First Red Scare Project
World War I and Anti-German Attitudes
World War I Repression
Even though anti-radical policing dates back to the 1870s and 1880s, the immediate roots of the Red Scare can be traced to the suppression of anti-war elements during World War I. On 7 April 1917, the day after the United States entered the war on the side of the Entente Powers, representatives of the Socialist Party passed the St. Louis Declaration, announcing their continued opposition to the war. They were joined in their anti-war dissent by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a radical labor union.
The federal government quickly put measures into place to quell such opposition, including the 1917 Espionage Act and the 1918 Sedition Act. Together these acts hindered freedom of speech, making it practically illegal to criticize the war or interfere with the war effort in any way. Postmaster General Albert Burleson (1863-1937) used this legislation to censor the press. He revoked the second class mailing privileges of radical publications. The Justice Department indicted a number of prominent Socialists, such as Eugene V. Debs and Victor Berger under the Espionage Act. Debs was sentenced to prison for ten years and Berger was denied his congressional seat after being duly elected.
The IWW led a wave of strikes in the summer of 1917 that government authorities interpreted as violating the Espionage Act. In September of 1917, federal agents raided forty-eight IWW headquarters across the country, arresting much of the group’s leadership and forcing the remaining members underground. At the local level, vigilante violence was directed at dissenters and “slackers” who escaped the notice of the federal government.
The Creel Committee, part I
During World War I, the President Wilson created the Committee on Public Information (CPI), to convince Americans to support the war effort. It was led by George Creel, a former journalist. Creel hired Edward Bernays, an advertising executive who brought his knowledge of how to sell goods to try and “sell Americans on fighting the war.”
Less than 35% of Americans supported getting involved in World War I when Congress declared war in 1917. So, Creel got to work, creating a propaganda campaign designed to convince Americans of the necessity of the fight, to demonize the Germans, and to attack any at home who did not support the war effort as “un-American.”
Creel created at army of “Four Minute Men,” who would travel the country, giving short, four-minute speeches in support of the war. They extolled the virtues of America and claimed that the war was fought to “make the world safe for democracy. The speeches were designed according to the newest scientific knowledge of the day. It was believed by psychologists at the time that four minutes was the length of the average persons’ attention span, so the speeches were kept short. These speeches were given in movie theaters before the film started, at sporting events, churches, schools, and other public places. Creel boasted that his 75,000 Four Minute Men had given over 7.5 million speeches over the course of 18 months. Today, this is regarded as one of the earliest “viral marketing campaigns.”
In addition to speeches, the CPI produced posters, newspaper ads, billboards, and other propaganda tools. But the CPI’s most insidious campaigns were more direct. It worked with the Postal Service to censor mail that was critical of the war effort and arrested people opposed to the war effort.
Creel Committee, part II
Creel, a former journalist, particularly targeted newspapers. He later estimated that the news division placed material in 20,000 newspaper columns each week during the war. A separate newspaper division monitored the hundreds of foreign-language publications in the United States. Beginning in May 1917 and running through March 1919, the CPI published Official Bulletin, a newspaper distributed free to public officials, newspapers, post offices, and other agencies. It carried statements from the government and had a circulation of about 115,000. The Official Bulletin’s purpose was to give everyone the “official” word on the war effort and encourage everyone to go along with government plans.
Visual images further helped to mobilize support for the war. The division of pictorial publicity joined with the division of advertising to create some of the war’s most vivid images in posters designed to demonize the German military and make Germans appear as violent barbarians, intent only on destruction. Some of the more infamous posters portrayed a German gorilla with a club labeled kultur (the German word for ‘culture’) and a green-eyed, blue-skinned German soldier with bloody fingers.
Not every American made the distinction between Germans overseas and German-born Americans in the United States. Violence against German-Americans was common, forcing many German-Americans to change their names and hide their German ancestry. German-language newspapers across the country were shut down.
In addition, the government linked any opposition to the war effort, whether by pacifists or communists, to treason. It trampled First Amendment rights, largely because of the success of the CPI in instilling fear through war propaganda. The CPI often blurred Wilson’s political goals with the national interest.
Eugene Victor Debs
Eugene Victor Debs, the American labor leader and Socialist Party candidate for President, was an outspoken opponent of World War I. Debs gave a speech in Canton, Ohio (known as the Canton Speech) in which he denounced the war and claimed that the war was being fought on behalf of Wall Street interests who only wanted to make money.
