The IWW and the Red Scare 1917-24

Abstract

Popular attitudes towards the Left in the United States since I945 have been largely conditioned by the Cold War and the anticommunist witch-hunt led by Senator Joseph McCarthy. Yet public awareness of the communist menace has deeper roots than this. It can be traced back more than fifty years to the time of the Bolshevik Revolution itself, when a nation which was already fighting in a great European war found itself facing a revolutionary movement at home which looked ominously like bolshevism. This movement was represented primarily by a revolutionary labour union called the Industrial Workers of the World. The trial and conviction of o10 IWW leaders at Chicago in I918 marked the opening of the whole anti-radical offensive which helped shape the next six years. The Red Scare, the Palmer Raids, and the decision to intervene in the Civil War in Russia left a deep wound in the American body politic. In the New Deal years and the second world war, when communism became at times almost fashionable, the wound healed. But the scar remained, and the strain of the Cold War and the McCarthy era opened it again. The United States has a long and honourable tradition, enshrined in its Constitution and Bill of Rights, of maintaining both freedom and order, and of protecting the liberty and property of its citizens from violation without due process of law. Yet the balance between freedom and security, inherent in every democracy, becomes more difficult to sustain in wartime, when the danger of subversion, real or imagined, can lead to serious invasions of normal peacetime concepts of due process. Such fears became apparent in Britain during both world wars. They were virulent after 1917 in the United States, where a comparatively high proportion of the population was foreign-born. Nativist fears of foreign immigrants had been a recurring theme