The First Red Scare, Part 2
The Red Scare begins. Kind of.
Welcome back to the history of the first Red Scare. I guess you can read this one without reading the first one, but I don't know why you would do that. The first part is mostly just about the Seattle General strike, so you just want to learn about that and you are fairly acquainted with the left wing movements of the late 1910’s… or if you read the first part, read on.
The time? January 21, 1919. the place? Seattle, washington. The reason that we're talking about it? The first thing that got people stirred up after the war was the Seattle general strike. While the war was going on, most of the non radical unions (sure, that sounds like a little bit of an oxymoron, but remember what I said about most of the non-IWW groups) worked out an agreement with the government, which created the NWLB, or the National War Labor Board. Actually, when I say most of the non-radical unions I am referring to the AFL. They will come back. The NWLB did lead to some good things for workers, I'm not disputing that, but they were mostly there to prevent unions from striking during the war.
After the war, however, the NWLB was dissolved by, guess who, Wilson. The AFL - When I said that they were going to come back, you probably guessed that it would be in a little bit more than a paragraph. Also, I realized I never actually told you what AFL stands for, so it stands for American Federation of Labor. You tend to see AF of L in documents of the time, but that’s the same thing. They were basically the right wing IWW. What do I mean by that? The IWW was basically defined by leftism, so how could you possibly be the right wing version of it?
Both were a collection of unions that all collected under one banner, but the size of the banner differed. When I was talking about the IWW history and I said that they allowed people from anywhere to join, unlike other unions, I was talking about the AFL. Sure, they let in the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a black union, but a lot of other groups didn't get in. The industrial workers decided to go off and make their own union with blackjack and hookers, which became the CIO. And then the two kind of ended up fusing back into the same thing and that's why we have the AFL-CIO right now. A lot of labor history is filled with this stupid drama, but the other half is people getting murdered or jailed for their beliefs, so it isn’t that fun. But the AFL was fairly right-wing in the labor scene sense, so they were specifically anti-radicalism. Fun fact, if you are a left-wing group that condemns radicalism, the right wing is going to conflate you and them anyway. You basically just shoot yourself in the foot and alienate yourself from a bunch of people who would support you. (I'm not talking about anybody specific, especially not any political parties in the US right now.)
But back to Seattle. The Pacific Northwest has apparently been thought of as a liberal hellhole since at least the late 1910’s because the IWW was doing a lot of organizing there. It's a little bit complicated why, but at least in Seattle, there were a lot of shipping ports that were great places to build warships. Of course, Seattle is the real worst place in the PWN (this is a joke, guys, but I will never forgive them for being the only city that anybody knows in the entirety of Washington. The Space Needle sucks. The playground outside of the modern art museum is pretty great though). Because of the wartime building projects, a lot of the normal work had been displaced, making things a lot more expensive and making the people a lot more upset. From what I read, apparently it cost more to live in Seattle at that point than it did to live in LA. I don't actually know how much it cost to live in LA at that point, it was probably a lot cheaper, but when the only city they bring up in comparison is LA, I would assume it was not cheap then either.
Turning up the burner on this unstable pot of paranoia, 35,000 Seattle shipyard workers decided to strike over a wage dispute on January 21st, 1919. The entire thing was described in a run-on sentence from a contemporaneous pamphlet, and if I'm saying it's a run-on sentence, it's very long. Yes, I get that technically run-on sentences are based on grammar rules, but it is one that way, too. Essentially, they were getting paid less than the average, and other unions were getting paid much higher than the average, and they didn't make this deal. Their contract wasn't technically up, so they were told to get back to work because nobody was going to negotiate with them if they didn’t. Thanks Charles Piez, head of the Emergency Fleet Corporation, Who was such a cool guy that he, at one point, said that shipyards couldn't have steel if their workers were striking. The shipyard workers, because they were cool, didn’t go back to work and kept striking. The skilled workers, who did make more money than they were asking for as the minimum wage, also decided that they weren’t going back to work.
The Seattle General Labor Council - I'm sure you can guess what they did, they went with the descriptive type of leftie name - met to discuss the request from the Metal Trades Council, who represented the shipyard workers along with other trades. If I get anything, it is my fault, but also pamphlets are so complicated, guys. You can go read it, the University of Washington does have a lot of amazing information about this, but it's a PDF of a century old piece of paper printed by people who weren’t writing this for posterity. It says “26 1-4” at one point, and I’m not sure what kind of percentage this could possibly mean.
The Labor Council was influenced by their secretary, James A. Duncan, who had risen to power in the unstable soup of the Pacific Northwest Labor scene. Sure, he wasn’t part of the IWW, but he had similar views. Anti-AFL, pro-Soviet, which I will admit is not great, but they had been in power for a few years and there was currently a civil war raging in the country, so I'm not mad at him for not being able to predict the future. Of course, things are barely ever controlled by one guy (speaking of the Soviet Union, huh?), so the other 20 guys on the council who were similarly radical were important. They decided that, yes, they were going to help and declared a general strike. It was kind of amazing how many unions actually went along with this. In the pamphlet, it specifically points out how many very conservative unions went along with it. Even more impressive to me was the amount of unions that could have lost their jobs, but still decided to strike. Shout up to you, 1919 Seattle hotel maids, cereal and flour mill workers, and Renton car builders. I think Renton refers to the town near Seattle instead of the cars, because that’s the only thing I can find when I look it up.
In fact, among the very few unions that didn't strike were the government workers. A quote from the pamphlet:
Now, what is a general strike? I'm sure you thought that we were done with definitions after the first video. You probably did not, you knew how many definitions there were in the first one and I'm not going to slow down. But a general strike happens when everybody, not just people in one specific trade, strikes in solidarity. It is very hard to organize when it's, say, the entire country, which is why you need national trade unions to do it and it takes years now. But if there is a very high rate of unionization, in a relatively small place (Okay, this isn't hating on Seattle, I'm not calling you guys small, I'm just saying that you're a lot smaller than the entire country) and all of them are really jazzed about doing a strike, you can get everything together really fast. Like, February 6th, 1919. They decided that they did in fact need to do a lot of work to organize.
