The Enemy Within Read online

  The 1870s were, for the most part, a decade of economic depression; as such, they spawned a broad range of worker unrest. There was the Granger movement, organized by cooperative associations of farmers in the Midwest to counter the enormous commercial power of the railroad companies. There were strikes in the coalfields of western Pennsylvania, led by the so-called Molly Maguires (a semisecret organization of mostly Irish miners). There were large protest demonstrations, with accompanying violence, in the major urban centers: for instance, the Tompkins Square Riot of 1874, in New York City, sparked by a parade by laborers carrying the red flag of the Commune.

  But most impressive by far was the great railway strike of 1877, prompted by wage cuts and other grievances of railroad workers in no fewer than 17 states. Indeed, this can reasonably be called the first strike, in any industry, of truly national proportions. And it turned violent at numerous points, as police, militiamen, and federal troops were mobilized in opposition. The toll in lives lost ran to over 100; the value of the properties destroyed was incalculable. Chicago, the strike’s epicenter, was temporarily paralyzed when workers in other industries walked out in sympathy. The reaction of the “respectable classes,” especially the business community, was predictably furious: the strikers were denounced as “ragged Commune wretches,” as advocates of a “French Communism, entirely at war with the spirit of our institutions,” and so on.

  The 1880s brought more of the same: more strikes, more bitter antagonism between the “respectable” and the working classes, more police and military intervention, more property destruction, more deaths. According to one estimate, the year 1886 alone witnessed a total of 1,400 strikes, involving over 600,000 workers.

  Haymarket (1886)

  That same year, 1886, was also the year of the notorious Haymarket Riot—and then of a full-blown Red Scare. Its immediate precursor was a tide of labor protest in many parts of the country, building through the spring toward a national strike on May 1 for enactment of the eight-hour workday. As part of this larger ferment, a bitterly contested work stoppage at the McCormick Harvester plant outside Chicago led, on May 3, to violent clashes between worker pickets and privately-hired Pinkerton guards, resulting in three deaths and more than a dozen injuries. The following evening, radical leaders called a protest rally in Chicago’s Haymarket Square. After some hours of speech making, police arrived with orders to disperse the crowd. At that moment, a bomb was tossed into the ranks of the advancing officers; mayhem ensued, with gunfire from both sides. When peace was finally restored, seven policemen and several demonstrators lay dead; others were mortally injured.

  Public reaction was rapid and severe. Business leaders and municipal officials alike struck a pose of horrified condemnation. Some construed Haymarket as the prelude to outright revolution. Others feared a takeover of their city by gangs of criminals and unemployed laborers. And all looked expectantly for signs of underlying “conspiracy.” Newspaper comment rose to a highly emotional pitch, with the rally’s organizers likened to devouring animals—“hyenas . . . vermin . . . wolves.” Police dragnets brought the arrest of several dozen local activists, many of whom according to one breathless account, “looked like communists.”

  Failing to identify the actual bomb-thrower, detectives and prosecutors focused on radical leaders who had supposedly “encouraged . . . by print or speech” the resort to violence. Trials were held in late summer. The state’s attorney described to the court an “anarchist conspiracy . . . beyond the pale of moral forces.” (Even “the firing upon Fort Sumter [at the onset of the Civil War] . . . was,” he declared, “as nothing compared with this insidious, infamous plot to ruin our laws and our country secretly.”) Ten anarchist and socialist leaders were indicted, eight were tried and convicted, and seven were sentenced to death. In the end, four would actually be executed and a fifth committed suicide, while the sentences of the remaining pair were commuted to life in prison.

  The riot itself, the follow-up investigation, and the court proceedings all made sensational news, reported in detail throughout the country. Fears of a similar “uprising” rippled along to other cities and towns, especially those in which radical groups were most active. Police raids on socialist meeting halls became a frequent occurrence. In some communities vigilantes acted on their own to suppress the “traitors” in their midst. Labor groups, too, suffered frequent harassment; union organizing was widely seen as a cover for revolutionary “plots.” Many of the Haymarket principals were of German birth (or extraction); thus, in 1888, a Chicago congressman introduced legislation “to provide for the removal of dangerous aliens from the territory of the United States.” The link between radical activism and foreign influence would henceforth remain a staple of common belief.

