ARed Scare is a form ofmoral panic provoked by fear of the rise ofleft-wing ideologies in a society, especiallycommunism andsocialism. Historically, red scares have led to masspolitical persecution,scapegoating, and the ousting of those in government positions who have had connections with left-wing movements. The name is derived from thered flag, a common symbol of communism and socialism.
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. TheFirst Red Scare, which occurred immediately afterWorld War I, revolved around a perceived threat from theAmerican labor movement,anarchist revolution, andpolitical radicalism that followedrevolutionary socialist movements inGermany andRussia during the 19th and early 20th centuries.
TheSecond Red Scare, which occurred immediately afterWorld War II, was preoccupied with the perception that national or foreign communists wereinfiltrating orsubverting American society and thefederal government.
Following the end of theCold War, unearthed documents revealed substantial Soviet spy activity in the United States, although many of the agents were never properly identified by SenatorJoseph McCarthy.[1][2]
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The first Red Scare in the United States accompanied theRussian Revolution (specifically theOctober Revolution) and theRevolutions of 1917–1923. Citizens of the United States in the years of World War I (1914–1918) were intensely patriotic; anarchist and left-wing social agitation aggravated national, social, and political tensions.[citation needed] Political scientist and formerCommunist Party USA memberMurray 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".[3] News media exacerbated such fears, channeling them intoanti-foreign sentiment due to the lively debate among recent immigrants from Europe regarding various forms ofanarchism as possible solutions to widespread poverty. TheIndustrial Workers of the World (IWW), also known as the Wobblies, backed severallabor strikes in 1916 and 1917. These strikes covered a wide range of industries including steel working, shipbuilding, coal mining, copper mining, and others necessary for wartime activities.
After World War I ended (November 1918), the number of strikes increased to record levels in 1919, with more than 3,600 separate strikes by a wide range of workers, e.g. steel workers, railroad shop workers, and the Boston police department.[4] The press portrayed these worker strikes as "radical threats to American society" inspired by "left-wing, foreignagents provocateurs". The IWW and those sympathetic to workers claimed that the press "misrepresented legitimate labor strikes" as "crimes against society", "conspiracies against the government", and "plots to establish communism".[5] Opponents of labor viewed strikes as an extension of the radical, anarchist foundations of the IWW, which contends that all workers should be united as asocial class and thatcapitalism and thewage system should be abolished.[6]
In June 1917, as a response to World War I, Congress passed theEspionage Act to prevent any information relating to national defense from being used to harm the United States or to aid her enemies. TheWilson administration used this act to make anything "urging treason" a "nonmailable matter". Due to the Espionage Act and the then Postmaster GeneralAlbert S. Burleson, 74 separate newspapers were not being mailed.[7]
In April 1919, authorities discovered a plot for mailing 36 bombs to prominent members of the U.S. political and economicestablishment:J. P. Morgan Jr.,John D. Rockefeller,Supreme Court JusticeOliver Wendell Holmes,U.S. Attorney GeneralAlexander Mitchell Palmer, and immigration officials. On June 2, 1919, in eight cities,eight bombs exploded simultaneously. One target was theWashington, D.C., house of U.S. Attorney General Palmer, where the explosion killed the bomber, who (evidence indicated) was anItalian-American radical from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Afterwards, Palmer ordered the U.S. Justice Department to launch thePalmer Raids (1919–21).[8] He deported 249 Russian immigrants on the "Soviet Ark", formed the General Intelligence Unit – a precursor to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) – within the Department of Justice, and used federal agents to jail more than 5,000 citizens and to search homes without respecting their constitutional rights.[9]
In 1918, before the bombings,PresidentWoodrow Wilson had pressured Congress to legislate the anti-anarchistSedition Act of 1918 to protect wartime morale by deporting putatively undesirable political people. Law professorDavid 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 ideologicaldissidents".[8] President Wilson used the Sedition Act of 1918 to limit the exercise of free speech by criminalizing language deemed disloyal to the United States government.[10]
Initially, the press praised the raids;The Washington Post stated: "There is no time to waste on hairsplitting over [the] infringement of liberty", andThe New York Times wrote that 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".[11] In the event, twelve publicly prominent lawyers characterized the Palmer Raids as unconstitutional. The critics included future Supreme Court JusticeFelix Frankfurter, who publishedReport Upon the Illegal Practices of the United States Department of Justice, documenting systematic violations of theFourth,Fifth,Sixth, andEighth Amendments to theU.S. Constitution via Palmer-authorized "illegal acts" and "wanton violence".[12] Defensively, Palmer then warned that a government-deposing left-wingrevolution 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 Partybid for the U.S. presidency failed.[13]Wall Street wasbombed on September 16, 1920, nearFederal Hall National Memorial and theJP 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.[14]