The first meeting was on February 2nd. They started at 8:35 in the morning and went to 9:35. PM. One could argue that there wasn't another meeting because the general strike committee was essentially meeting around the clock for the next 4 days. If you want to do a general strike, you can't just walk off your job, because the current civilization is run by workers. The workers in Seattle at the time weren't mad at the city or the people living there, because they and their families were about half the city at the time. They didn't want the water and garbage services to be destroyed while they were on strike. They weren’t doing this to cause a socialist revolution, they were doing this because the shipyard workers were getting fucked over, and they wanted to help.
This wasn't the central labor council doing this anymore, this was the general strike committee. The 21 unions of the metal trades, of which the shipyard workers were one, and 80 other unions, joined in the morning session of the first day. A few more unions were added later - I could do the math but I won’t - leading to the final count being 110. All unions who had voted to strike, or who belonged to a council that was striking, got three delegates, as did a few of the officials of the labor movement. If you're wondering how over 300 people, organizing a general strike in 4 days, managed to do, surprisingly well. If only I could have their energy when I was trying to organize literally anything. I'm not even talking about things like protests, I don't organize those, I'm talking about group projects. Please don't make us talk about what specific kinds of wristbands we need.
Basically, they were organizing all the functions of the government that the government could do because all their workers were on strike. Things like garbage wagon drivers who didn't want to go out to strike because trash needs to be picked up. Also, it wasn't necessarily the 330+ people making all of the decisions. They created a smaller group called the executive committee of 15. I'm sure you can guess how many people were on this council. There were also some committees for construction, transportation, and provisions, as well as other stuff that wasn't specified. As I said before, exceptions were granted for things that were necessary. There were a few pages in the pamphlet about this, but I'm sure you have better things to do than hear about the butcher's unions. And if that's something you really want to learn about, I feel like I cannot recommend the University of Washington collection enough. I was worried that this part would be a little too short, and then I realized I could write tens of thousands of words just about this strike with all the information I got. Honestly, if I just read out all of the information that they gave me, it would probably take more time than the strike did.
And with that seamless transition, how long was the strike? Well, that's spoilers. You can go look it up if you want, but I am telling a narrative history. it did hypothetically end at some point, because seattle is not currently still on strike (It could be. You don’t know. Russia and Japan are still technically fighting WW2, because they haven't signed a peace treaty, and they probably won't, because there are four islands that they both claim control of.) The strike committee discussed declaring an official end date for the strike at the start, but they decided not to, so the actual end will remain up in the air. Well, until I tell you.
Alright, if I keep talking about logistics, you will find something more interesting to read, and also I will fall asleep. One more thing that I need to bring up, because it will be important in a few minutes, is their talk with the mayor, Ole Hanson. That isn’t a nickname for an old guy, his actual first name was Ole. He was 45 at the time of the strike, and his hair did go prematurely white for some reason, but 45 was not that old. His parents were Norwegian, as you might be able to figure out by his middle name, “Thorsteinsson”.
How do you pronounce his first name? There’s no pronunciation guide to his name anywhere, and I was considering giving up. At least, I couldn't until the University of Washington saved me again. They have hours of recordings, 35 people who were actually at the strike. Now unfortunately, it’s literal hours of recording. I'm not sifting through those for you. Fortunately, however, there are searchable transcripts, meaning that somebody had to scan, and then do something computery, so I could ctrl-f typewritten words. Unfortunately, when I did so, the only things I could find with "ole" in them were the words whole and violence. Fortunately, when I was just about to give up, I realized that his name was written with an i in the interview, meaning I had to search for Olie. Unfortunately, the transcripts do not appear to start at the beginning of the recorded interview, because I sure couldn't find the words that the transcript said they were saying in the things that I was listening to. And, as you can imagine from digitized tapes, they aren’t exactly the highest quality things that you've ever listened to. Actually, I did find his name, and with confirmation from three different people, his name is pronounced like holy without the H. I don't know what's up with the spelling, because it's just Ole everywhere else, but I found it. I damaged my hearing, because in the first interview, it sounded like they dropped the mic before they said his name, but I found it.
He said that the city water and electricity had to run, and he preferred that the unions did it, but he would get soldiers in to do it if necessary. He said that the car line, which I think refers to streetcars, wasn’t essential. I'll let you interpret a line from the pamphlet, because I'm not quite sure what this means, but it says “in fact, he might even have the men given a lay-off so that they would not lose their civil service rating.” Oddly enough, if you know where this goes, I think that lay-off in this sense means that they could just take time off, because this is shown as something good that he's doing. The Committee of 15 sent the electricians back, except the commercial power, and Mayor Hanson left. He did not leave the story, however.
But, come 10 am on February 6th, which was a Thursday in case you were wondering, the strike started. Not for the cooks actually, because their strike had already started and they were working on making food for the strikers. In case you were wondering how many people were striking, 60,000. It also lets you know just how important the shipyard workers were. 60,000 is the total number of people, and the 35,000 shipyard workers were included, meaning that the other 25,000 were the 109 other unions.
Like when you have any national organization, people in certain parts of said nation will be more radical than others. I was shitting on the AFL at the start of that video, and I will not stop doing this, but the local unions that were striking were mostly part of the AFL. The IWW wasn't the secret power behind it, like a lot of people thought, they weren’t really part of organizing it. Of course, parts of the IWW also decided to strike, and they promise that if any member was “being unruly”, which I would assume is an old-timey euphemism for throwing glass bottles at management or something, they would “put them out of town and keep them out,” which is pretty self-explanatory, but also another fun old-timey expression. Apparently, they wanted to show the AFL that they could help with a strike without, you know, throwing glass bottles at management. I actually spent like 15 minutes when I was writing this part trying to figure out what specifically they were doing, so just imagine a time jump while I was frantically searching websites I could only get to the internet archive of what specifically the IWW was doing. They don't really have that on their website - they don't have any history on their website, see the internet archive comment - mostly because the history was about the strike that they were doing and the way that they were getting persecuted, not the specific things at the AFL didn't like about them. If the IWW gets mad at me about the “throwing glass bottles” comment, please know that I meant in the best way possible. They definitely didn't run the strike, but they did print out pamphlets and hand them out, so people had a reason to pretend that they were. Also, see all my previous comments about how radicals will be conflated with literally anything that any leftist organization does.
Another story that I found was that, since Japanese workers in the city were striking, apparently everyone was cool with each other and they were invited to send delegates to the general strike committee. On the uncool side, they were not giving a vote. From what I could find, this was both straightforwardly a racist thing and wasn’t, it was because the people running it were in AFL unions. See my previous statements about who was actually let into the AFL. Also, because some people did want to give them representation, and they decided that they wouldn’t get a vote. It's not as cool as I thought.
