The First Red Scare, Part 1
Why are we back here?
I'm sure that you've heard the saying that history doesn't repeat but it often rhymes. That's definitely true for the moment that we're living in right now. While you can compare it to the 1930s, the 1910’s is very similar, and I want to talk about it.
“Nonetheless, to modern American history the Great Red Scare remains important — important because it provides us with a concrete example of what happens to a democratic nation and its people when faith and reason are supplanted with fear. Moreover, it demonstrates clearly how easily the seeds of excessive hate and intolerance, which for the most part have remained dormant in modern American society, can suddenly develop into dangerous malignancies that spread with lightning rapidity through the whole social system. And, in view of current events, the Red Scare also can offer many valuable lessons to those of us who, like the people of that earlier postwar era, are presently bewildered and feel insecure in a restless world of rapidly changing moods and conditions.”
That was from Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919–1920 by Robert K Murray, which is kind of the definitive book on this. It’s from 1955, which was three decades after the first red scare and towards the end of the second one, so when I say “the modern era,”... well, it’s also surprisingly applicable to our modern era, but I mean the fifties.
The question of what the first Red Scare was is important, and I figure that’s what you want an answer to. But what the first red scare teaches us about our current situation is a little more important, at least to me.
If you just wanted a short paragraph description, I’ve got one. The first red scare was a moral panic over radicalism and bolshevism that led to government repression of leftist and labor movements. After the Russian Revolution, American leftists and radicals were given a purpose. The government and media steered public opinion towards “Americanism”, a goal which was easier after the swell of patriotism from the first world war. Anti-immigrant nativist views were also important to swing public opinion against left-wing movements. After major strikes and high profile bombings, the government was able to use wartime legislation to persecute labor and leftist movements. They were also able to pass laws allowing them to deport anarchists, which they used to deport radicals.
But, if I want to explain what any of that means, I’m going to have to define what a Red Scare actually is. I'm sure you've heard the word, probably in reference to the second Red Scare, which I brought up earlier, and, this is going to blow your mind, happened after this one. McCarthyism, blacklisting writers, lots of spying? It's definitely more famous than the first one. But that's not actually answering the question that I posed. I did write the script, and I am posing all of these hypothetical questions, but you could go read the Wikipedia article if you wanted a boring explanation. Or you can read Red Scare if you want to read a book that could have been written in modern times if you ignored some very fifties stuff. Mostly a dismissal of the movements he was talking about as angry radicals making mistakes, but he does use the n-word multiple times. One of them is in reference to the beliefs of the KKK, but he just uses it as an adverb once. I will not be putting those in here, obviously. I’m not making excuses for him, it’s really messed up, but the book was written much closer to the time of the first red scare, meaning he had access to many more historical resources and the book is unfortunately a valuable source.
A Red Scare is a moral panic about far left movements, which include communism, socialism, and anarchism. All three of them actually played a role in the First Red Scare, which makes the Wikipedia article defining the word Red Scare a little bit insulting because it doesn’t have the little box about anarchism on the side and mentions the word and all variations 8 times. But we don't have to get into my personal grievances here, at least in the first minute. But one more thing, for some reason it has social democracy on the side even though that is mentioned exactly once and that's saying that the people in charge couldn't distinguish between communism, socialism, anarchism, and social democracy. I promise I don’t use wikipedia as a main source and just check out the links, but it's the only thing I can find with a nice, near chronological list of events , so I can make sure I'm not missing anything. You have to make a timeline somehow.
Actually, I should probably tell you about my process. Usually I read a few books about it, or at least the important parts. But I'm not going to tell you everything. Obviously I'm not lying to you or anything, there's just a lot of events that aren't necessarily important and are kind of boring. you can read the books, they were all published long enough ago that they're on the internet archive, and they definitely have a lot of information. I don't think that you want to hear about the specifics of labor drama, because labor has so much drama. If I had to talk about every time the two people argued about methods for organizing, this would literally never end. On the other hand, I am going to go on a lot of tangents. You can experience my particular type of ADHD.
Alright, definition time! What are communism, socialism, and anarchism, because those are pretty loaded terms and you might not have the same definitions as I do. So, we are again going to Wikipedia because it’s not a super biased source.
“Socialism is an economic and political philosophy encompassing diverse economic and social systems characterised by social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to private ownership.”
Basically, single people don’t own the machines and resources that make products, multiple people do. That could be a co-op or the government or everyone, there are a lot of types of socialists and they, shocker, don’t all agree. It’s hard to explain what socialism is in the same way that it would be hard to explain what an animal is, because they’re both very wide ranging categories and if you start talking about specifics, you’re going to leave something out unless you list everything that doesn’t fit there. On the other hand, a lot of people in the US would rather describe radioactive waste to you. Yes, I'm talking to the “socialists are the real fascists” people, please look up the definition. Socialism isn’t the middle between capitalism and communism like a lot of people think, but it is a designation so broad that basically every country has policies that fall under it. Does your country pay for roads or schools? Maybe not America soon, but it's fine!
Speaking of smaller designations under the socialist umbrella, communism!
“Communism (from Latin communis, 'common, universal') is a sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology within the socialist movement, whose goal is the creation of a communist society, a socioeconomic order centered on common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange that allocates products to everyone in society based on need. A communist society would entail the absence of private property and social classes, and ultimately money and the state (or nation state).”
Yes, I kept the Latin in because I'm a nerd. I’m sure you know what communism is. When I was talking about the state owning the means of production during the socialism part, this is what I was referring to. I’m not explaining marxism vs leninism vs libertarian communism because this is not a video about theory and I don’t actually want to explain communism. I am not one and the only thing that matters to this video is what people thought of communists.
Anarchism. Oh boy. If socialism is misunderstood, anarchism isn’t understood. Fun fact, I had to watch a video about forms of government that listed off six types and slowly explained how most of them didn’t actually exist or were subtypes of other things. It said that a world with no rules would ultimately form them again, so it’s best described as a time between governments. To be fair, a middle school social studies class isn’t the best place to learn leftist theory.
