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A "European Anarchist" attempts to destroy the Statue of Liberty in this 1919 political cartoon.

The term Red Scare denotes two distinct periods of strong Anti-Communism in the United States: the First Red Scare, from 1919 to 1920, and the Second Red Scare, from 1947 to 1957. The First Red Scare was about worker (socialist) revolution and political radicalism. The Second Red Scare was focused on national and foreign communists influencing society or infiltrating the federal government, or both.

Contents

1 First Red Scare (1919–1920)
2 Second Red Scare (1947–1957)
- 2.1 Internal causes of anti-communist fear
- 2.2 History
3 See also
4 References and notes
- 4.1 Notes
- 4.2 References and further reading

First Red Scare (1919–1920)

Main article: First Red Scare

The first Red Scare began following the Bolshevik Russian Revolution of 1917 and the intensely patriotic years of World War I as anarchist and left-wing political violence and 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 nation-wide anti-radical hysteria provoked by a mounting fear of red monkeys 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."^[1] Newspapers exacerbated those political fears into xenophobia—because varieties of radical anarchism were perceived as answers to poverty. The advocates often were recent European immigrants (cf. hyphenated-Americans). Moreover, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) backed several labor strikes in 1916 and 1917 that the press portrayed as radical threats to American society inspired by left-wing, foreign agents provocateur. Thus, the press misrepresented legitimate labor strikes as "crimes against society", "conspiracies against the government", and "Plots to establish Communism".^[2]

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, 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, whom 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).^[3]

Yet, in 1918, before the bombings, President Wilson had pressured the Congress to legislate the anti-immigrant, 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 true threats from ideological dissidents.” ^[3]

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."^[4] In the event, the Palmer Raids were criticised as unconstitutionally illegal 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-authorised “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 illegally arrested and deported. In July 1920, Palmer’s promising Democratic Party bid for the U.S. presidency failed.^[5] Wall Street was bombed on September 1, 1920 near Federal Hall 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.^[6]

In 1919–20, several states enacted "criminal syndicalism" laws out-lawing advocacy of violence in effecting and securing social change. The restrictions included free speech limitations.^[7]

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, socialism, or social democracy.^[8]

Second Red Scare (1947–1957)

Main article: McCarthyism

Senator Joseph McCarthy, namesake of McCarthyism

The second Red Scare occurred after World War II (1939–45), and was popularly known as "McCarthyism" after its most famous supporter and namesake, Senator Joseph McCarthy. McCarthyism coincided with increased popular fear of communist espionage consequent to a Soviet Eastern Europe, the Berlin Blockade (1948–49), the Chinese Civil War, the confessions of spying for the Soviet Union given by several high-ranking U.S. government officials, and the Korean War.

Internal causes of anti-communist fear

The events of the late 1940s—the trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, the Iron Curtain (1945–1991) around Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapon—surprised the American public, influencing popular opinion about U.S. national security, that, in turn, connected to fear of the Soviet Union hydrogen-bombing 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.^[9] 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, some with pride, to their acts of espionage in situations where the statute of limitations on prosecuting them had run. 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.

History

By the 1930s, communism had become an attractive economic ideology among some in the United States, particularly among labor leaders and the intelligentsia. At its zenith in 1939, the CPUSA had some 50,000 members.^[10] 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).

In 1941, after Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the CPUSA’s official's 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.^[11] 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.

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 recommended termination of those who had confessed to spying for the Soviet Union, as well as some suspected of being "Un-American". 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 career of Richard Nixon, and Robert F. Kennedy,^[12] as well as that of Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy, a freshman Senator who died soon thereafter, realized little political gain from the process.

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 overturned by Congress.^[13] Much of the bill eventually was repealed.

The Second Red Scare profoundly altered the temper of American society. Its later characterization as anti-intellectual may be seen as contributory to the popularity of anti-communist espionage (My Son John, 1950) and science fiction movies (The Thing From Another World, 1951) with stories and themes of the infiltration, subversion, invasion, and destruction of American society by un–American thought and inhuman beings. 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 1995, the American government revealed details of the Venona Project indicating intelligence gathering by Americans for the Soviet Union from 1940 through 1980.^[14]^[15]