Random people just decided that, hey, they could be part of the strike too. They also did not get a vote on the council, but it's more for the reason that one elevator operator who decided he wasn’t going to run the elevator for the rich people’s building probably isn't going to help run the strike.
The committees and subcommittees and organizers continue to run their kind of parallel government. They still needed to figure out what the plumbers were going to do, and whether the IWW cards could get their holders a ten cent discount at commissaries like all the official striking workers. They did, in case you were wondering.
Other stuff was happening in the city. Normal, necessary operations, such as milk stations for babies were set up. When the milk drivers union brought this to their employers, they picked up the idea that their employers were going to spin this as though they were the ones who had actually come up with the idea. Also, the owners only planned to open downtown dairies, which probably meant that thousands of families - I think you can guess which ones (poorer families) - couldn't get milk. Realizing that they needed to feed babies, but also that their employers sucked, they just decided to do it on their own. Their employers apparently combined together and operated their own pasteurizing plant, which I'm really hoping meant that the employers did it themselves, but I figure means they got scabs to do it, to send milk to hospitals. However, the milk driver's Union didn't have the same amount of money, and therefore lost $700. In case you were wondering what that is in modern money, almost $13,000.
Speaking of people needing to be fed, everyone else in the city. The restaurants of Seattle were almost entirely organized, meaning that the owners were perfectly fine, or at least scared enough of their employees, to say that, yes, of course their restaurants could be taken over to feed the people of Seattle. Unfortunately, there were arguments over which restaurants would be taken over, because the ones that were would get a lot more business when the strike was over. It happened on the edge of the town, but most of the places to eat were in specifically arranged halls. Food was cooked in the kitchens of various restaurants and brought to the halls. It was 35 cents for anyone who wasn't in a union, or $6.47, and 25 cents for anyone who had any union card, which I talked about above, which is about $4.62 today. By the end, it was 25 cents for everybody. The kitchens also lost money. $6000-7000 dollars, which is $110,912.95-129,398.44 in modern terms.
On my favorite note, what happened to crime in the city. Surely, in all of the chaos, there must have been looting and rioting in the streets. Nope. It was more orderly than the city was normally. There was apparently not even a fist fight, as the strikers like to say. 32 arrests the first day, 18 the second day, and 30 over the weekend. Would you like to know how many of them were connected to the strike? Zero. The population of Seattle in 1920, which is when the census was taken because I couldn't find any numbers for 1919, was 315,312. But if we didn't have police, our lives would immediately descend into chaos. I promise. Around 300 union men who had been in the army or navy, organized into their own guard. Do you know what they didn't have? Any guns. Let me read the words that were apparently scrawled across the Whiteboard of one of the headquarters of the War veterans guard:
Of course, just going into a crowd, and telling them not to fight couldn't work, of course? Nope, it did. But of course we need police because civilization would dissolve into chaos without them.
24 hours after the strike began, the mayor demanded that the strike be called off. That's right, he's back. And he made a complete heel turn. Remember how he said that there were plenty of soldiers that could help run the water and light? Well now, he said that had plenty of soldiers to maintain order and that he was putting down the attempted Bolshevik revolution. Again, while the AFL of Seattle was more radical than the national leadership, this wasn’t a revolution. This was to try and get shipyard workers a few dozen more cents an hour. He said that he would declare martial law if they didn't call it off. They didn't, he didn’t, and everybody who was striking got mad enough that they weren't going to listen to him anymore. Now, let's sit and think about why the mayor would suddenly be against the strike. Technically, he never said it, but I think that the guy who is willing to let the streetcar workers have a break so they wouldn't get in trouble wasn't going to suddenly decide to threaten martial law and declare that it was a revolution by himself.
Speaking of something completely unrelated, the businessmen were not happy. I believe the best description of the way they were feeling was “desire to see the streets run with strikers blood.” If you would like an actual quote, here is someone who is only described as a prominent business man: “If that strike had lasted a few days longer, there would have been some people hung.” Yeah, yeah, I know it's technically hanged when referring to people, but language changes over time and also that's nowhere near the worst grammatical error in the pamphlet, assuming that this random business man had perfect English class grammar.
2,400 citizens were deputized, meaning that they were given a star and gun, then turned out onto the streets to do whatever. I think you can guess who went in to get deputized. In the pamphlet, there are two different descriptions of pairs of young kids who went in to get a gun, and one businessman. I think you can guess the gender of said young kids.
The time that he specified for it to end saw the strike still going. The momentum wasn’t going to stop on February 8th. It had been 2 days! I mean, there were actually some people that decided to go back to work, but most people didn't. I wouldn’t, this seems like a great time. However, guess who didn't agree with me? The executive committee of 15, who said that the city would eventually have to go back to normal, or at least the strike would have to be a little bit less general. They decided that Saturday night would be when the strike was over. The people that the mayor had called the leaders of the revolution were most in favor of ending it. The general strike committee was against it and decided that the executive committee was wrong. The proposed date of Saturday night came and went, and nothing appeared to have happened. However, the end was now in sight.
On Monday morning, several unions had gone back to work, most importantly the streetcar men and the teamsters. They were ordered to by the larger unions they were part of, or their own executive committees. Both of them promised that they would come back when the rank and file of Seattle had voted, or if they were called by the general strike committee, but they still left.
Actual fun fact, because I know I say that sometimes when the facts aren’t fun, most of the women's unions outlasted the men's version of whatever their craft was. The “Lady Barbers” as they were referred to, came to the union meeting when the male barbers had their executive committee to send them back to work.
A few of the other, smaller unions, also fell under the Teamsters. However, in the evening, there was another vote. They were going back to the strike at noon on Tuesday. However, everything was over. The Teamsters weren't coming back. By noon on February 11th, which was Tuesday, and the time that the Teamsters said they were coming back, the strike was over. The general strike committee voted to end it on February 10th.
Now, when I said that there weren’t any strike related arrests, I wasn't exactly telling the truth. There were any strike-related arrests during the strike. However, would you like to guess who immediately got arrested when the strike ended? Did you guess the IWW? That's right, 39 of them got arrested on the charge of being “ringleaders of anarchy” which was both an actual charge, and not what happened because they weren't organizing the strike. If you guessed the Socialist Party, you are also right. The Socialist Party candidate for the city council got arrested. The passing out of leaflets during the strike was the cause given for the arrests.
