| FROM THE VAULT: THE FIRST RED SCARE— MARCH 22, 1919
Decades before McCarthyism, anticommunist paranoia gripped America.
Almost 30 years before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare witch hunts, a similar hysteria gripped America. A year and a half after the fall of czarist Russia to the Bolsheviks, a Senate subcommittee investigating communists in the U.S. was whipping up fury and angst—emotions echoed in B.C. Forbes’ opening column. “Are you aware that two or three hundred Soviets have already been organized in the United States?” he asked. “Did you ever suspect that there are thousands upon thousands of revolutionaries who are daily and nightly planning and plotting to set a torch to this country?” His solution to the problem: “Spread enlightenment . . . [if] any of your workers or your associates have misconceptions concerning what Bolshevism really is, take the time to explain matters.”
The panic subsided only after the Palmer Raids, a series of extrajudicial roundups of supposed anarchists and communists. They were led by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, who hoped to use the detentions to position himself as a law-and-order presidential candidate. The raids climaxed in January 1920, when the government arrested thousands of people across the country in a single day and held 1,600 for deportation. Less than 30% of them were actually expelled. Public opinion shifted against Palmer soon after, and fears of communist infiltration abated further when his prediction of violent May Day activities didn’t come to pass. Later that year, he lost his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.