Red Years and Red Scares

The  Movement advances at such dizzy speed that it  may be said with confidence: Within a year we will  already begin  to forget there was a struggle for communism  in Europe,  because within a year all Europe will be  Communist.

Gregory Zinoviev, Head of the Communist International, March 1919

The armistice of November 11, 1918, began what the Italians called the biennio roso, the “Red Years,” when communism and its enemies struggled for power from one end of Europe to the other.  In America those years would see the radical supporters of the Bolshevik Revolution organize themselves into American Communist parties, and the young J. Edgar Hoover lead the first massive government drive against American communism.

Those years would leave a lasting imprint on anticommunism in America.  Both communists and anticommunists constructed terrifying but unrealistic stereotypes of each other to frighten the public.  Anticommunism would emerge from those early years burdened with a pernicious wing of extremists and their a fantastic conspiracy theory that pictured the American reform movement as a Moscow-directed communist plot.  For their part, American communists and their allies on the radical left would emerge from the Red Years armed with an equally misleading but powerfully effective stereotype of the anticommunist as a right-wing conspirator against the civil liberties of all Americans.  Both stereotypes would forever after frustrate knowledgeable anticommunists in their efforts to educate Americans about the real character of the Communist threat at home and abroad.

Order across Europe had broken down after the Armistice, leaving the European working class resentful and mutinous.  There was no central authority in Russia or the rest of the old Tsarist Empire (Finland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland).  There was no order in the wreck of the Austro-Hungarian empire (Austria, Hungary, present day Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia).  Anarchy ruled in the German states that had been united in the Kaiser’s Reich, while the Ottoman empire in the Balkans and the Middle East lay in ruins.

The Russian Bolsheviks believed that their own revolution was doomed unless it spread across Europe, particularly to Germany, which Leon Trotsky declared would be the real center of the revolution.  Trotsky’s prediction of a communist Latvia, Poland and Lithuania, Finland, and Ukraine that would link Soviet Russia to a future Soviet Germany and Austria-Hungary did not seem so far-fetched in 1918 and 1919.  There were pro-Bolshevik mutinies in the German fleet, and communist insurrections in Kiel, Hanover and Bremen.  Four days before the Armistice there was uprising in Munich.  The German Spartacists (the future Communist Party of Germany), led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebnicht, laid plans to seize power in Berlin.  More Bolshevik uprisings broke out in Hungary, Austria, and Bulgaria.  And from their European base, the Bolsheviks hoped to “Set the East Ablaze,” to communize Asia and the Middle East, to forge bonds with the revolutionary government in Mexico and — at last — join forces with the revolutionary movement in America.

On August 20, 1918, Lenin sent his first “Letter to American Workers,” calling on the American working class to revolt against its ruling class. As if in answer, there was a surge of strike activity after the Armistice.  Labor stoppages had been outlawed during the war, and so the industrial unrest of the winter of 1918-1918 still seemed seditious.  In reality, the strikes were a predictable response to post-war pay cuts during a period of mounting inflation, but many thought the European war between capital and labor had spread to America.

In January 1919, Lenin appealed again to American workers:  “We see a whole series of communist proletarian parties, not only in the border areas of the former tsarist empire . . . we see the powerful “Soviet” movement . . . in Western European countries and in the neutral countries [Switzerland, Holland, and Norway] . . . .  The revolution in Germany  . . . which is particularly important and characteristic as one of the most advanced capitalist countries . . . [has taken ] on “Soviet” forms.”  He called on American workers to join the revolution.

The strikes of 1919 were accompanied by a fiery brand of revolutionary rhetoric that America had not heard before.  As if scripted by Lenin, the Industrial Workers of the World proclaimed that “every strike is a small revolution and a dress rehearsal for the big one.”  On January 21, 1919, that “big one” seemed at hand.  In the Pacific Northwest, where the IWW was strongest, 35,000 Seattle shipyard workers walked off the job.  A few days later the Seattle Central Labor Council voted to support the shipyard workers.  On February 6, 60,000 more workers joined the walk-out, closing schools, public transportation, businesses and stores.

The press headlines — “REDS DIRECTING SEATTLE STRIKE — TO TEST CHANCE FOR REVOLUTION” — called the strike the beginning of a Bolshevik revolution in America.  Samuel Gompers’s American Federation of Labor feared there would be a public backlash against all labor unions, so the AFL joined in the attack on the Seattle strikers.  Seattle Mayor Ole Hanson said the strike was an act of class war led by radicals who “want to take possession of our American Government and try to duplicate the anarchy of Russia.”  Riding in a flag-draped car, he led federal troops from a nearby army base into the city where he ordered strikers back to work or lose their jobs.  The AFL denounced the strikers for abandoning traditional unionism.  They were playing, Gompers said, into the hands of anti-labor employers and politicians.  After four days the workers gave up.

