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In American history, the First Red Scare took place in the period 1917-1920, and was marked by a widespread fear of anarchism and communism, as well as the effects of radical political agitation in American society. Fueled by anarchist bombings and spurred on by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, it was characterized by illegal search and seizures, unwarranted arrests and detainments, and deportation of hundreds of suspected communists and anarchists.

The First Red Scare began during World War I in which the United States fought from 1917-1918. The communist revolution in Russia and the ensuing Russian Civil War (1917-1923) inspired a widespread campaign of violence in the U.S. by various anarchist groups and aggressive labor unions, which American politicians, the media and the public blamed on "communists".

Contents 1 Origins 2 Anarchist actions 2.1 Attacks 2.2 Reactions 2.3 Retaliations 3 Labor unions, strikes, and marches 4 See also 5 Contemporary accounts 6 References 7 External links

The First Red Scare's origins lie in alleged subversive actions of foreign and leftist elements in the United States, particularly militant followers of Luigi Galleani, and in the attempts of the U.S. government to quell protest and gain favorable public views of America's entering World War I. In 1917, President Wilson established the Committee on Public Information to circulate and distribute anti-German and pro-Allied propaganda and other news. To add to the effectiveness of the Committee, the Bureau of Investigation (the early name for the Federal Bureau of Investigation until 1935) disrupted the work of German-American, union, and leftist organizations through the use of raids, arrests, agents provocateurs, and legal prosecution. Revolutionary and pacifist groups, such as the Socialist Party of America and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW; its members were known as Wobblies), strongly opposed the war. Many leaders of these groups, most notably Eugene Debs, were prosecuted for giving speeches urging resistance to the draft. Members of the Ghadar Party were also put on trial in the Hindu German Conspiracy Trial.

The effort was also helped by the United States Congress, with the passing of the Espionage Act in 1917 and its sister act the Sedition Act of 1918. The Espionage Act made it a crime to interfere with the operation or success of the military, and the Sedition Act forbade Americans to use "disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language" about the United States government, flag, or armed forces during war.^{[citation needed]}

Postal inspectors refused to distribute materials they deemed as subversive to the war effort. Many foreign language and radical or anarchist publications were disrupted or closed as a consequence. One of the most notorious was Luigi Galleani's Cronaca Sovversiva (Subversive Chronicle), an Italian anarchist newsletter, which not only advocated the overthrow of the government, but also advertised a booklet innocuously titled Health is in You!, actually an explicit bomb-making manual^{[citation needed]}.

After the war officially ended, the government investigations abated for a few months, but did not cease. They soon resumed in the context of Russian Revolution of 1917, the Russian Civil War and the Red Terror. To some Americans, this was a time of uncertainty and fear over the prospects of an anarchist, socialist or communist revolution in the United States.

After years of inefficient responses to violent acts by various anarchist and radical labor groups, the Federal government was finally moved to action by a new series of bombings in June 1919 (later traced to militant followers of anarchist Luigi Galleani). The wide list of prominent official targets selected by the Galleanists sparked the Federal government's Bureau of Investigation (BOI) to investigate the crimes. The mayor of Seattle received a homemade bomb in the mail on April 28, which was defused. Senator Thomas W. Hardwick received a bomb the next day, which blew off the hands of his servant who had discovered it, severely burning him and his wife. The following morning, a New York City postal worker discovered sixteen similar packages, each holding enough nitroglycerin to kill a man, addressed to well-known people of the time, including oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller. There were 30 bombs in all, sent to prominent politicians, judges, businessmen, and a lowly BOI agent who just happened to be assigned to tracking down Galleanist fugitives.

On June 2, a new series of much more powerful bombs were left at the homes of prominent politicians, judges, and law enforcement officials, even a church. A bomb partially destroyed the front of Attorney-General A Mitchell Palmer's house. The bomber, Carlo Valdinoci, a Galleanist militant blew himself up when the bomb prematurely exploded. Palmer had previously been the target of a prior Galleanist mail bomb. On June 3, 1919, New York City Night Watchman William Boehner was killed by a bomb which had been placed at a judge's house.

In the Wall Street bombing on September 16, 1920, 100 pounds (45 kg) of dynamite with 500 pounds (230 kg) of fragmented steel exploded in front of the offices of the J.P. Morgan Company, killing 38 people and injuring 400 others. Anarchists had long been suspected as initiating the attack, which followed a number of letter bombs that targeted Morgan himself. The identity of the bomber was undetermined at the time, but has since been linked to the Galleanists.^[1]

In response to the bombings, the press, public, and prominent men of business and politics flared up in a surge of patriotism, often involving violent hatred of communists, radicals, and foreigners. U.S. Senator Kenneth D. McKellar proposed sending radicals to a penal colony in Guam^{[citation needed]}; U.S. Army General Leonard Wood approved a call to put them on "ships of stone with sails of lead"; evangelist Billy Sunday clamored to "stand [radicals] up before a firing squad and save space on our ships"^[2]. In Centralia, Washington, a Wobblie, Wesley Everest, was dragged from a town jail and hanged.

The largest government actions of the Red Scare were the Palmer Raids against anarchist, socialist, and communist groups. Left-wing activists, such as five-time Socialist presidential nominee Eugene V. Debs, were jailed by government officials using the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918. Section Four of the Sedition act empowered Postmaster General, (at the time, Albert S. Burleson) to slow or confiscate all Socialist material in the mail, a task that he took on readily.

