A "Red Scare" is the promotion of a widespread fear of a potential rise of communism or anarchism by a society or state. The name refers to the red flags that the communists use. The term is most often used to refer to two periods in the history of the United States which are referred to by this name. The First Red Scare, which occurred immediately after World War I, revolved around a perceived threat from the American labor movement, anarchist revolution and political radicalism. The Second Red Scare, which occurred immediately after World War II, was preoccupied with the perception that national or foreign communists were infiltrating or subverting U.S. society and the federal government.
First Red Scare (1917–1920)
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Political cartoon from 1919 depicting the Russian revolution's impact on the Paris peace talks
The first Red Scare began following the Bolshevik Russian Revolution of 1917,
and the intensely patriotic years of World War I, as anarchist and
other left-wing social agitation aggravated national, social, and
political tensions. Political scientist and former member of the
Communist Party Murray B. Levin
wrote that the Red Scare was "a nationwide anti-radical hysteria
provoked by a mounting fear and anxiety that a Bolshevik revolution in
America was imminent—a revolution that would change Church, home,
marriage, civility, and the American way of Life". Newspapers exacerbated those political fears into anti-foreign sentiment because varieties of radical anarchism were becoming popular as possible solutions to poverty, often by recent European immigrants (cf. hyphenated-Americans). The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), also known as the Wobblies, backed several labor strikes
in 1916 and 1917. These wartime strikes covered a wide range of
industries including steel working, shipbuilding, coal mining, copper
mining, as well as other industries necessary to make wartime
necessities. After World War I ended the number of strikes increased to
record levels in 1919 with more than 3,600 separate strikes that spanned
from steel workers, to railroad shop workers, to the Boston police
department. The press portrayed them as "radical threats to American society" inspired by "left-wing, foreign agents provocateurs".
Those on the side of the IWW claim that the press "misrepresented
legitimate labor strikes" as "crimes against society", "conspiracies
against the government", and "plots to establish communism".
Opponents, on the other hand, saw these as an extension of the radical,
anarchist foundations of the IWW, which contends that all workers
should be united as a social class and that capitalism and the wage system should be abolished.
In 1917 as a response to World War 1 Congress passed the espionage act of 1917
to prevent any information relating to national defense to be used to
harm the United States or aid her enemies. The Wilson administration
used this act to make anything "urging treason" a "nonmailable matter" .
Due to the espionage act and the then Postmaster General Albert S.
Burleson, 74 separate newspapers were not being mailed.
A "European Anarchist" attempts to destroy the Statue of Liberty in this 1919 political cartoon.
A bomb blast badly damaged the residence of Attorney General Mitchell Palmer in the spring of 1919.
In April 1919, authorities discovered a plot for mailing 36 bombs to prominent members of the U.S. political and economic establishment: J. P. Morgan Jr., John D. Rockefeller, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, U.S. Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer, and immigration officials. On June 2, 1919, in eight cities, eight bombs simultaneously exploded. One target was the Washington, D.C., house of U.S. Attorney General Palmer, where the explosion killed the bomber, who evidence indicated was an Italian-American radical from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Afterwards, Palmer ordered the U.S. Justice Department to launch the Palmer Raids (1919–21).
He deported 249 Russian immigrants on the "Soviet Ark", helped create
the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and used federal agents to
jail more than 5,000 citizens and search homes without respecting their
constitutional rights.
Yet, in 1918, before the bombings, President Woodrow Wilson had pressured the Congress to legislate the anti-anarchist Sedition Act of 1918 to protect wartime morale by deporting putatively undesirable political people. Law professor David D. Cole
reports that President Wilson's "federal government consistently
targeted alien radicals, deporting them ... for their speech or
associations, making little effort to distinguish terrorists from
ideological dissidents."
President Wilson used the Sedition Act of 1918 in order to limit the
exercise of free speech by criminalizing language deemed disloyal to the
United States government.
Initially, the press praised the raids; The Washington Post said, "There is no time to waste on hairsplitting over [the] infringement of liberty", and The New York Times
said the injuries inflicted upon the arrested were "souvenirs of the
new attitude of aggressiveness which had been assumed by the Federal
agents against Reds and suspected-Reds".
In the event, the Palmer Raids were criticized as unconstitutional by
twelve publicly prominent lawyers, including (future Supreme Court
Justice) Felix Frankfurter, who published A Report on the Illegal Practices of The United States Department of Justice, documenting systematic violations of the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments
to the U.S. Constitution via Palmer-authorized "illegal acts" and
"wanton violence". Defensively, Palmer then warned that a
government-deposing left-wing revolution would begin on 1 May 1920—May Day,
the International Workers' Day. When it failed to happen, he was
ridiculed and lost much credibility. Strengthening the legal criticism
of Palmer was that fewer than 600 deportations were substantiated with
evidence, out of the thousands of resident aliens arrested and deported.
