When America Lost its Head Over Anarchist Fears
Many know of the 1950s Red Scare, when demagogues like Senator Joseph McCarthy whipped America into a panic over communism. Many careers and lives were ruined in modern witch hunts, as those suspected of communism – or those simply accused of being communist even though they were not – were persecuted, boycotted, and blacklisted.
However, that 1950s panic was not the only time that America went into an anticommunist hysteria. The country had experienced another Red Scare, just as intense but far less known today, in the immediate aftermath of World War I. Early twentieth century America widely feared radical leftists. Once America joined the war, many conscientious objectors were locked up. By the end of WWI, fears of radicalism combined with distrust of foreigners in general, whom Americans blamed for the war.
The recent – and bloody – Bolshevik Revolution in Russia did not help. Things got worse when followers of an Italian anarchist sent dozens of mail bombs to prominent Americans in April, 1919. Two months later, on June 2nd, the anarchists set off nine bombs in eight cities across the country. They were accompanied by flyers that read: “War, Class war, and you were the first to wage it under the cover of the powerful institutions you call order, in the darkness of your laws. There will have to be bloodshed; we will not dodge; there will have to be murder: we will kill, because it is necessary; there will have to be destruction; we will destroy to rid the world of your tyrannical institutions“. A major panic that came to be known as the First Red Scare swept America.