  Was it a witch-hunt? In this case we can start with difference. Haymarket activism was real, was visible, was openly challenging toward the status quo. At some points this included explicit advocacy of revolutionary goals; it also included possibly violent tactics, up to and including the use of incendiary bombs. Whereas accused witches had generally denied the characterization given them, the Haymarket leaders acknowledged their radical stance: indeed they were proud of it. (Another difference was the preponderance among these leaders/victims of men. So, once again, gender is a mostly “missing” element.) And yet: the threat they posed was limited. Their numbers were few and their resources pitifully small when compared to the forces arrayed against them. Simply put, the Haymarket episode was an instance of massive overreaction; the word “hysteria” seems not out of place here. Again, there was the sense of vast conspiratorial design, of apocalyptic danger, of alien contagion abroad in the land—all of this infused with wildly overheated emotion.

  Reaction to Haymarket helped move the center of the labor movement in a strongly anti-socialist direction. The American Federation of Labor (AFL), founded just months after the riot, would quickly achieve preeminence; most (not all) of its member units embraced “pure and simple unionism,” short-term goals, and gradualist methods. But other unions, such as the International Workers of the World (IWW), espoused a more confrontational approach, and labor strife continued into the new century at a generally high level. This, along with the assassination of President William McKinley by a professed (perhaps crazed) anarchist, helped keep antiradical feeling alive. There were also political assassinations of several European heads of state during roughly the same time period. And socialist organizing proceeded apace on both sides of the ocean.

  Then came the “Great War” of 1914-18, with all its concurrent suffering and death—and, in its final year, the triumph of Bolshevism in Russia and Marxist-inspired revolts elsewhere across Europe. American participation in the war was limited in time (18 months) but massive in scale (nearly one million men in uniform). Rising military fervor helped spawn a clutch of patriotic organizations like the National Security League and the American Defense Society. Their initial focus was the German enemy in the field, and pro-German “collaborators” at home. (Thanks in part to their efforts, the teaching of the German language was outlawed in many school systems, and some individual Americans of German descent went so far as to adopt new surnames.) When radical activists opposed the war on political grounds, public animus turned in that direction, too. Congress enacted laws to criminalize both action and speech against the government: most notably, the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918. These enabled proceedings against socialist leaders like Victor Berger and Eugene Debs, both of whom were eventually jailed.

  The Great Red Scare (1919-20)

  With the armistice of November 1918, the American economy began a difficult process of readjustment to peacetime production; there was rapid price inflation, and then a sharp rise in unemployment. And there were strikes, strikes, and more strikes: some 3,600, involving over four million workers, during the year 1919 alone. Several of these attained huge proportions. First came the Seattle general strike of January-February, starting as a walkout by sh
ipyard workers and quickly joined by many from other industries. The city was temporarily paralyzed; federal troops were called in, and police were fully mobilized. The more conservative labor organizations, such as the AFL, declined appeals for support, and most of the strikers returned to work after just a few days. But by then public opinion had been seriously engaged against them, in Seattle and around the country.

  In late spring, a series of riveting labor conflicts unfolded across the border in Winnipeg, Canada. These were also of a “general” nature—and, unlike any of their predecessors, led to a virtual takeover of city government by a special strikers’ “council.” Though outside U.S. territory, the Winnipeg strike was close enough, and violent enough, to frighten many who already sensed a tide of revolution gathering around them. Summer brought the threat of a national strike, and accompanying demonstrations, to the United States itself. Plans to begin were set for July 4; the immediate goal was to force the release of jailed labor activist Tom Mooney. When faced with another massive police mobilization, the organizers drew back; however, the mere prospect served to heighten still further a general feeling of alarm.