As a result, Debs was arrested, put on trial, and sentenced to ten years in prison. At his sentencing, Debs said:
“Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
“I listened to all that was said in this court in support and justification of this prosecution, but my mind remains unchanged. I look upon the Espionage Law as a despotic enactment in flagrant conflict with democratic principles and with the spirit of free institutions…
“Your Honor, I ask no mercy and I plead for no immunity. I realize that finally the right must prevail. I never so clearly comprehended as now the great struggle between the powers of greed and exploitation on the one hand and upon the other the rising hosts of industrial freedom and social justice.
“I can see the dawn of the better day for humanity. The people are awakening. In due time they will and must come to their own.”
Debs was released from prison early by President Warren G. Harding, after the war ended.
Why the Reds?
During the Russian Revolution, a series of protests and strikes brought down the Tsar’s government. Workers and peasants, angry at their mistreatment by the government, overthrew it and established a Communist state under the control of V. I. Lenin and his Bolshevik Party.
The Bolsheviks seized large farms from the nobility and the rich and began to turn them over to peasants or to build large, collective farms where peasants would work together to farm. This proved very popular with the peasants. The Bolsheviks also seized large businesses and took over them themselves. They lowered the work day from 10 hours to 7 hours and improved working conditions in the factories in general.
The Bolsheviks also carried out large-scale social projects, including making homosexuality legal and allowing women to get divorces. Women were also allowed to own property for the first time in modern Russia and child labor was outlawed.
New public schools were opened across the country and reading classes for adults were provided in the evenings, at no charge. The literacy rate went from 15% in 1914 to 90% by 1928.
In America, many leaders regarded these changes with fear. Public officials were worried that Americans, frustrated with their own government and its mistreatment of people during WWI, might lead to an uprising. Many businessmen feared that their farms and businesses would be taken from them and turned over to the government or the workers if Americans adopted Bolshevik-style laws. Many religious leaders were horrified at the Russian acceptance of homosexuals and the generous rights afforded to Russian women, as they saw it as an attack on religious values and the social order.
Many leaders feared the Bolsheviks convincing Americans to adopt their system. And, in Seattle, it appeared as though it might be working.
The Seattle General Strike
On the morning of February 6, 1919, Seattle, a city of 315,000 people, stopped working. The city’s 35,000 shipyard workers, who had been engaged in a strike against unfair working conditions for two weeks. On February 6th, the nature of the strike changed: the other unions in the city voted to go on strike in solidarity (“in solidarity" means to support the shipyard workers.) An additional 25,000 union workers joined the shipyard workers on the picket lines. This became a ‘General Strike,’ or a strike in which everyone stops working unless their demands are met.
The rest of the city’s non-unionized workers also stayed home, refusing to work. Across the city, stores closed, and streetcars stopped running. The city was stunned and quiet. While the mayor and business leaders huddled at City Hall, eight blocks away the four-story Union Hall, headquarters for the Central Labor Council and 60,000 union members, hummed with activity.
An elected Strike Committee had taken responsibility for coordinating essential services and running the city. The unions realized that if no one went to work, the city could not function and that people some people could be put in danger, so took over responsibility for those services themselves. Thousands were fed each day at impromptu dining stations staffed by members of the culinary unions. The Teamsters union saw to it that supplies reached the hospitals, that milk and food deliveries continued. Many were stunned by the effectiveness of these services, including one U.S. General who said that he had “never seen such a peaceful city.” On the second day of the strike, the Mayor threatened to declare martial law and two battalions of US Army troops took up position in the city, but the unions ignored the threat and calm prevailed. "Nothing moved but the tide," remembered a striker years later. In effect, the unions had taken over the city.
After six days, the Strike Committee ended the strike. Soon, police and vigilantes were hard at work rounding up Socialists, Communists, and other radicals. The IWW hall and Socialist Party headquarters were raided and leaders arrested. Federal agents also closed the Union Record, the labor-owned daily newspaper, and arrested several of its staff. Meanwhile across the country headlines screamed the news that Seattle had been saved, that a potential revolution had been broken, that, as Mayor Hanson phrased it, “Americanism” had triumphed over “Bolshevism.” That was not story that most of the strikers would tell, nor the lesson that generations of labor activists would draw from it.