“Anarchism is a political philosophy and movement that seeks to abolish all institutions that perpetuate authority, coercion, or hierarchy, primarily targeting the state and capitalism. Anarchism advocates for the replacement of the state with stateless societies and voluntary free associations. A historically left-wing movement, anarchism is usually described as the libertarian wing of the socialist movement (libertarian socialism).”
Clearing things up for people, libertarian means different things at different times like all descriptions of political philosophy, so I don’t mean the essentially republican people who don’t want to pay taxes and who want a lower age of consent. By the state, I don’t mean American states. The state as an idea is hard to explain, but it’s essentially the underpinning of a government. The force of coercive hierarchy in a set of borders. The state sets and enforces the rules for the people living within it, and it is the only force within the borders that does so.
Do these things exist in the “real world”? Yes, but people sure don’t want them to. People outside of them, to be clear. Mostly because stateless societies tend to form in times of war, because that’s when societies are shaken up enough to allow people to try new stuff. Think about autonomous zones. Or look them up. Again, not a theory video, and, while i am not being fair in run time - I'm making up for all the histories that leave out the fact that anarchists are there until they have to make a reference that they skip right past because no one likes to mention anarchists except for anarchists.
Back to the definition of a red scare before the ghost of Stalin or A Mitchell Palmer tries to take me out. Who is the second one? We’ll get to it, I promise. It would be funny if I blacked out his name like a curse word every time I wrote it. The ****** raids.
A red scare is the fear of these ideologies, specifically the fear that they’re getting more popular. Especially if another country had a revolution or is having a revolution or is having the US invade it to stop that revolution. Normal behavior from the government, always. I really shouldn’t have gone to the FBI website, but at least someone is going to visit my website.
The first red scare started in 1919. But, like all movements based on fear of “the other”, the time it technically started wasn’t the exact time it started. A Mitchell Palmer - wait - US attorney general * ******** ****** - didn’t say “we’re doing a red scare” and America got paranoid, that paranoia was there before. And Palmer too. I’m not continuing the joke, it’s not that funny. I found a dissertation arguing that the red scare started in 1917 because the fear of communism started in the US then. I would argue with that, but I also don’t have any degrees, let alone a masters and the guy who wrote it won a lot of arguments to get one, so… But everything says 1919-1920, so those are the dates we’re going with. But there is, of course, historical context.
World war one. Like the red scare, less known than the sequel. Mostly because it was a worse and dumber war. The US really should not have gotten involved in that one. You know who agreed with me on that? A lot of people then, in every country that got involved. I’m starting in Russia because this sets things up well later.
Russia. 1917. I would assume you know what’s happened in the war up to this point, but Russia wasn’t doing well in the war - having a monarch in charge of your offensive might not be great, who would have guessed? - and people were starving. Eventually, people kind of got fed up and decided that they would have another revolution. Yes, there was one in 1905, which is pretty relevant, but I don't have the time. If you want to learn more about this, check out the revolutions podcast, which has more than a hundred episodes on these. It’s 10.1 to 10.103 if you have a few weeks to kill.
It started off with the February Revolution, which started on March 8th and ended March 16th. At the time, Russia was still using the Julian calendar, which was 11 days behind the current Gregorian calendar, meaning most of their revolution names have these off-by-one month errors. This one was not the Bolshevik Revolution, meaning that the people in charge were not the Soviets, they were the former duma (parliament). Well, they were in charge in name, but the revolution kept going until the October revolution (november) which was the bolsheviks.
“American radicals were not horrified; they were enthralled by the events taking place in Russia. Persecuted on all sides for their opposition to the war and to capitalism, the Bolshevik pro-peace and anti-bourgeois philosophy intrigued them.”
To say something that the quote didn't, this was essentially the only way forward for the radical left of the time. Obviously, we know now that the Soviet Union committed horrible crimes against its own people and that people it forcibly took over (if you’ve never heard of the Holodomor, it’s when the soviet union withheld grain from Ukraine, which is a genocide, and killed around 3.9 million Ukrainians), but at the time we’re talking about, there was still a civil war going on. Anything that happened in the country could be chalked up to the fact that they were still fighting and not in control yet. But why did I say it was the only way forward for most people? Because no other revolution worked. The Paris commune was crushed, the german revolution ended in the defeat of the far left and the establishment of the Weimar republic, which would last until 1933 for obvious reasons. There had been one successful socialist revolution, so if someone looked at the horrible world around them and thought that they needed to do something, there was one precedent. So when I write about people being fans of the soviet union, that’s why.
The Russian civil war went on for a while, but that’s what you need to know. The scary communists became the most important force in Russia and the common people were in charge now. Well, according to the people in America who were flipping out and the radicals.
Speaking of a man who was not a radical, Woodrow Wilson. for all you can say about him - don’t watch the birth of a nation in the white house. That was bad. Also all the anti-DEI - oops, wrong president. I mean the firing of a bunch of black government workers which is different. For all of that, he was really into self determination and against the US owning colonies. I wonder what he would call Hawaii. Or the rest of the US. But for other nations, he was all about it! Unless they voted wrong, like in Latin America. Or they were the Bolsheviks. He supported the provisional government as a democracy and thought that the Bolsheviks had destroyed it, which showed how much he understands because the country was a mess at the time. The US government was actually the first to recognize the provisional government. The US government actually interfered in the civil war at one point, which is a very interesting topic I’m not getting into. There’s a Lions Led by Donkeys about it, they do pretty good stuff about military history if you like that kind of history but are wary of people who get a little too into it.
The Bolsheviks also didn’t want to continue fighting, to which I have to say, congratulations, I guess you were on the right side, guys. The US was on the same side as Russia used to be, though, meaning they had just lost an ally. There were even rumors that Russian leaders were German, or at least influenced by them.
Here’s another quote from Red Scare, because he says it better than I can.