In 1919–20, several states enacted "criminal syndicalism" laws outlawing advocacy of violence in effecting and securingsocial change. The restrictions included limitations onfree speech.[15] Passage of these laws, in turn, provoked aggressive police investigation of the accused persons, their jailing, and deportation for beingsuspected of being either communist or left-wing. Regardless of ideological gradation, the Red Scare did not distinguish betweencommunism,anarchism,socialism, orsocial democracy.[16] This aggressive crackdown on certain ideologies resulted in many Supreme Court cases over free speech. In the 1919 case ofSchenk v. United States, the Supreme Court, introducing theclear-and-present-danger test, effectively deemed the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 constitutional.[17]
The second Red Scare occurred afterWorld War II (1939–1945), and is known as "McCarthyism" after its best-known advocate,SenatorJoseph McCarthy. McCarthyism coincided with an increased and widespread fear of communistespionage that was consequent of the increasing tension in theCold War through theSovietoccupation of Eastern Europe, theBerlin Blockade (1948–49), the end of theChinese 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 theKorean War.
The events of the late 1940s, the early 1950s—the trial ofEthel and Julius Rosenberg (1953), thetrial ofAlger Hiss, theIron Curtain (1945–1991) aroundEastern Europe, and the Soviet Union's firstnuclear 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 drop nuclear bombs on the United States, and fear of theCommunist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA).
In Canada, the 1946Kellock–Taschereau Commission investigated espionage after top-secret documents concerningRDX,radar and other weapons were handed over to the Soviets by a domestic spy-ring.[18][19]
At theHouse Un-American Activities Committee, formerCPUSA members andNKVD spies,Elizabeth Bentley andWhittaker Chambers, testified that Sovietspies 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 theChinese Communists winning theChinese Civil War against the Western-sponsoredKuomintang, their founding of theCommunist China, and laterChinese intervention (October–December 1950) in theKorean War (1950–1953) against U.S. allySouth Korea.
A few of the events during the Red Scare were also due to a power struggle between director ofFBIJ. Edgar Hoover and theCentral Intelligence Agency. Hoover had instigated and aided some of the investigations of members of theCIA with "leftist" history, likeCord Meyer.[20] This conflict could also be traced back to the conflict betweenHoover andWilliam J. Donovan, going back to the first Red Scare, but especially during World War II. Donovan ran theOSS (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.[21]
Historian Richard Powers distinguishes two main forms of anti-communism during the period,liberal anti-communism and countersubversive anti-communism. The countersubversives, he argues, derived from a pre-WWII isolationist tradition on the right. Liberal anti-communists believed that political debate was enough to show Communists as disloyal and irrelevant, while countersubversive anticommunists believed that Communists had to be exposed and punished.[22] At times, countersubversive anticommunists accused liberals of being "equally destructive" as Communists due to an alleged lack of religious values or supposed "red web" infiltration into theNew Deal.[22]
Much evidence forSoviet espionage existed, according to Democratic Senator and historianDaniel Moynihan, with theVenona project consisting of "overwhelming proof of the activities of Soviet spy networks in America, complete with names, dates, places, and deeds." However, Moynihan argued that because sources like the Venona project were kept secret for so long, "ignorant armies clashed by night". With McCarthy advocating an extremist view, the discussion of communist subversion was made into a civil rights issue instead of a counterintelligence one.[23] Thishistoriographical perspective is shared by historiansJohn Earl Haynes[24] and Robert Louis Benson.[25] WhilePresident Truman formulated theTruman Doctrine against Soviet expansion, it is possible he was not fully informed of the Venona intercepts, leaving him unaware of the domestic extent of espionage, according to Moynihan and Benson.[26]
By the 1930s, communism had become an attractiveeconomic ideology, particularly among labor leaders and intellectuals. By 1939, the CPUSA had about 50,000 members.[27] In 1940, soon after World War II began in Europe, the U.S. Congress legislated theAlien Registration Act (also known as theSmith 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 allforeign nationals. Although principally deployed against communists, the Smith Act was also used againstright-wing political threats such as theGerman-American Bund, and the perceived racial disloyalty of theJapanese-American population (cf.hyphenated-Americans).