“Russia Did It” was the title of a pamphlet that the IWW was giving out, which urged workers to operate their own industries. Most of the people who got arrested figured that it was because the authorities really wanted to arrest somebody, but nobody actually did anything wrong. Blah, blah, blah, there's a difference between legality and morality, but they also didn't really do anything illegal. Remember, not even a fist fight. The IWW asked the central labor council to help, and after looking over the pamphlets, they decided that they would help, even if they didn't agree with the IWW as an organization. Because solidarity is good, guys. If this whole story taught you anything, it's that solidarity is good and that you are so much more powerful than you might think.
Speaking of… solidarity? I don't know. Speaking of the Seattle general strike, what actually happened? Did they win? Well, strikes aren't like battles or sports games. you don't win or lose them. According to newspapers, they sure did lose, though. To quote Seattle newspapers, strikers were “creeping back to work downcast that they had lost their strike.” The papers said that they must clean house and get rid of their radical leaders. Again, their leaders were probably the most cautious people.The normal workers for the people who had made the strike happen. Their leaders were who had tried to get them to fix a time limit, had tried to get them to go home, who had urged caution and moderation at every point.
But what did the workers of Seattle feel like? They said didn't go back to work feeling beaten, and I believe the pamphlet when it tells me things like that. They felt like they had “gained something worth gaining, like men who had done a big job and done it well.” They felt like they had won, because they might have lost five days' pay, but every institution around them and the business men of the city acted like the Russian Revolution had barely been avoided. I may be projecting on to them, but if I were them, I would be at least a little bit happy that I scared the rest of the country shitless.
All right, but there was a thing that they were actually striking for. A raise for the shipyard workers. Did this happen? Not from what I can find. I think something would have said so if they did. I'm also pretty sure that they didn't actually get a raise because there was no one person who controlled Seattle shipyard raises, meaning there wasn’t one single person to ask. So that didn't work.
But it sure did teach an important lesson to anybody who wants to strike, or even somebody who wants to boycott a company. Lay out clear goals, and don't stop until you get them. This might be a lesson that we can all learn from.
So, it worked in some regards and it didn't work in others. 50/50. Since we've established that I can't deal with nuance, my answer is in fact that they did win, based on one simple statistic. My new opinion about Seattle. They used to be my least favorite place in the entirety of Washington, and while I still hate their football team, which I think most of them would agree with me about, and I I think that their tourist attraction is tacky, and I don't like any of the companies that came out of there, although I'm not a big fan of companies in general, but Seattle companies are kind of the worst… Well, even though that's all true, Seattle is now my favorite city in Washington. New low is… Spokane, I guess. Just kind of a weird vibe off that City. Actually, maybe it's Olympia, because they're a capital that sucks so much that literally nobody knows about them, and also I went to a cabin there, and I don't remember it being a great time. Although I can't give them too hard a time, because I'm pretty sure your average person couldn't name the capital of most states, including the one I live in right now.
Back to the Seattle general strike, before I go after too many other cities. What happened to some of the other figures? Ole Hanson is credited for ending the strike, even though his contributions to the end of the strike were “causing people to argue, and also threatening them occasionally.” If they wanted the actual people who ended the strike, national union leaders and the council who they were calling radical was who they should have been looking at. Newspapers across the country decided that Hanson was the man of the hour, and that he was the man responsible for ending this horrible strike. Imagine if shipyard workers could get paid 82 ½ cents more? Per day? In modern dollars, that's $15.25 more. Per day. That's something like $1.90 per hour, and probably lower, because they wanted 44 hours a week, which, you might notice, is slightly more than an 8 hour work day. They were also asking for an 8-hour workday so I'm not sure how the math works out, but those shipyard workers sure couldn't have whatever they wanted, because that’s socialism. I’ll catch up with Hanson at the end.
The city of Seattle apparently acknowledges that part of their history, which I will say is very impressive, as somebody who lives in the south. That’s not exactly fair to the place I live, there are a bunch of historical markers around it. On the other hand, I have seen very large confederate flags half an hour away. Apparently there is a rock opera titled Seattle 1919, and you can listen to one of the songs. Again, thank you very much to the University of Washington, because I couldn't have found most of this without them.
Moving onto something else. The Overman committee. That's right, we will never be done with committees. If you would like to know what day I am picking up the story on, February 11th, 1919. Yeah, that's the day the strike ended. The company was technically formed in 1918 - well I see technically but that's the time it was formed, there isn't really anything technical about it - but it opened on February 11th. Chaired by North Carolina Senator Lee Overman - also named after North Carolina Senator Lee Overman - it was a committee of the US Senate Judiciary Committee. There are five members: Overman, and four other guys whose full names I could probably find if I looked through the 1919 Senate records, but are just named King, Wolcott, Nelson, and Sterling in the report, so that's all I'm giving them.
Do you want to know who else was there? That's right. Coming back into our story is the Honorable A. Mitchell Palmer, Custodian of Alien Property, or at least that's how he is referred to in the report. I thought I was going to read the entirety of these, then I realized that the first one was more than a thousand pages long. And there are two of them. I don't care about government operations this much, because Would you like to know what these were titled? Brewing and liquor interests and German propaganda. I hate the taste of alcohol, do you think that I want to read about 1918 German Brewing? I'm not actually kidding about this, the brewing industry was very important to this committee.
Speaking about alcohol, the 18th Amendment. Something that I didn't mention, because it isn't directly a cause of the Red Scare, but it is connected. The 18th amendment was passed on January 16th, 1919, when the committee had been meeting about german brewers for a while. It didn't go into effect in 1919, it was set to take effect on January 1st, 1920, but it was connected. My little trick to remember the amendments, if you need to remember them, is that the 18th amendment prohibited alcohol, because you can’t drink at 18 in the US like in other countries. The 21st amendment made it legal again, because 21 is the drinking age.