“Naturally, economic conservatives eagerly seized upon bolshevism’s dangers in order to further their own campaign of stifling political and economic liberalism. The net result was the implantation of the Bolshevik in the American mind as the epitome of all that was evil. “
A bit later it says, and I must remind you that this was written in 1955 and we were having another red scare at the time and the writer definitely admits he has some prejudices,
“As a result, exaggerated conclusions were reached concerning the size and influence of the movement. Indeed, never before had the nation been so overwhelmed with fear. It is understandable. Because of its waning faith, its political and moral irresponsibility, and its momentary abandonment of high ideals, the nation had been susceptible as never before. Harassed by the rantings and ravings of a small group of radicals, buffeted by the dire warnings of business and employer organizations, and assaulted daily by the scare propaganda of the patriotic societies and the general press, the national mind ultimately succumbed to hysteria.”
Speaking of a small group of radicals, let's talk about what was happening in the US at the time. Well, we actually need to go back to 1914, but that isn't too big of a time jump.
It may amaze you, but the US used to be strongly against interfering in other people's Wars. Inconceivable, I know. But the US was kind of a second rate baby empire with a few colonies. While again, the US is a colonial project and the entirety of the US is a colonized nation, that isn't what the other imperial nations thought at the time. If you wanted a world spanning Empire at the time, you would have looked at European nations or Japan. People at the time wouldn't have thought of Japan in an equal way and probably still don't, for some unknown reason (racism), but they had a massive colonial empire.
All that's to say, when World War I started in Europe, President Wilson went with the tried and true American tradition of not getting involved. Isolationism, if you want the fancy AP Gov word for it. It had been an American tradition since back when George Washington gave his farewell address recommending that we didn't get involved in foreign entanglements and we didn't form political parties. We didn’t listen at all, but we stayed out of Europe’s shit for longer than we tried the second one. We didn’t try the other one, there were political parties when Washington gave that speech. That's all to say that when Woodrow Wilson campaigned on the promise in 1916 of not getting the US into the war, it wasn’t a radical position. And he made such good on that promise that he… wait no, never mind, he folded. It took a while though so congrats on that stunning moral fiber, Woodrow.
People think that the sinking of the Lusitania was the Pearl Harbor of World War I. Sure if Pearl Harbor happened in 1939 and the US sucked it up for a few years. Tell me when the Lusitania got sunk, I dare you. Just the month? Maybe the year? Exactly. It isn’t exactly a day that lives in infamy, as the saying goes. It was May 7th, 1915, if you were wondering. Another 7th. Don’t be on US boats on the 7th during world wars, i guess. The Germans promised not to do unrestricted submarine warfare again, and the US pretended that it was totally an unarmed ship even though there were munitions on it. Still not cool to sink a passenger ship but it's war, and I'm not saying that was the worst crime of the Imperial German Army. It was technically fair game by the rules of war.
It might be confusing that the US wasn't immediately gung ho to avenge all of its fallen citizens, but the US wasn’t a military and economic powerhouse like it was in 2001 or 1950. That wouldn’t happen until 1945 and the end of WW2. in 1915, we were a totally normal country that could deal with a few people dying. Also, the US, like me, could have gone both or neither ways at that point. Yes, that is a little bit of bi and ace humor for you. There were a lot of German immigrants in the United States at the time and no side of the war was worse than any of the others. Remember this is World War 1. Sure the Imperial German Army wasn't great, as said before, but every other country in the war wasn't great either. I mean, the kaiser, the tsar and the King of England were all related to each other.
A lot of other people wanted to be neutral. The Irish immigrants didn't necessarily like the English for some unknown reason. Also just people didn't want to go die in a stupid land grab. This may amaze you but a lot of Southern farmers were saying that it was a rich man's war and a poor man’s fight and are actually extremely anti War. The South is actually full of cool things; it just has a lot of uncool people too.
The US would sell weapons to the allies but remain neutral until Germany said that it was resuming unrestrained submarine warfare, which they promised not to do. Then they sent that Zimmermann Telegram to Mexico, who definitely were not going to get involved like the kaiser wanted them to. They were in the middle of a civil war at the time, I don’t think they were going to join another war effort (fun fact, it only found out because Germany decided to send it through US telegram lines and the British were spying on them.) Between the telegram that promised Mexico could take back the land that the US stole and the ships that no one remembers but got sunk, the government felt like it was time for the US to go to war.
A lot of people were still opposed to it, of course. The US still had the draft at that point, so it wasn't just people who enlisted getting sent over, it was any man between the ages of 21 and 30. The Socialists opposed the war before it started, and they didn't stop that when we were getting involved.
“Advocates of these varying philosophies organized themselves into a multitude of small groups during the prewar period. By 1919, however, there were two organizations which had succeeded in unifying the radical movement to some extent and with these the nation was most familiar. The one was the Socialist party; the other was the Industrial Workers of the World.”
Those were two general groups we’re going to talk about, the Socialist party of America and members of the Industrial Workers of the world, or the IWW. Or the Wobblies. They go by a lot of names. The Socialist party was a third party that managed to get people elected. Like, a surprising amount of people elected. Third parties used to be a lot more important. In April 1917, they met to write and accept a declaration saying that they were anti-American intervention in the war and saying that they would oppose the war through “demonstrations, mass petitions, and all other means within our power.” If you know the American people, they were cool and normal about this- Nope! They hated the socialists with a fiery passion. Ignoring the entirety of the socialist’s anti-war past, they decided that they were spies or pro-German because… obviously?
They were pretty far left, but not as far left as the next people we’re going to talk about, the IWW. The IWW was a union, and to explain why they were so far left, I need to get into American labor history. Most unions in US history were racist and sexist and only let types of workers in, meaning they sucked at being meaningfully leftist. You can’t organize the workers if you don’t have most of the workers. While they were an international union and had members in other countries, we’re just going to talk about the American part. The government also hated them. I found a collection of information about the IWW, and the 4th thing on their timeline, after forming and writing their founding documents, was “Getting framed for murder”. There are multiple people who get accused of murder in the timeline, but most of them happen before the red scare, so I’m not bringing them up. Don’t worry, more people are going to get accused of murder in cases still brought up to this day.