The Seattle General Strike deeply concerned American leaders. They feared that working-class institutions, such as labor unions, would continue to grow stronger and their power. They looked at the Russian Revolution and feared that American workers might soon join the Russians in overthrowing their leaders.
Unrest at Home
After Germany’s defeat in World War I, the Committee of Public Information (CPI) had to find a new enemy. It looked to the newly-emergent Soviet Union as a threat to America. The Russian Revolution had established the world’s first socialist nation and represented a perfect target for the CPI.
In the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revolution, the capitalist economies of the world entered a deep recession. The American elite worried that the disillusionment created by the horrors of World War I and the promise of peace and prosperity offered by the Russian Revolution would convince Americans to rise in revolution. The Seattle General Strike seemed to confirm that labor unrest could spread.
Indeed, radical ideas of socialism captured working people’s imagination as they faced unemployment, hunger and poverty under capitalism. Workers in the Upper Midwest of the United States began to hang photos of Lenin (a leader in the Russian Revolution and head of the Soviet Union) in their homes and many believed that World War I had fatally weakened the capitalist order.
But capitalists went to work to beat back this challenge. Fomenting “Red Scare” and xenophobia (fear of outsiders, especially immigrants) would work to their advantage. They used fear of outsiders to convince American workers that foreign-born workers were not “patriotic” or American enough and should be feared. The same tactics were used against strikers and workers – both U.S. and foreign born – during the Seattle General Strike, for example.
At home, socialists, communists, anarchists, pacifists, and other political radicals were regarded as “un-patriotic” or “un-American.” The CPI fanned the flames of fear and prejudice, largely driving radicals from public life. Many intellectuals were fired from their jobs at American universities and radical organizations were targeted for destruction. The Socialist Party USA, the Industrial Workers of the World union (IWW), and other radical organizations found many of their leaders in prison and their newspapers shut down.
In a particularly strange encounter, 249 American radicals were rounded up by the government and deported to the Soviet Union, despite none of them actually being Soviet citizens. They were declared “undesirables” and put on the USS Buford, a US Navy vessel that the press dubbed “the Red Ark” and simply dropped off in the Soviet Union.
The Palmer Raids
Attorney-General A. Mitchell Palmer awoke June 2nd, 1919 to the sound of an explosion. An anarchist revolutionary had attempted to place a bomb in Palmer’s mailbox with the goal of blowing up the Attorney-General. The would-be assassin wanted to kill Palmer due to his abuse of Americans under the Espionage Act and the CPI, however the bomb detonated early, killing only himself.
A. Mitchell Palmer went to work, with the goal of destroying all the remaining radical movements in the country.
In 1919, Palmer put J. Edgar Hoover in charge of a new division of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation, the General Intelligence Division. Palmer’s agents soon collected over 150,000 names of those they suspected of having “radical” views. Using the Espionage and Sedition Acts, Palmer launched a series of violent raids on labor unions, immigrant organizations, suspected “radicals,” and other deemed “untrustworthy” to the government. They used illegal wiretaps and torture to gain information and confessions.
In January 1920, 6,000 Americans were arrested, mostly members of the Industrial Workers of the World union, a legal labor association. During one of the raids, more than 4,000 individuals were rounded up in a single night. By January 1920, Palmer and the Department of Justice had organized the largest mass arrests in U.S. history, rounding up at least 10,000 individuals.
For most of 1919 and early 1920, much of the public sided with Palmer, but this soon changed. Palmer announced that an attempted Communist revolution was certain to take place in the U.S. on May 1, 1920 (May Day, an international holiday recognizing workers). No such revolution took place on May 1, leading to criticism of Palmer.
On May 28, 1920, the American Civil Liberties Union published a report entitled Report of the Illegal Practices of the United States Department of Justice which carefully documented illegal Departmental authorization of the arrests of suspected radicals, illegal entrapment by agent provocateurs and unlawful incommunicado detention. The report was signed by prominent lawyers and law professors. Palmer was called before the House Rules Committee and strongly defended his actions and that of his department, saying “I apologize for nothing that the Department of Justice has done in this matter. I glory in it.”
Despite this, the failure of Palmer’s “Communist Revolution” to emerge had turned public opinion against him.