Oddly enough, Prohibition was a bit of a nationalist movement as well, because who were the immigrants, both at the start of the movement? Germans, connected with brewing and the Irish, stereotyped as liking alcohol. Even in 1919, Italian people were connected with wine and the stereotypes of Eastern European people are probably only people who can match the stereotypes of the Irish for liking drinking. Listen, sometimes you just like cooking things with wine. That's why my family has so much cheap white wine. No cheap red wine, my dad tried making risotto with that once, and it wasn’t good. Very peppery, for some reason. This is why you check what's in your cabinets before cooking. Honestly, my historical theory for one cause of this kind of connects to anti-catholicism because of communion wine, but I couldn’t find any historical documentation backing me up, so don’t think that this is actual historical fact. I’m not studying history, so I don’t think I’ll ever do any research on this.
Really, the first part was about things that were happening during World War 1, which is important but not what we are talking about right now. So I will just give you the short version. I will also link them, because they are very old and government documents so you can get them for free.
The Overman committee is now regarded as a forerunner of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which is basically what the second Red Scare is known for. The committee was formed to investigate the influence of German propaganda, but once the German empire got stomped into the ground at the end of the war, they didn't want to be done. Okay, I don't think that they wanted to do more work, but the senate did pass a resolution expanding the mandate of the subcommittee they switched their focus to bolshevism. The hearing lasted until March 19th, and you can guess how many bolshevik activities they found in the United States? The main thing that you need to remember is “Americanism”, which is what the majority of the country wanted to preserve. Americanism is defined as “complete loyalty to nation and state with adherence to white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant ideals.” A lot of things have changed about America, mostly the fact that we didn't usually think about ourselves as a melting pot. We were Americans. We might actually be going back to that, if you remember when you were growing up and they thought about how everybody came to America, that's a recent thing.
Essentially, the committee asked a bunch of people about the recent Russian Revolution, and since most of them were people who had fled, I think you can guess what they felt about that one. I think you can also guess who got brought into this. Yes, they conflated Jewish people with Bolshevism. Color me shocked, or don't because I am pretty sure most of us expected this.
The committee provided little concrete evidence of bolshevik activities in America, acknowledged that most of the people that they called the radicals were not actually Bolshevik, but insisted that domestic radicalism was still a threat.
And now, we're going to talk about some actual domestic radicals. When the average person right now thinks about what a historical anarchist was like, I'm pretty sure than they think about one thing. That's right, explosions. There’s a reason the anarchist cookbook is the most famous book connected with anarchists, instead of any theory. Quick public service announcement, don’t read the anarchist cookbook, because it is both very illegal and, from what I have heard, sucks. I have not read it, and I'm not going to, but blowing up bombs is bad. It hurts a lot of people. Anyway, with the public service announcement done, let's talk about why people might choose to blow up bombs.
The first thing you need to know is that bomb parts were a little bit easier to acquire. You could buy cocaine in the drug stores, there were a lot less regulations about what got sold at the time. I mean, they sold explosive fertilizer and didn't wonder what you were doing with it until the Oklahoma City bombing, there were not a lot of health and safety things going on in 1919. I'm not saying that they were easy to build, the list of anarchists who blew themselves up while poking dynamite with a screwdriver or something is very long. Especially because they were probably smoking while they were doing it.
But why bombs? I mean, the most famous American anarchist assassination was not carried out by a bomb. I would also venture that it is not actually famous, because how many of you can tell me who assassinated William McKinley? How many of you guys can actually tell me who William McKinley was? 25th president of the United States, man on the $500 bill. The one that we don't use anymore, because who actually needs a $500 bill? The assassin's name was Leon Czolgosz, and he shot William McKinley on the 6th of September, 1901. I do have a bit of a soft spot for him, because come on. Nobody knows anything about half of the people who assassinated presidents, and I relate to him a little too much. Everyone thought he was a spy because he was really awkward and just asked about things a little too bluntly. I do not relate to him in one very important way, I'm not going to do anything that he did in the end. If you are going to yell at me about a certain pair of people who you have probably actually learned about, I promise they will show up later. Sacco and Vanzetti will come up later, but they didn't actually assassinate anybody. Robbery is different. They did use a gun, too, though.
But this isn't answering my first question. In fact, it kind of contradicts my first question. They definitely did use bombs, that is a historical fact. I’m sure you can guess what I’m going to do. That's right, more definitions. Propaganda of the deed is direct action meant to reach out to people. Sure, but what’s direct action? That's when you use your own agency to achieve goals. voting isn't direct action, voting is choosing someone else to do action for you. Same with petitions. You aren’t doing anything, you're trying to get others to do something for you. Direct action would be something like a strike, a sit in, or, on the more violent side, property damage or assassinations. Propaganda of the deed happens when you do the correct action as an example. It is a form of propaganda, which didn't always have the negative connotation that it does right now. People used to say that they were doing propaganda as a neutral statement of “I am trying to convince someone that I am correct by handing them a pamphlet about my ideas.” But propaganda of the deed comes from the idea that sitting a bunch of people down and explaining your specific political ideas is hard sometimes, but throwing a bomb at the king people don’t like is… not exactly easier, but you can hopefully convince a lot of people very quickly. And because anarchists are not exactly a large percentage of the population, and typically work with a very small number of people, bombs are a great way to make a very large impact.
Of course, that isn’t the only reason why an anarchist would try to kill someone with a bomb. Assuming that you are very good at building them, or just good enough to not lose a few fingers while trying, and you can get close enough to the person that you would like to assassinate, you’ve probably got a higher chance of actually getting said person. Just ask Alexander ll, former emperor of Russia.
But I am not talking about Russia. Alexander's grandson was the one who kicked all of this off, but he was dead at the time. Maybe the copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion that he was reading to his kids still existed, but he and his family basically didn’t anymore. Yes, he did read that to his kids. You know, that’s probably why I don't like the movie Anastasia. The Romanovs really sucked, guys.
But the time we are currently talking about is about a month after the end of the Overman committee hearings. The transcripts weren’t out yet, but they were done. For now, it's April 28th, and we are coming back to an old friend. Actually, we’re just going to mention him, because he doesn’t open his own mail. Mayor Ole Hanson is just too famous for that. Actually, he probably didn't open his mail because that was the only way to communicate with people back then. I'm sure your senator doesn't listen to all of their calls personally. Hanson’s clerk, William Langer (according to Wikipedia. The source given is a book that looks pretty interesting, but I am not going to read), was opening a package. Fortunately for him, he opened it upside down. I assume that means he was not usually a very good secretary, but considering that it kind of saved his life, I would assume that his boss was not too mad about it. Apparently, when one opened the side of the box labeled “open”, one would release a vial of sulphuric acid onto some fulminate-of-mercury blasting caps which would set off a stick of dynamite, because I wasn’t lying when I said you could just buy anything back then. In case you were wondering, fulminate-of-mercury is not what you think of when you think of mercury, it's a highly explosive substance. Also, when I looked through Red Scare again, apparently it was damaged in transport and some of the sulfuric acid leaked out onto the desk, causing “considerable damage.”
