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THE UNITED STATES AND ANTI-SOCIALISM
JUST AFTER WORLD WAR ONE, in the years 1919-1920, the United States went through a paroxysm of fear and paranoia known as the Red Scare. It was an expression of the widespread anxiety brought on by a war that had dragged the U. S. into European affairs. The war years had brought economic and social dislocations followed by post-war uncertainties. The nation's self-image, cast in the context of isolationism and in opposition to the perceived corruption and militarism of the "Old World," was now subject to question and debate. Under these circumstances, a movement grew around the assumed need to keep the country "one hundred percent American."1 What was perceived as threatening this American character was not only continued involvement in post-war European affairs, which was viewed as dangerously innovative, but also the introduction of "un-American" ways and values.
This alleged corruption of the American way of life was in turn seen as a product of the growing number of immigrants, especially from Eastern Europe, and the ideological "disease" of socialism/communism they were thought to carry. Eastern Europe and socialism/communism fit together in the American mind because, while many of the immigrants arriving since the turn of the century had come from this area, Eastern Europe seemed to be turning to the Left. United States labor unrest of the period was consequently blamed on "communist agents" among these immigrants.2 Then a short spate of anarchist bombings lent panic to the sense of foreign influenced conspiracy. The government response soon reflected this growing atmosphere of hysteria. It came in 1920 in the form of the "Palmer raids" (named after the politically opportunistic Attorney General of the day, A. Mitchell Palmer) in which some six thousand alien residents were arrested and held for deportation. Most of this was done without warrants and was therefore illegal.3
As the decade of the 1920s progressed, the hysteria abated. Labor relations stabilized as the overall economic picture improved. The anarchist bombings ceased. The U.S. Senate rejected Wilsonian internationalism in the form of the Versailles peace treaty thus allowing Americans to slip back into a more comfortable, if temporary, isolationism. And in Europe, socialism seemed more and more restricted to the young Soviet Union, and thus less...