In July 1920, Palmer's once-promising Democratic Party bid for the U.S. presidency failed. Wall Street was bombed on September 2, 1920, near Federal Hall National Memorial and the JP Morgan Bank.
Although both anarchists and communists were suspected as being
responsible for the bombing, ultimately no individuals were indicted for
the bombing in which 38 died and 141 were injured.
In 1919–20, several states enacted "criminal syndicalism" laws outlawing advocacy of violence in effecting and securing social change. The restrictions included free speech limitations.
Passage of these laws, in turn, provoked aggressive police
investigation of the accused persons, their jailing, and deportation for
being suspected of being either communist or left-wing. Regardless of ideological gradation, the Red Scare did not distinguish between communism, anarchism, socialism, or social democracy.
This aggressive crackdown on certain ideologies resulted in many
supreme court cases over the debate to free speech. In the case of
Schenk v. United States using the clear and present danger test the
espionage act of 1917 and the sedition act of 1918 were deemed
constitutional.
Second Red Scare (1947–57)
The second Red Scare occurred after World War II (1939–45), and it was popularly known as "McCarthyism" after its most famous supporter, Senator Joseph McCarthy. McCarthyism coincided with an increased and popular fear of communist espionage that was consequent of the increasing tension in the Cold War through the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, the Berlin Blockade (1948–49), the end of the Chinese Civil War,
the confessions of spying for the Soviet Union that were made by
several high-ranking U.S. government officials, and the outbreak of the Korean War.
Internal causes of the anti-communist fear
The events of the late 1940s, the early 1950s — the trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg (1953), the trial of Alger Hiss, the Iron Curtain (1945–1991) around Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union's first nuclear weapon test in 1949 (RDS-1)
— surprised the American public, influencing popular opinion about U.S.
National Security, which, in turn, was connected to the fear that the
Soviet Union would hydrogen-bomb the United States, and fear of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA).
In Canada, the 1946 Kellock–Taschereau Commission investigated espionage after top secret documents concerning RDX, radar and other weapons were handed over to the Soviets by a domestic spy-ring.
At the House Un-American Activities Committee, former CPUSA members and NKVD spies, Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers, testified that Soviet spies
and communist sympathizers had penetrated the U.S. government before,
during and after World War II. Other U.S. citizen spies confessed to
their acts of espionage in situations where the statute of limitations
on prosecuting them had run out. In 1949, anti–communist fear, and fear
of American traitors, was aggravated by the Chinese Communists winning the Chinese Civil War against the Western-sponsored Kuomintang, their founding of the People's Republic of China, and later Chinese intervention in the Korean War (1950–53) against U.S. ally South Korea.
A few of the events during the Red Scare were also due to a power struggle between director of FBI J. Edgar Hoover and the Central Intelligence Agency. Hoover had instigated and aided some of the investigations of members of the CIA with "leftist" history, like Cord Meyer. This conflict could also be traced back to the conflict between Hoover and William J. Donovan, going back to the first Red Scare, but especially during World War II. Donovan ran the OSS
(CIA's predecessor). They had differing opinions on the nature of the
alliance with the Soviet Union, conflicts over jurisdiction, conflicts
of personality, the OSS hiring of communists and criminals as agents,
etc.
History
Early years
By the 1930s, communism had become an attractive economic ideology, particularly among labor leaders and intellectuals. By 1939, the CPUSA had about 50,000 members. In 1940, soon after World War II began in Europe, the U.S. Congress legislated the Alien Registration Act (aka the Smith Act,
18 USC § 2385) making it a crime to "knowingly or willfully advocate,
abet, advise or teach the duty, necessity, desirability or propriety of
overthrowing the Government of the United States or of any State by
force or violence, or for anyone to organize any association which
teaches, advises or encourages such an overthrow, or for anyone to
become a member of or to affiliate with any such association"—and
required Federal registration of all foreign nationals. Although principally deployed against communists, the Smith Act was also used against right-wing political threats such as the German-American Bund, and the perceived racial disloyalty of the Japanese-American population, (cf. hyphenated-Americans).