  Autumn brought an absolute peak in the strike-ridden year of 1919: in early September, a police walkout in Boston; later the same month, the start of a nationwide steel strike; and six weeks after that, a broadscale stoppage by mineworkers in the coalfields of the East and upper Midwest. Each of these three major actions was met by forceful counteraction, both in the courts and on the streets. Each provoked sporadic, occasionally lethal, violence. (The Boston police strike led to citywide outbreaks of vandalism. And clashes between strikers and strikebreakers in several midwestern steel towns produced death, injury, and widespread property damage.) Each aroused fearful, outraged reaction from the public at large. And this, in turn, was effectively exploited—not to say, enhanced—by corporate employers and their politically conservative allies.

  Finally, each was immediately, and heatedly, linked with “Red Revolution”—in spite of the fact that all were framed by quite limited, labor-related objectives. Consider some newspaper headlines: BOLSHEVIST NIGHTMARE. LENIN AND TROTSKY ARE ON THEIR WAY. SENATORS THINK EFFORT TO SOVIETIZE THE GOVERNMENT IS STARTED. REVOLUTION IS STAKE RADICALS PLAY FOR IN STRIKE OF MINERS. RED BOLSHEVISM DIRECTS BLOW AGAINST THE NATION. A cartoon in the New York World, with the caption “Steel Strike,” depicted a heavily muscled arm upthrust from a cluster of factory buildings, and holding high a banner bearing the single word “RED.” Another cartoon, in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, portrayed an enormous foot labeled “Coal Strike” about to stomp on the dome of the nation’s Capitol building.

  In fact, this extraordinary year included many other tumultuous happenings: the discovery of bomb plots (especially in Seattle); the founding of two separate Communist parties; race riots in several cities (Chicago, Washington, Houston) as black citizens, including many recently returned veterans, fought off assault by whites. (Another newspaper headline to mention: REDS TRY TO STIR NEGROES TO REVOLT.) To list such events—and more could be added—is to acknowledge some genuine cause for alarm. Yet never was there the slightest prospect of actual “revolution”; and official response—including the actions of both federal and local authorities—was, by any measure, extreme.

  The “Great Red Scare,” as it would later be called, rode atop a wave of angry public opinion. In the press, from church pulpits, in community forums across the land, the cry rang out: “Down with the Reds!” Suspicion turned in many directions—toward avowed radicals, first of all, but also toward labor organizers, teachers, some journalists and social workers, plus a large and more nebulous grouping of so-called parlor Reds (in short, anyone who might be construed as sympathetic to “Bolshevism”).

  These attitudes would sustain a broad and severe campaign of suppression during the late fall and early winter. Its opening phase came in November, with antisubversive roundups by federal authorities in at least a dozen cities: the total of arrests ran into the hundreds. Local and state governments followed with raids of their own; in New York, for example, a legislative committee headed by state senator Clayton R. Lusk conducted investigations leading to the detention, and deportation, of numerous “alien” radicals. (Deporting those who were noncitizens was often the preferred strategy, since it involved only an administrative proceeding, not a full-blown prosecution in court.)

  The climax came just after the New Year. On a single night ( January 2) the nation’s attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, sent federal agents in 23 different states on a massive sweep directed largely at members of the two recently founded Communist parties. The net yield was over 6,000 detainees. Some of these would be quickly deported, while others were prosecuted under the criminal statutes of individual states. Public reaction was, at first, hugely enthusiastic and congratulatory. Opinion-makers across the land saluted Palmer and his corps of enforcers; the raids were seen as tolling the “death knell” of radicalism.

  Subsequent events, however, proved anticlimactic. Protests against the treatment of detainees, including the sometimes disgraceful conditions of their incarceration, generated a growing backlash. Proceedings in the courts and the various administrative boards became increasingly bogged down; eventually, many of those held had to be released for lack of evidence. Palmer and his zealous young assistant, J. Edgar Hoover (soon to become the first director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation), sought to fan the flames of alarm by anticipating new conspiracies. But when their prediction of revolutionary violence on May Day failed to pan out, public interest began to fade.