The radical anarchist, Luigi Galleani, and eight of his adherents were deported in June 1919, three weeks after the June 2 wave of bombings. Although authorities did not have enough evidence to arrest Galleani for the bombings themselves, they could deport him because he was a resident alien who had overtly encouraged the violent overthrow of the government; was a known associate of Carlo Valdonoci; and had authored an explicit how-to bomb-making manual, covertly titled La Salute é in Voi (The Health is Within You), used by other Galleanists to construct some of their large package bombs^{[citation needed]}.

In a spectacle that exposed the paranoia, xenophobia, and fear of anarchism which much of the United States was experiencing, Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italian Galleanist anarchists, were executed for murder in a trial seen by many as unfair. Both men called for retaliation against the government, and a wreath left at the funeral parlor where their caskets were exhibited bore the ominous message Aspetando l'ora di vendetta (Awaiting the hour of vengeance).^[3]

Radical retaliation was not long in coming. For their part, the Galleanists did not cease their bombing campaign, despite the Palmer raids. In 1920, a powerful bomb killed 38 people in the Wall Street bombing.

After the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, the Galleanists continued their attacks for another five years, culminating in an attempt to assassinate trial judge Webster Thayer by bombing his home in 1932.^[4]

The first major strike at the end of the war was the Seattle shipyard strike in 1919. On January 21, 35,000 shipyard workers in Seattle struck. A general strike resulted when 60,000 workers in the Seattle area struck on February 6. Despite the absence of any violence or arrests, the strikers were immediately labeled as "communists" and charges that they were trying to incite revolution were leveled against them (see red-baiting}. Hysteria struck the city as department stores, grocery stores, and pharmacies were flooded by frightened customers trying to ensure that they would be able to survive a prolonged strike. National newspapers, countrywide, told of the threat of Seattle falling to the "Reds"^{[citation needed]}. Mayor Ole Hanson, a longtime opponent of the Wobblies, publicly announced that fifteen hundred policemen and as many National Guard troops were ready to be dispatched at his orders to break up the strike. On February 10, realizing that resistance would only hurt the movement, labor leaders ordered the strike to stop. Mayor Hansen took credit for the termination of the strike, proclaimed a victory for Americanism, quit his job, and became a national expert and lecturer on anti-communism.

On May 1, 1919, a May Day parade in Cleveland, Ohio, protesting the imprisonment of Eugene Debs erupted into the violent May Day Riots of 1919. Charles Ruthenberg, a prominent Socialist leader who organized the march, was arrested for "assault with intent to kill"^{[citation needed]}.

Other labor actions, such as the Boston police strike, the Steel strike of 1919, and the organizing efforts of the Industrial Workers of the World, seemed to demonstrate the rise of radical labor unions. Furthermore, many of the organizations that supported the unions were not only associated with socialism or communism, but had already been persecuted for opposing World War I.

• Red Scare
• Immigration Act of 1924
• Red Summer of 1919
• McCarthyism

• Chicagoans Cheer Tar Who Shot Man: Sailor Wounds Pageant Spectator Disrespectful to Flag. Universal Service. Washington Post. May 7, 1919, p. 2. Retrieved April 13, 2005.
• Fear of Dissent. By "L. S. G.". The Nation. April 17 1920. Retrieved April 13, 2005.
• Benchley, Robert. The Making of a Red. The Nation. March 15, 1919. Retrieved April 13, 2005.
• Nelles, Walter. Seeing Red: Civil Liberty and the Law in the Period Following the War. PDF file. Published as a pamphlet by the American Civil Liberties Union (New York), Aug. 1920. Retrieved December 29, 2005.
• Palmer, A. Mitchell. America or Anarchy? An Appeal to Red-Blooded Americans to Strike an Effective Blow for the Protection of the Country We Love from the Red Menace Which Shows Its Ugly Head on Every Hand. PDF file. Report of Attorney-General Palmer to the United States Senate, published as a pamphlet by Martin L. Davey, Member of Congress from the 14th District of Ohio. Archived on the Early American Marxism section of the Marxist Internet Archive. Retrieved April 13, 2005.
• Palmer, A. Mitchell. The Case Against the Reds. Part III Peacemaking, 1919-1920, Radicalism and the Red Scare, World War I At Home: Readings on American Life, 1914-1920. John Wiley and Sons, Inc.: New York, pp. 185-189. Retrieved April 13, 2005.
• The Michigan Raid. PDF file. Published in The Worker [New York], v. 5, whole no. 241 (Sept. 23, 1922), pp. 1, 4. Marxists Internet Archive. Retrieved May 31, 2005.
• Exposes the Third Degree: Lambkin Tells of Brutalities Following Arrest in Michigan Raid PDF file. Published in The Worker [New York], v. 5, whole no. 245 (Oct. 21, 1922), pg. 1. Marxists Internet Archive. Retrieved May 31, 2005.
• Ruthenberg, C.E An Open Challenge PDF document. The Liberator , v. 6, no. 3, whole no. 59 (March 1923), pg. 16. Early Worker's Party history of the Red Scare. Retrieved April 11, 2005.

• Avrich, Paul, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background, Princeton University Press, 1991
• Manning, Lona, 9/16/20: Terrorists Bomb Wall Street, Crime Magazine, January 15, 2006
• Stanley Coben, A. Mitchell Palmer: Politician (New York: Da Capo Press, 1972), 203-04; quoted in the Moynihan Secrecy in Government Commission Report, The Encounter with Communism

• Famous Trials: Sacco and Vanzetti
• Red Scare (1918-1921) Image Database