As I said above, both groups opposed the war, and the government decided to suppress their activism, especially their publications. Unlike kids these days, people used to read books! Well, papers, but whatever, I've never lived in a world with print media. You’re reading this on a website, and even this is nostalgic. Remember the timeline I brought up? Well, a lot of it is “the IWW started another newspaper”, because that was the only way to get information around, especially if you were poor. The government is going to try to stop them from doing this, but that’s later.
Another quote from Red Scare, mostly because it has a lot of good quotes. “As in the case of the Socialists, the Wobblies were bitterly opposed to the war. But unlike most Socialists, they were willing to implement verbal opposition with concrete action. Members signed up for the draft as “IWW, opposed to war,” while IWW posters were distributed, saying, “Don’t Be a Soldier, Be a Man” and “Slow down. The hours are long, the pay is small, so take your time and buck them all.” “ I mean, what does the country mean to you if it doesn't support you? why would you go and die for it if it doesn't support you back?
The American public reacted in a very similar way to them, and decided they were financed by germany. Honestly, for a very specific time period, Germany was the Soviet Union of American politics. Everything the public didn’t like was funded by them. In case you were wondering if the American public has ever changed, another quote.
“As the war progressed, this hang-them-all-at-sunrise attitude further deepened and soon all super-patriots were believing that the only remedy was to take them “out into the desert and shoot them.” “
Now, why were people so against leftist ideals? Well, Robert k Murray says
“Even more basic in creating a hostile attitude was bolshevism’s unyielding emphasis on the world-wide overthrow of capitalism and the complete abolition of private property. This doctrine ran counter to all accepted American traditions of political philosophy and economy and struck terror into the heart of the average American conservative. Already harassed by domestic radicals who advocated big changes, the nation viewed the emergence of Russian bolshevism with extremely grave concern and feared that it might portend serious domestic consequences.”
This man was writing in the 1950’s, so he has a different opinion about leftist politics than I do, even though he says something close to my analysis later in the book But I might say that rich people were trying to take back the power that they had lost during the trust-busting era (..I’m handing it to teddy roosevelt) and stopping the further spread of anti-capitalist ideas was the best way to get people back on their side. And if they had to make things up and use previous American bigotries to do so, well, that was even better.
What were those previous bigotries? Well, we’re going to get into some dark stuff (like bigotry isn’t dark.) Content warning for antisemitism. But first, we’re going to get into something slightly more… not funny, but kind of. To understand why the Us didn’t like Italians, because they’re white, right, we have to explain anti-catholicism and nativism.
I wouldn’t say that Protestantism, evangelical or otherwise, has engraved itself into America's bones as much as I would say it’s the strontium-90 in them. That’s what got released in the radioactive fallout from the atomic bombs. Deeply entwined in a way that makes them inseparable, caused by horrible American atrocities, wane over time, but will never be removed in our lifetimes? Nothing against any christians, it’s the specific American cultural interpretation of the idea that’s toxic. But the US in the 1910’s was proudly Protestant. And Italians are, by and large, Catholic. Or that’s what the picture of Mary in my grandparent’s bathroom implies. I don’t like it, but at least it’s facing the corner. Also, the fact that the literal Catholic country, Vatican city, is contained within the capital of Italy, which might be a stronger piece of evidence.
The general reason for anti-catholicism is the idea that Catholics cannot be loyal to the United States because their loyalty to the pope is going to come before their loyalty to anyone else. Keep the “divided loyalties” trope in your mind, it’s going to come back. That is the reason why we have had two Catholic presidents, when every single one of our presidents has been, or at least has said they were christian. I’m not implying the “Obama is a muslim” conspiracy theory, I’m talking about the presidents who might have been atheist. We also haven’t had a orthodox president or something, so I would be interested to see what kinds of bias people would bring against them, but the rest if them have been anglican or evangelical or pretending to be in order to appeal to their rightwing base… what are you doing here, Reagan?
Anti-catholicism in the United States has been a tradition since groups of people came over from England to take over the country. Some of the first people to colonize the country, Spain, were in fact very Catholic and used Catholicism to spread their imperialism. But since almost all of the people who forcefully took over and created what we would now know as the United States, or the original 13 colonies, were some form of British, they were not big fans of the Catholics, because they had split off over Henry the 8th things. The first settlement in what we would now call Jamestown were explicitly sent by the king of England as a company endeavor which he had a stake in. The other people that we think of as “founding the US” were Puritans, who were anti-every religion that wasn't specifically theirs and wanted a beautiful world where they were the only people who got to discriminate on the basis of religion. Then, and this does kind of disprove my point, the US got a lot more okay with Catholics after the Catholic French helped us out with the whole Revolution thing and we split off from the British
The second start of anti-catholicism in the US was the first wave of immigration, in 1845-1849. Most of the people coming, at least on the East Coast, were people from Western Europe. Of course, the Gold Rush was happening on the other side of the country, which caused a lot of people from Asian countries, especially China, to move there, but China was not a communist country during the first Red Scare, so discussions of anti Asian racism might have to wait until I do a second Red scare series. leaving you with one fun fact, California did have segregation, it was just against Asian people. but the people who were coming from Western Europe weren't just people from the UK, like it usually had been. Well, that's a bit of a complicated discussion, I really don't want to get into the troubles of Ireland being in the UK at the time. At the time guys, because it was taken over by the English, I am definitely not making any statements about current Irish/Uk politics, I promise.
While there were still people from the United Kingdom coming over, the two other main immigrant groups were Germans and the Irish. While we think of Germany as… well we don't really think of Germany in terms of religion in the United States a lot, but it was literally where Protestantism was founded. While Germany does have a large Protestant majority, it also has a lot of Catholic people, Who were the majority of the German immigrants to the US at the time. On the other hand, the Irish. during the first big wave of immigration, the Irish constituted most of the immigrants because there was a potato famine/genocide going on at the time. They were a refugee population who happened to have a religion which was not the majority, so you can guess what the US thought about that. Nativism became a big thing in the US, which is bigotry based on someone's country of origin or immigrant status instead of just the way that they look. If you ever heard of the Know Nothing party, that's who the voice of the nativists was.
