Schmidt. (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2000. 391 pp. Paper, $41.00, ISBN 87-7289-581-0.)

With yet another attorney general busy saving the "homeland" in the wake of the events of September 11, a book on the original Red Scare could not have come at a better time. The focus here is on 1919-1920, when Woodrow Wilson was in charge, blissfully unaware that Randolph Bourne got it right. War could not be used to advance democracy at home, let alone abroad, and the progressives' war on civil liberties at home killed off their own movement. With Theodore Roosevelt and Eugene Debs also showing well in the election of 1912, the new president inherited a left-leaning nation. Wilson needed to move the nation right, however, in...