As you can imagine, authorities were a little bit worried about this. Once the clerk for the man everybody lauded as the person to end the Seattle general strike called the authorities to tell them that “Hey, i almost got blown up by a bomb built out of many, many unstable and highly dangerous chemicals. It’s a little weird that we sell dynamite at hardware stores, but people can’t rent bulldozers to remove large rocks in 1919, so farmers need something.” I would assume that he did not say that exactly, but we can pretend. Oddly enough, the FBI is the only group that actually gives the postal workers credit. It was really one guy, though, who heard about the bombs, looked at his packages, and realized that a bunch of boxes he had set aside for not having enough postage looked suspiciously like the one described.
This guy is actually pretty interesting. I can't find his name, and I can only find things about him in one book, written at the time, but he was a Russian immigrant who had moved to the US when he was seven. He said that he had a little better luck then most Russians, and then he said some more very interesting things. He said that
He then said about the bombs:
“When you look at it sanely you know that no possible good could come from acts like that. The fanatics want to kill men like Morgan and Rockefeller because they are rich and the fanatics themselves are starving. Men like that never traveled to open their own mail, and some helpless servant or underling is the victim- someone of their own class, who, maybe, is skipping and starving along on his little money as the anarchists… I know because I've lived among them my whole life, even though I've been a bit luckier than millions of them. they get mad like starving beasts. and a starving beast has just one passion- to kill. Men want to kill the men who are grinding down to misery, and they will go about it as madly as beasts.”
It’s complicated. We don't get to see a lot from the normal people of the time. I have said, and I will say again and again, that “the people” wanted something. But the people don't have any one mind on things. There's always going to be this guy, a normal person, who sees the world in the way a normal person would. and it's interesting to hear what he says about things. I guess… props to the FBI for acknowledging that it wasn't government agents that managed to find the bombs. Well, unfortunately, when I say find the bombs, I mean find most of the bombs.
It's April 29, 1919, and a housekeeper named Ethel Wlliams just took in the mail. She worked for a former senator, Thomas Hardwick. he has not appeared in the story at all, and will not appear anymore, because he is not important. She opened a package. I'm sure that you can guess what was in it.
The bomb blew off her hands. Ms. Hardwick, standing nearby, also suffered burns. The former senator had nothing bad happen to him because he was too lazy to go get his own mail. You know, for all of my complicated thoughts about the postal clerk's words, he was definitely right on the money with the “Who do you think is going to find the bombs?”
Some of the other people who received bombs were the Postmaster General, a guy named Albert S. Burleson. I was just going to list off people, and then I realized how bad this guy was. He “has been called the worst postmaster general in American history,” according to historian G.J. Meyer, “but that is unfair; he introduced parcel post and airmail and improved rural service. It is fair to say, however, that he may have been the worst human being ever to serve as postmaster general.” Born in Texas to a wealthy Southern planter family in 1863, so I think you can guess what side of the war his father was on. That's right, a confederate officer. Apparently, he cried at the sight of a parade of elderly confederate veterans. You know what I call Confederate veterans? Easy targets. He would be crying a lot harder if I had been there. I think you’re allowed to say that about a bunch of dead people.
In case you're wondering what his priorities in office were… segregation and union-busting. Would you like to know how much this man deserved to get the bomb that was in his mail? He didn't want to have mixed race railway mail car sorting or postal windows. He put up screens in workrooms so that white employees wouldn’t have to look at black employees. When he was given the ability to censor the mail through the Espionage Act, he decided to go for the foreign language newspapers. I mean, what could possibly be written in a language that you didn't understand? Why couldn't they just speak English? Any article that was published in a different language about the US government or any country in World War I, had to be completely translated, and have that translation filed with the local postmaster. I think you can guess that making every single tiny newspaper that wanted to write something about this US file a translation with the post office, which was not set up to handle this, was extraordinarily expensive and time consuming.
When the sedition act allowed him to refuse to deliver mail if he wanted to, it was like Wilson had given him a birthday present. People trying to defend the IWW suddenly didn't get checks. Letters to possible witnesses? Nope. Letters from the Socialist Party leadership to its smaller chapters across the country definitely didn't get through, meaning but the only way to communicate were telegrams or long distance phone calls, neither of which were cheap.
Anyway this has been a very long digression into a man Whose name I randomly clicked on in Wikipedia, and realized was a horrible person. He died in the thirties, meaning that he made it to his 60’s and he shouldn't have, at least in my opinion. Some of the other people, who I will not look up because I cannot afford any more digressions, were John D Rockefeller, JP Morgan Jr, and Various representatives and government officials. Overman was one of them. Ole Hanson, of course, who apparently said “If the Government doesn’t clean them up I will.” What are you going to do, sit there and threaten to enact martial law? You need the government for that, buddy. The two important people are Palmer and Rayme Weston Finch. The chance that you've heard of the second guy is approximately zero, because the chance that you would ever heard of him at the time was zero. He was an agent with the Bureau of Investigation, which was not the FBI, and probably best be described as “just some random agent.” In modern terms, imagine a plot that involved various senators, government officials, and a random FBI agent living in Philadelphia named Steve. But this random agent had arrested two Galleanists, or followers of Luigi Galleani. The FBI has a beautiful quote explaining who did it.
Never mind, I shouldn’t have trusted them. I don’t know why I did. I didn't misspell "the", the FBI has a misspelling on its website that it hasn't fixed. I'd be ok if it was a normal person, but I'm not giving the FBI any leeway. Anyway, actual explanation. Born in Italy, Luigi Galleani had to leave for a very different reason than my family. He was getting pursued by the Italian police for helping lead the labor movement. He then moved to the US, and apparently ended up in New Jersey, which was probably worse than getting caught by the Italian police - when your family moved to New York, you can make jokes about the New Jersey Italian Community - and gained many dedicated followers among Italian-American anarchists He also wrote a newspaper, Cronaca Sovversiva. Two people would get arrested during a raid on its offices and provide a pretty good clue as to who was setting the bombs.