After that very long history, we come to the second wave of immigration. Instead of being from Western Europe, there was starting to be more immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe. I promise you we're going to get into the Eastern European thing. At the time it started, in the 1860s, there were a lot of things going on in Europe. One of them was the unification of Italy. Since the fall of Rome, and I promise I'm not going to trace the entire history from Rome to 1917, Italy had been a group of small city states. Then came the unification of Italy, which is a complicated historical topic I'm not going to explain because I am off on too much of a digression already, and all of those city-states became something approximating what we now know as modern-day Italy. However, when you have a very tall country (I don't exactly know how to explain it, you know what I mean by a country that spans a lot of longitude lines, I guess) there is going to be a difference between the North and South. If you understand the difference between the North and South and the way that they think about each other in the United States, it's pretty similar. Blah, blah, blah, ignorant and superstitious. The only reason is because southern Italy is a lot harder to grow things in, which means a lot harder to industrialize as fully, and of course industrialization is the only way to measure how civilized people are.
And for that reason, most of the people who came over to the United States were southern Italian. And the Mafia as we know it today is kind of a collection of crime families from various places in southern Italy. I am quite obviously not saying that all Italian people are in the mafia, because if I was then I would be implying that I am in the mafia and I am not. I would say that if I was in the mafia too, so… just trust me on this one. I’m saying that being a criminal and being Italian was linked in the minds of Americans.
To write this part, I found a book called The Italian in America, which is part extremely detailed statistics about the Italian American population in 1905, part model minority thing about Italian people. I mean, there's also a lot of racism against not only African-American people, but like every country in Europe too? It’s baffling. if you would like to fight through so many statistics for just the wildest possible quotes, it's on the internet archive. It does have a pretty good overview on just generally what it was like for Italian people, which I am going to share because it does have a great quote in the middle:
“The average immigrant shrinks from exposing his ignorance to any but his own countrymen. He has reason for this in the common lack of patience with his supposed dullness and blunders. I have heard Americans, otherwise apparently rational, shout at Italians as if bellowing would make spoken EngUsh more intelligible, and swear at them as if ignorance of English was an unspeakable offence. The Italian is sensitive to ridicule, and feels the injustice of abuse keenly whether he resents it openly or not … The clustering in cities, so often complained of, is attributable not only to his fondness for social life and lack of means to enter the country, but to the lack of invitation with any assurance of patience or sympathy.”
Sure, sensative to ridicule, unlike anyone else? It's facinating vintage 1910's race science.Anyway, this very long digression has been to say that Italians were seen as "others", which is why it was so easy to turn Americans against them.
And now, unfortunately, another group that wasn’t considered to be white. Let’s talk about antisemitism. Starting, again, at the takeover by the British of the country, another bias they held was against Jewish people. The entire history of Europe has antisemitism ingrained into it, and I am not jewish, so this is a bit harder of a subject for me to discuss. If I mess anything up, please tell me. Also, antisemitism is a much more active phenomenon in US right now, so it’s not as “hey, look at this weird book I found” as it is “this is one of the longest running forms of racism in the world and has led to so many horrible atrocities that I can’t make jokes about much here.”
Anyway, the history of antisemitism in the US is very connected to the history of europe. It was carried over from there, and it’s still here, under a lot of names. One of them is the fear of communism. I’m going to explain why, but first, we need to talk about what antisemitism is. It says that Jewish people are a different race from the “white” people who live here, therefore they can’t be trusted. There’s also a parallel to the Catholicism thing, where Jewish people have sympathy and loyalty to other Jewish people above the people from wherever they live. The most important part of pre 20th century antisemitism was the idea of the blood libel, or the idea that Jewish people killed christians, especially Christian children. Usually the theory goes that the blood was used to make the bread for passover. Pogroms, or violent genocides against Jewish people happened frequently, and kings forced them to live in certain areas. There’s also the idea that Jewish people control the banking system, or just the world. The banking theory is because there’s a rule against interest collecting in Christianity and Islam, and Jewish people weren’t allowed to do a lot of jobs, so they took whatever they were allowed to do, which was money lending sometimes. Obviously, not all Jewish people were rich, most of them were extremely poor, but the most visible Jewish people were lending money, and people don’t like the people charging them any money in general. Combine that with being a disliked minority, and you get a self sustaining loop of bigotry.
On that note, time to take a small digression into conspiracy theories. You’ve heard of conspiracy theories before, obviously. If you haven’t, welcome to the internet, I don’t know how you found me. Now, the difference between a conspiracy theory and an actual conspiracy is wider than you might think, even though some people calling out actual conspiracy theories have been thought of as conspiracy theorists. An actual conspiracy is a secret thing that is being hidden from most people, usually by some powerful group like a government. however, an actual conspiracy is limited in scale, and is usually found out at some point. Consider things like the Iran-Contra scandal. The scale was “sending money to the contras so that they could take over and selling weapons to the Iranian government to fund it”, and it got found out while they were doing it. On the other hand, conspiracy theories like the idea of a flat Earth would require the entire world, every single government and scientists and astronaut to be covering it up. And the only people that found out about it were some weirdos on forums? no, flat Earth is a conspiracy theory in that it is extraordinarily wide scale and has somehow never been revealed by any of the countries that are constantly at war with each other. While conspiracy theories can be fun (not being into them, just making up your own as a joke. For instance, JFK got assassinated because he was a Catholic.) the ultimate heart of them is both anti-intellectual and, when you get down to the deep dark part of most of them, antisemitic.
