The Cold War and the Red Scare in the United States

The Cold War and the Red Scare in the United States

American Red Scare

The sudden decentralizing of the economy , away from its wartime organization of labor shortages and surging production caused an almost instant depression as corporate revenues collapsed and millions of workers lost their jobs . This provided the general economic context for the greatest concentration of mass strikes in American history to that point . This set the stage for the organized "Red Baiting " used effectively by Seattle Mayor Ole Hanson to defeat the Seattle General Strike of 1919 , and

by the coal and steel industries to undermine popular support for the two largest industrial strikes of that turbulent year . Alarming stories about Bolshevik conspiracies , foreign influences and ideological contagions that stirred up and made dupes of ordinarily happy workers proved an effective tactic when it came to silencing the basic demands made by the largely immigrant workers

What was increasingly being called hysteria ' by liberals continued to swallow up the nation 's popular politics and policy as conspiracy driven fears , pushed by politicians , prosecutors , paramilitaries and populists grew only more intense with the end of the war . With the singing of the armistice in November 1918 , the fearsome Kraut , Kaiser and Hun were overnight replaced by sinister Reds , Bolsheviki and Communists Fictionalized horror stories coming out of Soviet Russia (coupled with counter-revolutionary military interventions in Vladivostok and Archangle , the founding of American Communist parties , deadly bombing campaigns at home , and the explosion of labor militancy enabled the political opportunism of employers , militarists and Republicans to sustain if not intensify the repressive intolerance of wartime into a new postwar Red Scare . The newss bust with warnings of Bolshevik plots and gigantic conspiracies . Newss and the Attorney General spread panic over the widely predicted May Day Uprising ' which resulted only in mob violence against the Socialist party , Russian political organizations , and the sacking of the nation 's last Socialist daily news , the New York Call . The nation , it seemed , still felt threatened by invasion by foreign subversives , and ideological contamination by outside agitators . The American Legion , founded as an anti-radical paramilitary army , replaced the APL as the new vanguard of popular reaction to be cheered from the sidelines by politicians and newss

Race riots (more properly described as racial massacres ) broke out in the Red Summer of 1919 ' from Washington D .C . to Charleston to Chicago as African Americans migrants from the Jim Crow South came under attack in their new urban industrial homes . State Criminal Syndicalism ' laws carried the wartime sedition laws over into the postwar period providing the legal foundation for much of the Red Scare 's political repression . Federal officials stepped up their assaults on radicals employing spies , agents ' provocateurs and the newly constituted Anti-Radical branch of the Justice Department , culminating in the mass expulsion of alien radicals from the land of the free . General Leonard Wood suggested his own (highly popular ) policy of how to deal with radicals : S .O .S . - ship or shoot . I...