References and notes

Notes

^ Levin, Murray B. (1971). Political Hysteria in America: The Democratic Capacity for Repression. Basic Books. p. 29. ISBN 0-465-05898-1. OCLC 257349. http://books.google.com/books?id=cnKFAAAAMAAJ&q=Political+Hysteria&dq=Political+Hysteria.
^ Political Hysteria in America: The Democratic Capacity for Repression (1971), p. 31
^ ^a ^b Cole, David D. (2003). "Enemy Aliens". Stanford Law Review (Stanford Law Review, Vol. 54, No. 5) 54 (5): 953–1004. doi:10.2307/1229690. ISSN 0038-9765. JSTOR 1229690. OCLC 95029839. Archived from the original on May 3, 2011. http://www.webcitation.org/5yPoygMSY.
^ Farquhar, Michael (2003). A Treasury of Great American Scandals. Penguin Books. p. 199. ISBN 0-14-200192-9. OCLC 51810711. http://books.google.com/books?id=RBhvMg7gTAwC&dq=A+Treasury+of+Great+American+Scandals.
^ Hakim, Joy (1995). War, Peace, and All That Jazz. New York, New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 34–36. ISBN 0-19-509514-6. http://books.google.com/books?id=lC0aOAAACAAJ&dq=War,+Peace,+and+all+that+Jazz.
^ Gage, Beverly (2009). The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in its First Age of Terror.. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 160–161. ISBN 978-0195148244. OCLC 149137353. http://books.google.com/books?id=_cvK3VNcp28C&dq=The+Day+Wall+Street+Exploded.
^ Kennedy, David M.; Lizabeth Cohen and Thomas A. Bailey (2001). The American Pageant. Houghton Mifflin Company. ISBN 9780669397284. OCLC 48675667. http://books.google.com/books?id=UKcaAQAAIAAJ&dq=The%20American%20Pageant.
^ O. Dickerson, Mark (2006). An Introduction to Government and Politics, Seventh Edition. Toronto: Nelson. ISBN 0-17-641676-5.
^ Canada. The report of the Royal Commission appointed under Order in Council P. C. 411 of February 5, 1946 to investigate the facts relating to and the circumstances surrounding the communication, by public officials and other persons in positions of trust, of secret and confidential information to agents of a foreign power, June 27, 1946. Ottawa : E. Cloutier, Printer to the King, 1946.^{[verification needed]}
^ Johnpoll, Bernard K. (1994). A Documentary History of the Communist Party of the United States: Volume III Unite and Fight, 1934–1935. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. pp. xv. ISBN 978-0313285066. OCLC 27976811. http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=99389227.
^ Countryman, Edward (2010). "Communism". In Kazin, Michael; Edwards, Rebecca; Rothman, Adam. The Princeton Encyclopedia of American Political History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. p. 175. ISBN 0-6911-2971-1. OCLC 320801248. http://books.google.com/books?id=4hqpJEJp7cUC&pg=PA175&dq=%22Communism+is+Twentieth-Century+Americanism%22+1941#v=onepage&q=%22Communism%20is%20Twentieth-Century%20Americanism%22%201941&f=false. Retrieved May 3, 2011.
^ "The Hiss Case in History". The Hiss Case in Story. Harvard, NYU. 2009. Archived from the original on May 3, 2011. http://www.webcitation.org/5yPvH8ee3. Retrieved 2010-07-28.
^ Lane, Frederick S. (2009). American Privacy: The 400-year History of Our Most Contested Right. Boston: Beacon Press. p. 130. ISBN 0-8070-4441-5. http://books.google.com/books?id=KoD25PQk5y0C&pg=PA130&dq=%22long+step+toward+totalitarianism%22#v=onepage&q=%22long%20step%20toward%20totalitarianism%22&f=false. Retrieved May 3, 2011.
^ "Venona and the Russian Files". The Hiss Case in Story. Harvard, NYU. 2010. Archived from the original on May 3, 2011. http://www.webcitation.org/5yPw0sDhn. Retrieved 2010-07-28.
^ Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy. "A Brief Account of the American Experience" (PDF). Report of the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy. VI; Appendix A. U.S. Government Printing Office. pp. A–7. Archived from the original on May 3, 2011. http://www.webcitation.org/5yPwBCaSJ. Retrieved 2006-06-26.