A conspiracy theorist worldview is a gateway into believing a lot of things. If the government said that world was round and they said that you need to get your kids vaccinated, who said they didn't lie about the second one? I am not a huge fan of the government or states in general, but I can say both of those things are definitely true. The world is in fact round and kids in fact do need to be vaccinated. But the grandfather of all conspiracy theories is the idea that Jewish people control the world, and it's woven so deeply into most other conspiracy theories that you can't separate them. Who is the “world government” or “the elites” or “the globalists” covering up all of these things? I think you can guess. And that’s what the modern form of antisemitism is. If you were wondering why conspiracy theorists tend to end up right wing, well that's why.
The conspiracy theorist narrative began at the end of the 19th century, and is best exemplified in What might be the most famous conspiracy book ever written, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It was written in Russia in 1903, probably by the Okhrana, which was essentially the Russian secret police at the time. It was supposedly the minutes of a meeting about the secret plot to take over the world, but it was plagiarized from an already plagiarized source. Not that you need me to tell you that this is complete and utter horseshit, but it is even more fake than you thought it might be. If you want to learn more about it, there's a really good behind the bastards two parter on it. Also, more fun facts, Henry Ford would bring it over to the US, translate it, and publish it. There’s just something cursed about car people, I think. Of course, I’m talking about volkswagen. What does the “volk” part stand for, huh?
Anyway, when I was talking about nativists, they quite obviously didn't just go after Catholics. Jewish people coming from usually Eastern European countries, were also targeted. When I say that Eastern European people were targeted on suspicion of being communists, there is an implication. So when I say it later, you know exactly why they were targeting specifically Eastern European people. Obviously, not all eastern european immigrants were jewish, but it’s a dog-whistle. You don’t say the word, but most people know what you mean and you have plausible deniability.
Now, onto the actual connections between communism and Judaism, because they do exist, but also because there are a lot of myths about them being connected that I need to talk about. The phrase cultural marxism is actually an antisemitic dog-whistle, for a reason. To start, yes. Karl Marx did come from a jewish family, even if he wasn’t raised into the religion, which a lot of people like to use for their wildly bigoted ideas. Also, marginalized people tend to be on the left, especially the radical left, especially the part of the left that maybe wants to take down the government that is currently oppressing them. And when they get kicked out of the country that they are being oppressed in or have to flee due to violence, then they tend to bring their beliefs over to the country that they move to. So yes, some revolutionaries, like Trotsky, may have been jewish, but not all of them. For fuck’s sake, the Soviet Union would sign the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact with Nazi Germany.
Why did I do this entire long digression into the specific bigotries against the main ethnic groups of communists/anarchists? Because of the bigoties. The Red Scare wasn't just a worry about the specific ideologies, it was a worry about the people who were associated with the ideologies. And not just because those people tended to be the ones bringing over ideas that hadn’t reached the United States, because we didn't have the internet and it was kind of hard to send over radical literature, but because those people tended to be poor and immigrants. And people who are poor typically end up being exploited for their labor. Think about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. Do you want to know who is working there? Yeah, Italian and Eastern European immigrants.
And now, we need to talk about some laws passed between 1917 and 1918. Obviously, there were more than a hundred laws passed each year, but we only need to talk about two or three (depending on how you characterize amendments to a law.) I am not going to go over the entirety of the 1917 bridge policy because that would be boring and also not related directly to what I'm talking about and also I don't like talking about civil engineering stuff. Nothing against them, it just seems bureaucratic. I’m talking about this because it's enjoyable not because I want to read a ton of boring documents about bridge policy. There were a lot of those, apparently. I had to read so many of all the pamphlets, I do so much for you guys. The Espionage Act of 1917, the Sedition Act of 1918, and the Immigration Act of 1918 are pretty important to today.
I'm starting with the Espionage Act because it was the first one to get passed and also I'm going to get very mad about the Immigration Act. The Espionage Act of 1917 was created to prevent people from getting information about the United States defense or military operations and using it or passing it to a foreign government that would use it to harm the United States. It was also created to prohibit interference with military operations or recruitment and to prevent insubordination in the military. I read the entirety of this very boring government document for you. If you know about this law, you might be aware of the court case that resulted from it, Schenck v. US, In which the court said that you can actually curb people's rights in times of War, such as their ability to pass out, I don't know, flyers telling people not to get drafted. The fact that you can abridge people's rights in times of war never did anything bad- wait, I forgot Japanese internment camps.
Anyway that's pretty bad, but it's not like it's still a law right? Oh wait, it is? It’s still established legislation in the United States and they have prosecuted everyone from the Rosenbergs to Edward Snowden under it? If you were thinking back to your vast Cold War knowledge, the Rosenbergs did get the death penalty. Yeah, this is still established US law.
Time for something a little less scary only because it isn't law anymore. that's it, it's pretty bad. The sedition Act of 1918 which was an amendment to the Espionage Act, forbade you from saying anything about the government, the flag, or the military that could cause people to see it or its institutions with contempt. Yes, that means that I could insult the military uniforms hard enough that they would throw me in jail. I mean it couldn't have been that long, right… nope 5 to 20 years. it also allowed the Postmaster General to refuse to deliver mail that met the same standards. This is how the government suppressed socialist and IWW publications.
Luckily, it came late enough in the war that there weren't that many prosecutions under this sedition Act. you might have actually heard of one of them, Eugene V Debs. That's right, the man who ran for president under the banner of the Socialist Party which was a legitimate thing that you could do in the early 1900s. He was actually running from jail at the time. I had actually never realized this was why he was running from jail although I definitely did know that he was running from prison so this is pretty interesting to me. It's also why I never agree with the people who are like “we have a felon in the White House” because that's not anyone's biggest problem. I've heard people who said something like “well if we don't let felons vote, we shouldn't let them be in the White House,” and I don't actually agree with either of those things. Voting is a right that everyone should have in the current system that we have and I don't think your carceral status should at all be connected to your eligibility to be the president. a lot of people get sent to prison on things like drug charges which I don't think we should prosecute anyone for, but definitely don't mean that you can't be president. I don't know, it just seems like people are coping in whatever way they can instead of saying that the president is a fascist. Laws don’t equate to morality, and saying that someone’s rights should be taken away because they were arrested by the state gives the state a little too much power, and we know who they like to arrest, right? Right?