After the non-aggression pact was signed between Hitler and
Stalin in 1939 the communist party in the United States took an anti-war
approach and were consequently treated with more hostility than they
had been previously by the public because they were seen as to be
working with the Nazis, however in 1941, after Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the CPUSA's official position became pro-war, opposing labor strikes in the weapons industry and supporting the U.S. war effort against the Axis Powers. With the slogan "Communism is Twentieth-Century Americanism", the chairman, Earl Browder, advertised the CPUSA's integration to the political mainstream. In contrast, the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party opposed U.S. participation in the war and supported labor strikes, even in the war-effort industry. For this reason, James P. Cannon and other SWP leaders were convicted per the Smith Act.
Increasing Tension
In March 1947, President Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order 9835,
creating the "Federal Employees Loyalty Program" establishing
political-loyalty review boards who determined the "Americanism" of
Federal Government employees, and requiring that all federal employees
to take an oath of loyalty to the United States government. It then
recommended termination of those who had confessed to spying for the
Soviet Union, as well as some suspected of being "Un-American". This led
to more than 2,700 dismissals and 12,000 resignations from the years
1947 to 1956. It also was the template for several state legislatures' loyalty acts, such as California's Levering Act.
The House Committee on Un-American Activities was created during the
Truman administration as a response to allegations by republicans of
disloyalty in Truman's administration. The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) and the committees of Senator Joseph McCarthy (R., Wisc.)
conducted character investigations of "American communists" (actual and
alleged), and their roles in (real and imaginary) espionage,
propaganda, and subversion favoring the Soviet Union—in the process
revealing the extraordinary breadth of the Soviet spy network in
infiltrating the federal government; the process also launched the
successful political careers of Richard Nixon and Robert F. Kennedy,
as well as that of Joseph McCarthy. The HUAC held a large interest in
investigating those in the entertainment industry in Hollywood. They
interrogated actors, writers, and producers. The people who cooperated
in the investigations got to continue working as they had been, but
people who refused to cooperate were blacklisted.
Senator Joseph McCarthy
stirred up further fear in the United States of communists infiltrating
the country by saying that communist spies were omnipresent, and he was
America's only salvation, using this fear to increase his own
influence. In 1950 Joseph McCarthy addressed the senate, citing 81
separate cases, and made accusations against suspected communists.
Although he provided little or no evidence, this prompted the Senate to
call for a full investigation.
Senator McCarran introduced the McCarran Internal Security Act
of 1950 that was passed by the U.S. Congress and which modified a great
deal of law to restrict civil liberties in the name of security.
President Truman declared the act a "mockery of the Bill of Rights" and a
"long step toward totalitarianism" because it represented a government
restriction on the freedom of opinion. He vetoed the act but his veto
was overridden by Congress. Much of the bill eventually was repealed.
The Second Red Scare profoundly altered the temper of American
society. Its later characterizations may be seen as contributory to
works of feared communist espionage, such as the film My Son John
(1952), about parent's suspicions their son is a spy. Abundant accounts
in narrative forms contained themes of the infiltration, subversion,
invasion, and destruction of American society by un–American thought. Even a baseball team, the Cincinnati Reds,
temporarily renamed themselves the "Cincinnati Redlegs" to avoid the
money-losing and career-ruining connotations inherent in being
ball-playing "Reds" (communists).
In 1954 congress passed the Communist Control Act of 1954 which prevented members of the communist party in America from holding office in labor unions and other labor organizations.
Wind Down
In
1954, after accusing the army, including war heroes, Senator Joseph
McCarthy lost credibility in the eyes of the American public. He was
formally censured by his colleagues in Congress and the hearings led by
McCarthy came to a close.
After the Senate formally censured McCarthy, he lost a lot of his
standing and political power, and some of the tension and excitement
from a possible communist takeover died down.
From 1955 through 1959, the Supreme Court made several decisions
which restricted the ways in which the government could enforce its
anti-communist policies, some of which included limiting the federal
loyalty program to only those who had access to sensitive information,
allowing defendants to face their accusers, reducing the strength of
congressional investigation committees, and weakening the Smith Act.
In the 1957 case Yates v. United States and the 1961 case Scales
v. United States, the Supreme Court limited Congress's ability to
circumvent the First Amendment, and in 1967 during the Supreme Court
case United States v. Robel, the Supreme Court ruled that a ban on
communists in the defense industry was unconstitutional.
In 1995, the American government revealed details of the Venona Project, which when combined with the opening of the USSR ComIntern
archives, provided substantial validation of intelligence gathering,
outright spying, and policy influencing, by Americans on behalf of the
Soviet Union, from 1940 through 1980.
Over 300 American communists, whether they knew it or not, including
government officials and technicians that helped in developing the atom
bomb, were found to have engaged in espionage.