After the Soviet Union signed the non-aggressionMolotov–Ribbentrop Pact withNazi Germany on August 23, 1939, negative attitudes towards communists in the United States were on the rise. While theAmerican communist party at first attacked Germany for its September 1, 1939invasion of western Poland, on September 11 it received a blunt directive fromMoscow denouncing the Polish government.[28] On September 17, theSoviet Union invaded eastern Poland and occupied the Polish territory assigned to it by the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, followed by co-ordination with German forces in Poland.[29][30] The CPUSA turned the focus of its public activities fromanti-fascism to advocating peace, not only opposing military preparations, but also condemning those opposed toHitler. The party did not at first attack President Roosevelt, reasoning that this could devastate American Communism, blaming instead Roosevelt's advisors.[31]
On November 30, whenSoviet Union attacked Finland and afterforced mutual assistance pacts from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, the Communist Party considered Russian security sufficient justification to support the actions.[32] Secret short wave radio broadcasts in October from Comintern leaderGeorgi Dimitrov ordered CPUSA leaderEarl Browder to change the party's support for Roosevelt.[32] On October 23, the party began attacking Roosevelt.[33] The party was active in theisolationistAmerica First Committee.[34] The CPUSA also dropped its boycott ofNazi goods, spread the slogans "The Yanks Are Not Coming" and "Hands Off", set up a "perpetual peace vigil" across the street from theWhite House and announced that Roosevelt was the head of the "war party of the American bourgeoisie".[33] By April 1940, the partyDaily Worker's line seemed not so much antiwar as simply pro-German.[35] A pamphlet stated theJews had just as much to fear from Britain and France as they did Germany.[35] In August 1940, after NKVD agentRamón Mercader killedTrotsky with anice axe, Browder perpetuated Moscow's fiction that the killer, who had been dating one of Trotsky's secretaries, was a disillusioned follower.[36]
In allegiance to the Soviet Union, the party changed this policy again after Hitler broke the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact byattacking the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. The CPUSA opposedlabor strikes in the weapons industry and supporting the U.S. war effort against theAxis Powers. With the slogan "Communism is Twentieth-Century Americanism", the chairman, Earl Browder, advertised the CPUSA's integration to the political mainstream.[37] In contrast, theTrotskyistSocialist 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 otherSWP leaders were convicted per the Smith Act.
In March 1947, PresidentHarry S. Truman signedExecutive 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.[38] It also was the template for several state legislatures' loyalty acts, such as California'sLevering 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.[38] TheHouse Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) and the committees of SenatorJoseph 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 ofRichard Nixon andRobert F. Kennedy,[39] 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 wereblacklisted. Critics of the HUAC claim their tactics were an abuse of government power and resulted in a witch hunt that disregarded citizens’ rights and ruined their careers and reputations. Critics claim the internal witch hunt was a use for personal gain to spread influence for government officials by intensifying the fear of Communists infiltrating the country. Supporters, however, believe the actions of the HUAC were justified given the level of threat Communism posed to democracy in the United States.
Senator 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.[40]
SenatorPat McCarran (D.,Nev.) introduced theMcCarran 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.[41] Much of the bill eventually was repealed.
Theformal establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949 and the beginning of the Korean War in 1950 meant thatAsian Americans, especially those ofChinese orKorean descent, came under increasing suspicion by both American civilians and government officials of being Communist sympathizers. Simultaneously, some American politicians saw the prospect of American-educated Chinese students bringing their knowledge back to "Red China" as an unacceptable threat to American national security, and laws such as the China Aid Act of 1950 and theRefugee Relief Act of 1953 gave significant assistance to Chinese students who wished to settle in the United States. Despite being naturalized, however, Chinese immigrants continued to face suspicion of their allegiance. The general effect, according toUniversity of Wisconsin-Madison scholar Qing Liu, was to simultaneously demand that Chinese (and other Asian) students politically support the American government yet avoid engaging directly in politics.[42]
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 filmMy Son John (1952), about parents' 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–Americanthought. Even a baseball team, theCincinnati 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 theCommunist Control Act of 1954, which prevented members of the communist party in America from holding office in labor unions and other labor organizations.