Meanwhile, pressure mounted on Washington to do something about the labor unrest.  Aliens, who did not enjoy legal protection from arrests, jailing, and deportation, became the target of convenience.  Attorney General Thomas W. Gregory announced he was going to deport 7,000 or 8,000 “alien anarchists and trouble makers.”  The Immigration Bureau of the Labor Department loaded thirty-six alien Seattle Wobblies onto a train on February 6 and dispatched it to Ellis Island.  The papers called it the “Red Special.”  Immigration officials promised it would be the first of many.  After Seattle, every picket sign looked like a red flag, and picket signs were everywhere.  There were major strikes in Lawrence, Massachusetts and Butte, Montana in February;  175 more in March,  248 in April, 388 in May, 303 in June, 360 in July, and 373 in August.

Unrest in America, revolutionary insurrection in Europe, and the spectacular achievements of the revolution in Russia were about to profoundly alter the history of the American left, as the Bolsheviks’ most enthusiastic supporters raced to link the American movement to the center of the revolution in Moscow.  The “Left Wing” of the American Socialist Party established the Communist Propaganda League in November 1918 and excitedly began to discuss affiliation with the Bolsheviks when, in January 1919, the Russians invited revolutionaries from around the world to a Moscow conference of the “now well-defined and existing revolutionary International.”  The conference would discuss the “tremendously swift pace of world revolution” and how to defend the revolution from the counter-revolutionary capitalist cabal with the “hypocritical title of ‘League of Nations’.”

While American radicals laid plans to join forces with the Russian communists, the groups that had searched for disloyalty during the war began to see communism as their new target.  During the first congressional investigation of postwar radicalism, North Carolina’s Senator Lee Slater Overman’s Judiciary Committee had begun scrutinizing the predominantly German brewing industry in 1918.  Even though it had expanded its inquiry to the general phenomenon of “pro-Germanism,”  Overman’s investigation would seem to have been rendered obsolete by the Armistice.  It was explained to them, however, by Archibald E. Stevenson of the New York City Mayor’s Committee on Aliens, that Bolshevism was “the result of German propaganda.”  According to Stevenson, German socialism was “the father of the Bolsheviki movement in Russia” and so “the radical movement which we have in this country today has its origin in Germany.”  That sent the Overman committee back to the Senate for permission to investigate radicalism.  During the winter of 1918 and 1919 the Committee heard a parade of Russian emigres and Americans back from Russia with hair-raising tales of Bolshevik outrages against private property, the churches, the family, and everything sacred.  Much of the testimony seemed so far-fetched that it seemed to discredit all reports of communist atrocities, even though many of them later turned out to have been, if anything, understated.

Meanwhile, the Russians were proceeding with their plans to organize foreign revolutionary groups into an international force directed by Moscow.  On March 4, 1919, communists from all over the world met in Russia to found the Third Communist International (the “Comintern”).  Its manifesto announced that “the Third International is the international of open mass action of revolutionary realization.  Socialist criticism has sufficiently stigmatized the bourgeois world order.  The aim of the International Communist Party is to overthrow it and raise in its place the structure of the socialist order.”

At that moment Russian and foreign communists were fully confident that the world was on the brink of revolution.  At the Comintern’s closing session they boasted that “the Movement advances at such dizzy speed that it may be said with confidence: Within a year we will already begin to forget there was a struggle for communism in Europe, because within a year all Europe will be Communist.”  Two weeks later, communists under Bela Kun established the Soviet Republic of Hungary.

The birth of the Comintern and the unrest across Europe worried President Wilson and his liberal internationalist advisors who were in Paris in March 1919 negotiating the Peace Treaty.  When Lenin and Trotsky created the Comintern as a radical rival to the League of Nations, Wilson ordered Herbert Hoover, head of the Allied Relief efforts, to use food supplies to pressure Eastern European governments to suppress their communist movements.  The Allies were sending twelve trainloads of food a day to Austria.  They made this aid contingent on the authorities’ keeping their Communists under control.  The Hungarian people were warned that there would be no relief sent to them while they had a communist government.

For Wilson, Bolshevism now seemed a more dangerous danger to the new world order than the old imperialist system, and he began to draw closer to the unabashedly nationalistic leaders of England and France, all of whom feared that communism would spread from Russia.  Wilson began to echo Winston Churchill, who walked  through the Bois de Boulogne with Bernard Baruch, and shivered in the cold:  “Russia!  Russia! That’s where the weather is coming from!”  Wilson insisted that the Conference act quickly to organized its League of Nations to block the spread of revolution.  Despite pleas from his doctors he refused to rest from the debilitating pace of the negotiations:  “Give me time,” he told them. “We are running a race with Bolshevism and the world is on fire.”

As a consequence, the League began to be seen as an international alliance against Bolshevism.  Only a few internationalists still held out for the original Wilsonian vision of a liberal world order open to all nations and hostile to none.  When the President got home from Paris on July 8, treaty in hand, leaflets were passed out to the crowd at the dock:  “Everybody’s business:  To stand by our government. To help the soldier get a job.  To help crush bolshevism.”