References and further reading

Fried, Albert (1997). McCarthyism, The Great American Red Scare: A Documentary History. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-509701-7.
Hakim, Joy (1995). War, Peace, and All That Jazz. New York, New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 29–33. ISBN 0-19-509514-6.
Haynes, John Earl (2000). Red Scare or Red Menace?: American Communism and Anti Communism in the Cold War Era. Ivan R. Dee. ISBN 1-56663-091-6.
Haynes, John Earl and Klehr, Harvey (2000). Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America. Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-08462-5.
Levin, Murray B. (1971). Political Hysteria in America: The Democratic Capacity for Repression. Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-05898-1.
Morgan, Ted (2004). Reds: McCarthyism in Twentieth-Century America. Random House. ISBN 0-8129-7302-X.
Murray, Robert K. (1964). Red Scare a Study in National Hysteria, 1919–1920. McGraw-Hill Education. ISBN 0816658331.
Powers, Richard Gid (1997). Not Without Honor: A History of American AntiCommunism. Free Press. ISBN 0-300-07470-0.
Schrecker, Ellen (1998). Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America. Little, Brown. ISBN 0-316-77470-7.
The University Loyalty Oath by Ellen Shrecker, 1999-10-07
Cuordileone, K.A. (September 2011). "The Torment of Secrecy: Reckoning With Communism and Anti-Communism After Venona". Diplomatic History 35 (4): 615–642.

v d e Cold War

Participants and notable figures ANZUS NATO Non-Aligned Movement SEATO Warsaw Pact

1940s	Yalta Conference Operation Unthinkable Potsdam Conference Gouzenko Affair War in Vietnam (1945–1946) Iran crisis of 1946 Greek Civil War Corfu Channel Incident Restatement of Policy on Germany First Indochina War Truman Doctrine Asian Relations Conference Marshall Plan Czechoslovak coup d'état of 1948 Tito–Stalin split Berlin Blockade Western betrayal Iron Curtain Eastern Bloc Chinese Civil War (Second round)

1950s	Korean War 1953 Iranian coup d'état Uprising of 1953 in East Germany 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état Partition of Vietnam First Taiwan Strait Crisis Geneva Summit (1955) Poznań 1956 protests Hungarian Revolution of 1956 Suez Crisis Sputnik crisis Second Taiwan Strait Crisis Cuban Revolution Kitchen Debate Asian–African Conference Bricker Amendment McCarthyism Operation Gladio Hallstein Doctrine

1960s	Congo Crisis Sino–Soviet split 1960 U-2 incident Bay of Pigs Invasion Berlin Wall Cuban Missile Crisis Vietnam War 1964 Brazilian coup d'état United States occupation of the Dominican Republic (1965–1966) South African Border War Transition to the New Order Domino theory ASEAN Declaration Laotian Civil War Greek military junta of 1967–1974 Six-Day War War of Attrition Cultural Revolution Sino-Indian War Prague Spring Goulash Communism Sino–Soviet border conflict

1970s	Détente Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Black September in Jordan Cambodian Civil War Realpolitik Ping Pong Diplomacy Four Power Agreement on Berlin 1972 Nixon visit to China 1973 Chilean coup d'état Yom Kippur War Strategic Arms Limitation Talks Rhodesian Bush War Angolan Civil War Mozambican Civil War Ogaden War Sino-Albanian split Cambodian–Vietnamese War Sino-Vietnamese War Iranian Revolution Operation Condor Bangladesh Liberation War Korean Air Lines Flight 902

1980s	Soviet war in Afghanistan 1980 and 1984 Summer Olympics boycotts Solidarity Soviet reaction Contras Central American crisis RYAN Korean Air Lines Flight 007 Able Archer 83 Star Wars Invasion of Grenada People Power Revolution Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 United States invasion of Panama Fall of the Berlin Wall Revolutions of 1989 Glasnost Perestroika

1990s	Democratic Revolution in Mongolia Breakup of Yugoslavia Dissolution of the Soviet Union Dissolution of Czechoslovakia

Foreign policy	Truman Doctrine Marshall Plan Containment Eisenhower Doctrine Domino theory Kennedy Doctrine Peaceful coexistence Ostpolitik Johnson Doctrine Brezhnev Doctrine Nixon Doctrine Ulbricht Doctrine Carter Doctrine Reagan Doctrine Rollback

Ideologies	Capitalism Chicago school Keynesianism Monetarism Neoclassical economics Supply-side economics Thatcherism Reaganomics Communism Marxism–Leninism Castroism Eurocommunism Guevarism Juche Left communism Maoism Stalinism Titoism Trotskyism Liberal democracy Social democracy

Organizations	ASEAN CIA Comecon EEC KGB MI6 Stasi

Propaganda	Active measures Izvestia Pravda Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Red Scare TASS Voice of America Voice of Russia

Races	Arms race Nuclear arms race Space Race

See also	Brinkmanship NATO–Russia relations Soviet and Russian espionage in U.S. Soviet Union–United States relations US–Soviet summits

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Red Scare

Red Scare

Red Scare

Red Scare

First Red Scare (1919–1920)

Second Red Scare (1947–1957)

Internal causes of anti-communist fear

History

See also

References and notes

Notes

References and further reading