While this lacks one very important thing, proof, circumstantial evidence pointing to minorities was something that 1910’s authorities loved. The bombs were set to arrive on May Day, May first, which is the international celebration of laborers and the working class. It isn't celebrated in one very specific country, and I think you can guess which one. That is of course, Mongolia! Okay, it isn't celebrated in a few countries, but considering that the day was chosen by the AFL to commemorate an American strike, of course America doesn't celebrate it. We picked another day and we force actual laborers to work on the day. Companies aren’t even forced to pay extra when they make people work on federal holidays here.
All that's to say that May 1st is a fairly important labor holiday. And it wasn't like it was just the Galleanists getting mad about their rights being infringed upon. That May 1st, the greatest unrest happened in New York or Boston. No, what would come to be known as the May Day riots happened in Cleveland, Ohio. Now why Cleveland? I know that I've been going after a lot of cities today, but I'm fine with Cleveland. It wasn't named after Grover Cleveland, our president whose fun fact has become the least fun in recent months, it was named after some random Revolutionary War guy. Oh no, trying not to offend people who really like Cleveland has backfired, I have insulted their namesake. But at the time, Cleveland had close to a million people and a large amount of foreign born, blue collar people. It was also dominated by established political machines, meaning that if a socialist wanted to become mayor, the chance that they were going to win was zero. The Socialist Party became much more radical than other branches in the nearby Midwest. I don't care if Ohio is in the Midwest or not.
Because people tend to reappear in history, the inciting incident was a demonstration to protest the jailing of Eugene V. Debs. His trial had been held in Cleveland, and the head of the Socialist Party held a march. His name was Charles Ruthenberg, and do you remember when I said that someone couldn’t win the mayoral race on the socialist ticket? Well, he's the guy that proved it. He managed to win nearly 30% of the vote, but he definitely didn't win the race. But that was in 1917. In 1919, he was holding a 30,000 person march from the Socialist headquarters to Public Square. The way that multiple things described the march, they were divided into four units, each with a red flag and an American flag at the front. I don't exactly have a mental picture of how that would work, but what you need to know is that they had those red flags. Many of them also wore red clothing or badges, and some of the marchers, who were veterans of World War 1, were dressed in their full uniforms. On the other side, various groups of anti-socialist veterans and the city government. An army lieutenant on that side tried to take one of the flags of the socialists, which was being held by a different veteran, and a fight broke out.
When I say a fight broke out, I mean that the lieutenant and the soldiers that he had with him decided to take on the marchers. The number of soldiers specified was “several” but it could not have been more than the 7,500 people marching, which is why this was a really dumb idea on the soldiers' part. That is, until several mounted police charged their horses directly into the crowd and swung clubs at the marchers. 20 people were injured, and I bet you can guess what you said they were on, so I really don't care what happened to the horses, 1919 NYT, because the horses got ridden directly into a crowd of people. If the horses got hurt, I'm not blaming the people that they were trampling.
Once the first riot was over, a second one started downtown. They weren't really connected at all, because it was very hard to communicate without having somebody run over to tell them. In Public Square, former Secretary of Treasury William Gibbs Mcadoo was holding a victory loan rally at something called “Keith’s Hippodrome.” I don't know who Keith is, but a victory loan is basically a post-war war bond. Another army lieutenant ordered the socialists to move away from the speaking platform, and when they didn't, decided to choose violence. They were again outnumbered, because I don't think any soldiers in this story who weren’t on the socialist side made a good decision. That's fine, because a bunch of mounted policemen showed up. And two army tanks. They were specifically German tanks, if you want another fun little piece of irony. I'm not sure exactly what the irony is, but using German tanks to crush a bunch of people that the US used to say were funded by the Germans has to be something, right? And then 70 people got arrested.
A third riot happened, but the NYT seems to have run out of space, because it was just talking about how the socialists were lawless rioters getting mad that people are yanking their flags out of their hands. Later that night, the socialist headquarters were completely wrecked when a group of people including soldiers charged in and destroyed the place. At the end of the night, a bunch of red flags and banners were piled into a heap and burned. I guess it's fine to burn flags when it's something you disagree with, huh? At the end of the night, two people died, 40 people were injured, and more than 100 were arrested. Various sources disagree on all of these numbers, the contemporary article I'm reading from says one guy died. The number that I am seeing from reliable sources says 124, Red Scare says 106, and wikipedia says 116. For once, I think I've been able to figure out the source of that information, which I've seen in a few articles that might or might not have been relying on Wikipedia. 116 is a figure in Red Scare, which is kind of the authoritative book on this, and it says 116 people were arrested… in Boston. Make me a Wikipedia editor or something. I really don't have the time for that, never mind.
One of the number of people who got arrested was Charles Rutheburg, for assault with intent to kill. The charges would later be dropped, because they were bullshit. But for the rest of his life, he would always be under indictment or in jail. He would unfortunately die at the age of 44 in 1927 after co-founding the American Communist Party. His ashes were sent to Moscow and interred in the Kremlin Wall, one of only three or four (unclear, there’s no list) Americans that the Soviet Union honored that way.
Speaking of the people who had been arrested, local newspapers loved to note that only eight of said people were born in the United States. Another note that I would like to add is that none of the police or anti-march rioters, even though that was the side that killed people. Afterwards, a law known as a red flag law would get passed. These are very hard to look up, mostly because red flag laws are a different thing now. It reminds me of the time that my physics teacher looked up transformers. He did not find what he was looking for. But I found them by looking socialist flag laws, then going from there. The one that I can find the most about was California's, because it got overturned in 1931 in a case known as Stromberg v. California, where a teenager worked at the Pioneer Summer camp, a camp run by a bunch of different organizations, some of which were Communist. The Better America Federation, a name which throws up all kinds of red flags, ironically. I can make so many jokes about this. Uhhh… they better call the cops on themselves? Well, they got the sheriff into the camp and arrested a 19 year old named Yetta Stromberg, along with some other employees. She was the one who ended up challenging the law, so she's what the case is named after. Somehow, she managed to win. Some choice phrasing from the San Bernardino Sun, if you wanted to know how 1931 newspapers wrote about women. “Tempestuous daughter of Russian immigrants” and “The pretty USC co-ed” are not the phrases that would come to mind when I was talking about a teenager being arrested.