I don't know, I just think Eugene V. Debs is pretty cool. His middle name was Victor which I also learned. Born in 1855 in Terre Haute, Indiana, a place containing a college I applied to and got into, so thanks, Debs. He dropped out of school at age 14 to be a grease cleaner on the railroad, then got a job as a fireman. Well, got, was forced to have because the firemen didn’t show up, it doesn’t matter. By firemen, I don’t mean firefighters, I mean the men who shovel coal into the engine, which isn’t a great job but does pay more than fifty cents a day. That’s about $9.24 a day. He got a dollar a day, or $18.49. If you can guess from the pittance he was paid, he got into labor organizing in the 1870’s. He created several unions in the 1880’s, then helped organize the American Railway Union in 1893. The next year, the union got involved in the Pullman strike, meaning Debs got in trouble and went to jail, which happened to the guy multiple times, because the run from prison was a different time. He became a socialist in prison, because people sent him letters and pamphlets.
On to the law that you've never heard of but is actually a lot more important than you think it is. It might be the most important law that you've never heard of. Simply put, it allows the US to deport foreign anarchists who aren’t citizens. That is right, the United States has been deporting people that it doesn't think have the correct political opinions forever. I am not directly comparing it to what is going on right now but… come on. It has also never been repealed so technically anarchists aren’t allowed to become US citizens. It was largely negated by the Immigration Act of 1990 but it's still really uncool that that is a current law that is on the books in the United States.
Where did the law come from? The Immigration Act of 1903 was the first that contained anarchists as a group that the US could refuse to give citizenship to. but it wasn't strong enough and people who were self-professed anarchists were not able to be convicted. How sad. so they wrote a new law that defined it much more broadly, stating:
“Aliens who are anarchists; aliens who believe in or advocate the overthrow by force of violence of the Government of the United States or of all forms of law; aliens who disbelieve in or are opposed to all organized government; aliens who advocate or teach the assassination of public officials ; aliens who advocate or teach the unlawful destruction of property ; aliens who are members of or affiliated with any organization that entertains a belief in, teaches, or advocates the overthrow by force or violence of the Government of the United States or of forms of law, or that entertains or teaches disbelief in or opposition to all organized government, or that advocates the duty, necessity, or propriety of the unlawful assaulting or killing of any officer or officers, either of nonspecific individuals or of officers generally of the Government of the United States or of any other organized government, because of his or their official character, or that advocates or teaches the unlawful destruction of property shall be excluded from admission into the United States .”
It also removed the protections for people who had been in the US for longer than 5 years. To Grant whatever shreds of fairness I can conjure up, most of these people that got deported were actually anarchists. On the other hand, Congress will make no law abridging the freedom of speech? I'm not saying that is worse than what is happening right now. I'm just saying that the people in charge always wanted to take protections away from people in the United States for disagreeing with their political opinions. and the people that it is easiest to take those rights away from are people who aren't citizens. At least that's who they're going to start with. The state has done this forever and they're going to keep doing it because people are more worried about what rights are going to be taken away from them than what rights are currently being taken away from other people. The things that happen to other people in this country, people who aren't necessarily as privileged as you, are direct precursors of what could happen to you if you don't stand up and fight against them. but it's not just oh no what if this happens to me, it's oh no this thing is happening to someone else and I need to stop it because it is bad for them. And this is why you didn't learn them. People who don't know history are repeating it and no one remembers what we did in the past, which could be sinking us right now.
Well, that got heavy! There was definitely a reason why I wanted to talk about this. But why did it happen back then?
Money. Specifically, the idea of losing it. Woodrow Wilson was the last of the progressive presidents. I promise this connects. there was a political movement called the Progressive Movement. We only ended up with three presidents, Teddy Roosevelt, William H. Taft, and Wilson. Before the progressive movement was the gilded age, a time when Rich robber barons ruled over the country, and the presidents did nothing about it. I mean, they didn't do much about anything, because it was a time of laissez-faire governing. Laissez-faire is an economic system where the government essentially does not involve itself in economics at all. the progressive movement realized that this wasn't going well.
But the main thing that Teddy Roosevelt did, at least the main one that we're going to worry about right now, is trust busting. A trust is essentially a monopoly. It's more complicated, but I am not up on my financial not quite crimes because I don't have enough money to commit them. Teddy Roosevelt, for all of the many, many things you could say about him as a person, and I'm sure that the Philippines could say a lot about him as a person, was also extraordinarily antitrust. Well, for the time, which was pretty good. fun fact about the Sherman antitrust Act, the one that was used to break up all of the trusts? When it was first passed, it was used to break up unions. But one president did eventually use it to break up actual trusts.
Now am I saying that the president was the only one doing anything progressive? Of course not. Whenever a president has a policy, especially if the idea could be considered left of center, there have been people pushing for that for years before anyone in power decided that they could be rewarded for listening to them. The muckrakers of the time, like Jacob Riis, a Danish photographer who took pictures of the tenements. If you’ve ever heard the saying “How the Other Half Lives”, it comes from the name of his photo series. Well, it comes from a book, but it became famous because he named his photos after that. Another muckraker is Upton Sinclair, who published a very famous book called “The Jungle” that exposed the horrible conditions of the meatpacking industry. It’s a very gross book, because the meatpacking industry was even worse in 1906, and do you know how bad meatpacking is? It’s so gross. The message of the book was mostly about how socialism is good, but, as he said, he “aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” To be fair, if you read the book, you would understand why it helped pass the first American food laws. Last, but not least, because she’s my favorite, Ida B Wells. I'm not going to talk too much about her right now, because she comes back up later, but all you need to know about her is that her project was anti-lynching.
Anyway, all of this history is to say that Americans were able to see what was happening in the places that they didn't want to look at, and they realized that maybe the people in charge of the industries weren’t amazing people. So when a war came around, and patriotism spiked, the robber barons and the people who wanted to be robber barons but were only pretty rich saw their opportunity. They could swing the public opinion against the people telling them that the rich were not their friends.