Examining the political controversies of the 1940s and 1950s, historianJohn Earl Haynes, who studied theVenona decryptions extensively, argued that Joseph McCarthy's attempts to "make anti-communism a partisan weapon" actually "threatened [the post-War] anti-Communist consensus", thereby ultimately harming anti-communist efforts more than helping them.[24] Meanwhile, the "shockingly high level" of infiltration by Soviet agents during WWII had largely dissipated by 1950.[24] Liberal anti-communists likeEdward Shils andDaniel Moynihan had contempt for McCarthyism, and Moynihan argued that McCarthy's overreaction distracted from the "real (but limited) extent of Soviet espionage in America."[23] In 1950, PresidentHarry Truman called Joseph McCarthy "the greatest asset theKremlin has."[43]
In 1954, after accusing the army, including war heroes, Senator Joseph McCarthy lost credibility in the eyes of the American public and theArmy-McCarthy Hearings were held in the summer of 1954. He was formally censured by his colleagues in Congress and the hearings led by McCarthy came to a close.[40] After the Senate formally censured McCarthy,[44] his political standing and power were significantly diminished, and much of the tension surrounding the idea of 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.[38] In the 1957 caseYates v. United States and the 1961 caseScales v. United States, the Supreme Court limited Congress's ability to circumvent the First Amendment, and in 1967 during the Supreme Court caseUnited States v. Robel, the Supreme Court ruled that a ban on communists in the defense industry was unconstitutional.[45]
In 1995, the American government declassified details of the Venona Project following theMoynihan Commission, which when combined with the opening of the USSRComintern archives, provided substantial validation of intelligence gathering, outright spying, and policy influencing, by Americans on behalf of the Soviet Union, from 1940 through 1980.[46][47] Over 300 American communists, whether they knew it or not, including government officials and technicians that helped indeveloping the atom bomb, were found to have engaged in espionage.[38] This allegedly included some pro-Soviet capitalists, such as economistHarry Dexter White,[48][49] and communist businessmanDavid Karr.[50]
According toThe New York Times,China's growing military and economic power has resulted in a "New Red Scare" in the United States. Both Democrats and Republicans have expressed anti-China sentiment.[51] According toThe Economist, the New Red Scare has caused the American and Chinese governments to "increasingly view Chinese students with suspicion" on American college campuses.[52]
The fourth iteration of theCommittee on the Present Danger, aUnited States foreign policy interest group, was established on March 25, 2019, branding itself Committee on the Present Danger: China (CPDC).[51] The CPDC has been criticized as promoting a revival of Red Scare politics in the United States, and for its ties to conspiracy theoristFrank Gaffney and conservative activistSteve Bannon.[51][53] David Skidmore, writing forThe Diplomat, saw it as another instance of "adolescent hysteria" in American diplomacy, as another of the "fevered crusades [which] have produced some of the costliest mistakes in American foreign policy".[53] Between 2000 and 2023, there were 224 reported instances of Chinese espionage directed at the United States.[54]
The American Red Scares, combined with the general atmosphere of the Cold War, had a marked influence on other Anglophone countries. Anticommunist paranoia occurred in Australia,[55] Canada,[56] and the United Kingdom.[57] Inother parts of the world, such asIndonesia, fear and loathing of communism has escalated to the level ofpolitical violence.
The strike surge of 1919 featured unprecedented levels of industrial conflict. Acting as the capstone to the long strike wave of 1915–1922, it involved nearly one out of every four workers — over 4,160,000 in total, 20 percent of the labor force — walking out in more than 3,630 work stoppages, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)The Day Wall Street Exploded.
The American Pageant.
Convictions under the Espionage Act and the Sedition Act were upheld in several Supreme Court cases in 1919, includingSchenck v. United States, in which Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. first outlined his clear and present danger test [...].
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