The text of the law reads
There were riots in New York and Boston, but Cleveland is the main one. New York and Boston get enough coverage. We're skipping forward to June 2nd, 1919. The Galleanists are back, and they're setting bombs off outside of people’s houses. Also a Catholic church. And one of these people's homes? One guess. No, not Ole Hanson, although he shows up a lot in this story. No, A. Mitchell Palmer. Unfortunately, these bombs would be more deadly, killing a night watchman, William Boehner, and the man setting the bomb in front of Palmer’s house, Carlo Valdinoci. Fun fact about how rich people know each other, do you know who lived across the street from Palmer? FDR, who called the police about it. He apparently went and stood outside with Palmer, who was so shaken up about his house blowing up that he went back to his Quaker roots and addressed FDR as “thee” multiple times. Quakers used thee and thou because they were the informal versions of “you” in English, like “tu” in Spanish, and Quakers are big on being friends with people. It’s kind of the main thing they’re known for. Think of “thee” like a singular “y’all” and imagine a southern guy who tried to get rid of his accent and then his house got blown up. It kind of makes me like him, but you have to see people in history as people, no matter what you feel about them.
Each bomb was delivered with several copies of a pink flyer titled “Plain Words”, which led to a print shop. The two people running the shop, who were Galleanists, refuse to testify about their role or give up other people. According to the FBI, to find them, “Agents and police also conducted many interviews, worked with informants, and drew links to the intended targets, all of whom had angered anarchists in some respect. No other bombers were directly identified.” I would assume that they couldn’t do this because “most of the tools and technologies that we associate with modern-day policing—many pioneered by the FBI—had yet to be invented" and the only one they had at the time was shaking down minorities. I mean, they hadn’t invented facial recognition or going undercover and trying to convince people to do extremely dangerous things so that they could get arrested yet.
Obviously some people realize that a bombing like this had happened before, and one or two or eight bombs being planted isn't exactly proof of a nationwide conspiracy. When I say some people, I do not mean all of the people, because you know what Americans are like. If you don't, congratulations on somehow not reading any of this, because this is the history of Americans being nuts about like five people who write mean pamphlets and sometimes go after people who really, really deserve it. I am speaking about the postmaster general, in case you are wondering.
And so we come to the point where, as Red Scare says “The machinery of the government began to move.”
But I'm not done. What happened to Hanson, who I am no longer referring to as mayor, because he retired. Well, retired from being the mayor which is why I no longer refer to him as such. I don't know why I decided to end every video with a little biography of a guy who did something, but it's because a lot of these guys end up doing something interesting. Would you like to guess what he did afterwards? Three guesses, and if any of them were to write a book, go on a year long lecture tour, or run for president, you are a winner. You win too much knowledge of the way our society works. How's that working out for you? His book was titled “Americanism versus Bolshevism”, and judging by the fact that you do not remember him being president, or if you're a big history nerd, being a contender for president, he didn't not win. As we will discuss later, 1920 was not a great time to still be doing red scare things. Palmer will eventually have his comeuppance. Ole is an interesting symbol of what happens to people that America puts on a pedestal. Before he was mayor, he was in the state legislature, where he supported an 8-hour work day for women and a minimum wage bill. Even at the start of the story, he was perfectly willing to work with the unions. In fact, the Union Record, which was a daily labor paper, wrote favorably about him on February 3rd. Even on the 6th, they just seem confused that he was against them. But once the strike ended and newspapers across the country needed someone to laud as the man who broke labor's back or whatever, the mayor who had threatened to shoot strikers was a great pick. probably the only pick, because the commander of the nearby soldiers was definitely not as willing to use the military to threaten the workers of Seattle. The union record said on the 11th that they couldn't print the words they would have liked to use from it, and just kept insulting him until the 20th. When he resigned on August 19th, they apparently printed "Hanson Quits: City Hall Rid of Freak." Which, I will admit, was weirdly funny to me. But the big newspapers disagreed. He was a hero.
And so, Ole was given praise for something, and seeking the limelight, made it his entire personality. Of course, I’m not claiming that he was a radical who jumped on the bandwagon. His main issue when he got elected was anti-bolshevism, which meant being anti IWW. But, much like another man who was the mayor of a city that everybody seems to think is the capital of the state, who was in charge during a disaster and then got a lot of media attention, then tried to run for president and failed because his specific issue wasn't super electorally relevant at the time, he dropped out of the spotlight and spent most of his life trying to get back.
Of course, Ole didn't become the president's lawyer. He could have, because he passed the Wisconsin bar despite being 2 years too young to practice law. He never actually did any lawyering, which means you really could just do anything in the late 1800s. I believe that this is because there was no law in the 1800’s. That was a joke, but it does apparently become harder to pass the bar exam every year because they keep ruling on cases, which you have to study. So if you want to become a lawyer and you feel bad, just know that he had 130ish years of cases less than you to study.
However, he did seem to be pretty decent with money, or at least earned enough that it didn't really matter, because he purchased a 2,000 acre (somewhere around 3 square miles, or 8 square kilometers) in Orange County, California. Since he earned 38,000 dollars from speaking engagements, or $702,448.67, and Orange county became expensive when they put suburbs in, so it was probably the latter. And then he founded a city. If you are from San Clemente and you have been screaming at me this entire time because I pronounced the man's name wrong, no I didn't. People alive at the time backed me up on it. If you’ve been screaming at me because you went to a school named after him or something, now you know why some random Seattle mayor has so much stuff named after him in California. He was also not good enough with money that he managed to not mortgage him many properties, and the great depression was not kind to him. He was able to launch a new property development in San Bernardino, so it wasn’t too horrible. It was Twentynine Palms, a place which is actually spelled that way. Anyway, I don't feel too bad for this guy, because he died of a heart attack on July 6th, 1940, in LA, at the age of 66. He had 10 children, so I'm sure he left his mark on the world in that way. There are people alive right now who are related to him, unless something really weird happened to his family.
I'm not sure how to wrap this up. People aren't all black and white, and sometimes there's a historical character that reminds us that just because you get famous for something, doesn't mean that's all that you are. but then he founded his own town, so I'm not sure that the lesson actually applies. I think, be smart with your money is the main thing that I heard from him. maybe take credit when people seem really eager to give it to you, even if you did nothing and natural human arguing solved it all for you? I don't know man, sometimes history isn't a moral lesson, it's just a thing that humans did. See y'all later.