A Red Scare Moral Panic
Many are aware of America’s 1950s Red Scare, when demagogues like Senator Joseph McCarthy whipped fears of communism into a widespread panic. Many careers and lives were ruined in modern witch hunts, as those suspected of communism – or those simply accused of being communists – were persecuted, boycotted, and blacklisted. However, that 1950s panic was not the only time that America went into an anticommunist hysteria. The country experienced another Red Scare, just as intense but far less known today, in the immediate aftermath of World War I. Early twentieth century America widely feared radical leftists. By the end of WWI, those fears combined with distrust of foreigners in general, whom Americans blamed for the war. The recent Bolshevik revolution in Russia and its bloody course did not help.
It was a potentially toxic mix, whose potential was realized when followers of an Italian anarchist sent dozens of mail bombs to prominent Americans in April, 1919. Two months later, on June 2nd, anarchists set off nine bombs in eight cities across the country. They were accompanied by flyers that read: “War, Class war, and you were the first to wage it under the cover of the powerful institutions you call order, in the darkness of your laws. There will have to be bloodshed; we will not dodge; there will have to be murder: we will kill, because it is necessary; there will have to be destruction; we will destroy to rid the world of your tyrannical institutions“. The result was a major panic, and what came to be known as the First Red Scare.