  Yet in many ways, the Great Red Scare had already achieved its goal of anchoring anti-radical attitudes at the center of the national mainstream. The rest of the 1920s would bring no reprise of the Palmer raids, but there was hardly any need. Sedition laws had by now gained a place on the statute books of a large majority of individual states. And, at the level of local governance, police “red squads” held political activists on a generally tight leash. The federal government, meanwhile, enacted and enforced a set of massively restrictive immigration measures, with quotas designed to maintain the demographic lead of “old-stock” Americans. Although the famous Sacco-Vanzetti trial of 1921 replayed the familiar “alien radical” theme, in actual fact aliens of all kinds were a rapidly shrinking presence. Culturally, too, the dominant note was a xenophobic brand of patriotism, nicely captured in the popular phrase “100 percent Americanism.”

  So . . . was it a witch-hunt? The pattern grows familiar with each succeeding case. The strongest points in favor once again involve ideation and imagination—an alien conspiracy, vast in scope and size, with fundamentally subversive goals, and creating an aura of immense danger—all of this enhanced by disproportionately strong emotion. Moreover, the Palmer raids and subsequent court trials expressed the “hunt” aspect with special clarity. And the process, as it went forward, developed the usual “spiral” effect (with one case leading on to others), as well as a powerful drive toward “purification” (by extruding the alien poison). The “missing” parts are, as before, misogyny and overtly religious/moral sponsorship. The overall picture seems broadly similar to what appeared in the previous Red Scare, following Haymarket.

  If the 1920s were bounded at one end by the Great Red Scare, they were equally marked at the other by the Great Depression. Now the deck would be reshuffled once again, with large-scale anti-radical campaigns effectively coming to an end. Indeed, the era of the New Deal opened a door—at least partway—to radical change, in the face of ever-deepening, society-wide distress. The Communist Party itself gained a certain legitimacy denied it heretofore, and sought to exploit opportunities for “popular front” alliances with other left-of-center political forces.

  Anti-communism retreated, but hardly disappeared. Indeed, the end of the 1930s saw its partial revival—and, in a preview of things to come, the beginnings of its transformation into a potent tool of partisan politics. New Deal Democrats were increasingly paint
ed “pink” by Republican opponents. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was born with a mandate to hunt down subversion. And the so-called Smith Act, passed by Congress in 1940, made it a crime to advocate overthrowing the government by force.

  The Second World War introduced another abrupt break in this unfolding tableau; the “Reds” became allies, both at home and overseas, in the struggle against fascism. But once more the effect was temporary; and the immediate postwar era brought a rapid resurgence of anti-radical, anti-communist feeling.

  The McCarthy Era (1950-54)

  The second great Red Scare of the 20th century was born in the aftermath of the 1946 congressional elections. Republicans had gained control of both Houses for the first time in nearly two decades, in part by associating their Democratic opponents with “radical” attitudes. The Cold War, though still in its infancy, was a source of growing public alarm. The administration of President Truman responded to these changed circumstances by instituting “loyalty” programs designed to weed out potential subversives within the federal government and by initiating a series of prosecutions under the Smith Act. Meanwhile, a reinvigorated HUAC undertook a new round of investigations, centering this time on infiltration of the movie industry; eventually these would lead to prison terms for a so-called Hollywood Ten, as well as a “blacklist” to prevent employment of other presumed radicals.

  Truman’s upset victory in the 1948 presidential elections did not deflect the onrushing anti-Communist tide. In the months to follow, the American side experienced a string of Cold War setbacks: the “fall” of China to Maoist forces, the acquisition by the Soviet Union of nuclear weaponry, and the invasion of South Korea by the Communist-ruled North. By now, too, public suspicion had turned forcefully toward (alleged) Communist penetration of the New Deal, personified in the figure of Alger Hiss (a high official in the Rooseveltera State Department). Hiss had been linked to espionage, and, in the fall of 1949, was tried, convicted, and jailed on charges of perjury. The Hiss case led to other loyalty proceedings against officials in the State and Justice departments; thus was a spiral of politically fraught investigations set in motion. Local and state governments joined the fray with loyalty campaigns of their own, while liberal groups and unions scrambled to rid themselves of the “Red” taint. The Truman administration was itself obliged to fight off politically damning charges of being “soft on Communism.”