During the war, there was a committee, called the Committee on Public Information. Headed by George Creel, a Progressive journalist, PR expert, and chair of the board of censors. I think you can imagine what kind of public information they were disseminating. Essentially, the job was to make propaganda, but it also led to a new wave of nationalism. Another thing that they did was allowing citizens to make their own private groups to investigate disloyalty. The APL, which will be important later, had more than 200,000 members. They reported people around them, looked through their personal records including medical records. I have no idea what you can get from medical records that would tell you that they’re a spy - probably something racist. They also did breaking and entering, bugging, and wiretaps. This is the early 1900’s, I don't know how they did that. I was going to make a joke about a five pound bug attached to the handset, but they probably just hung out with the operators to listen in on them.
This history was nice, but let's end with something fun. Attorney General ******. Come on, you knew I was going to bring it back.
Alexander Mitchell Palmer. Born near White Haven, Pennsylvania on May 4th, 1872. If you guessed what religion a guy born in the late 1800’s in Pennsylvania was… yep, Quaker. Sorry to anyone who guessed Amish, but half points because I wish that was true. The guy would have done a lot less damage if he convinced everyone in his little Amish community that Joseph down the road was coveting people's cows, because he kind of did that on a national level. You really wouldn’t think that a Quaker would be so intolerant, but I guess he’s red scare georg. Average Quaker persecutes 5 leftists a year factoid incorrect, red scare george, who lives in Washington DC and persecutes 100 leftists a minute is an outlier and should not have been counted. He went to Swarthmore, and served as director of various banks and public service corporations, which you could do after just graduating in the 1890’s. Palmer also studied law and got admitted to the bar. He started a political career as a democrat back when democrats were definitely the conservative party. They seceded, and the south was “the solid south” for the democrats. He was on the progressive wing of the party, but Woodrow Wilson, famous racist, was too.
He was elected to the house of representatives from 1909-1915. He got the Pa delegation to vote for Wilson, hoping to become the AG in 1912, but he was offered secretary of war instead. He stuck to his principles, and said that he wouldn’t prepare for the conflict as a quaker. He was also surprisingly pro-labor for what he would become. He sponsored a bill on behalf of - and I promise this is real - the national child labor committee. It was to end child labor, and the committee was anti-child labor, but the fact that we needed a bill to do that? And it failed because of… Wilson. Who let it die in the senate after the house voted 232 to 44 in favor.
Another thing that he did, and this was cool (I keep handing it to people I don’t like. It’s almost like people aren’t 100% good or bad. No, I can’t accept that. The world is black and white, and bad people can never have good points! This is a joke) was to say that the US shouldn’t be mad about the Lusitania, because "the entire nation should not be asked to suffer" for people who had willingly traveled on a boat full of munitions. It’s kind of funny to try to figure out why Americans don’t like teaching that, because my browser history looks like a conspiracy theorist. “Lusitania sinking history cover-up”, “why doesn’t the US say the Lusitania had munitions”, “controversy over lusitania history”, all the greatest hits. The only thing I could find that talked about why the Us didn’t teach people that it had munitions was from the Cato Institute, and I refuse to read any of their stuff. And I read the FBI’s Palmer raid page. They did the Palmer raids. To be fair, it was for one line and it’s a pretty good line. People were very aware of it at the time, and the only citation i have for this part is “I heard it in history class”, but the Us just doesn’t like talking about its mistakes and WW1 was a big mistake, so they needed to cover it up with a legit reason, and the lusitania was a decent reason.
Something kind of funny that Wilson did was persuading Palmer to give up his house seat and run for senate in 1914. He got third place in a three man race. He was a delegate to the DNC in 1912 and 1916, a member of the other DNC (democratic national committee) from 1912 to 1920, and most importantly, he was appointed Alien Property Custodian in October 22, 1917, by President Wilson, and served until March 4, 1919, when he resigned to become Attorney General of the United States. Now, what is the Alien Property Custodian?
It was created in 1917 under the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917 to “assume control and dispose of enemy owned property within the United States and its possessions.” Essentially, that means that if Germany has some money in a US bank, then the US can take it. It got renamed a lot, but the general department existed until LBJ abolished it in the '60s. In the 1910’s it just got used to take German companies assets, which the US got to keep after the end of the war. Basically it was a giant company that could take whatever it wanted from anyone who was associated with someone in the US might be fighting, including interned immigrants. Keep that in mind for later. the whole thing was also a chance for him to give out jobs to people he liked, but I'm not going to pretend that it was some unique corruption only he could do, because that was most government jobs in the 1900s. They went after German Brewers, because most of the beer brewing industry at the time was German (that's why the companies are called Budweiser and Anheuser-Busch, which are extremely German names) at the Overman committee. keep that name in your mind because it is going to come back later.
But he gave up this job when he was given the chance to be Attorney General, which is what he wanted from Wilson in the first place. And it was his house, among many others, that an anarchist would try to blow up in 1919, but it was him that started the Palmer raids.
Since Palmer is so entwined with the history of the first red scare, giving an accurate history of the rest of his life would just be the rest of this video with some stuff added on. One interesting thing is that he gave a young man a job leading an intelligence division. Well, I say gave, but i mean that he appointed another guy to hire the first guy. That first guy? J Edgar Hoover. Yes, he would head the FBI in the future and be a very important part of the second Red Scare. I was going to say the history is weird sometimes, but I think that this might actually just be related to the FBI, a weird organization, but one that loves persecuting leftists. More interesting than that is the way that their names are written. First initial, middle and last name? it's not a way that I've seen any other name written… except for L Frank Baum, the guy who wrote the Wizard of Oz. am I saying they're connected? No, that was probably just a common way to write people's names and those are the only people that I know of.
Well, this has been quite a bit, and we still haven't gotten to the actual red scare. I have the next parts written out, so I'll probably post them soon, but I was planning to make these into videos, which is why the grammar might not be amazing and if you see anything about a video, that's because this is the script and I tried to adapt it to writing. I hope this had made you think.