Mass hysterias and public panics have plagued societies with regular frequency throughout history. Take the First Red Scare, a period of mass public fear that led to massive police and government abuses. So great were the abuses that they birthed the American Civil Liberties Union. Below are some interesting facts about that relatively little-known public panic.
America’s Lesser Known Red Scare
America’s 1950s Red Scare, when demagogues like Senator Joseph McCarthy whipped up fears of communists, is relatively well known. Many careers and lives were ruined in modern witch hunts, as those suspected of communism – or those simply accused of being communist even though they were not – were persecuted, boycotted, and blacklisted. However, that was not the only time that America descended into anticommunist hysteria. The country had experienced another Red Scare, just as intense but far less known today, after World War I.
Fear of radical leftists was widespread in early twentieth century America. By the end of WWI, those fears were combined with distrust of foreigners in general, whom Americans blamed for the war. The recent Bolshevik revolution in Russia and the violence that accompanied it did not help. It was a potentially toxic mix. Things came to a head when followers of an Italian anarchist sent dozens of mail bombs to prominent Americans in April, 1919. Two months later, on June 2nd, the anarchists set off nine bombs in eight cities across the country.
The Tense Summer of 1919
The anarchist bombings 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 widespread panic, and what came to be known as the First Red Scare. It found fertile ground in which to grow.
The summer of 1919 was pretty tense in the US, with the country in the grip of the Spanish flu. It would eventually kill as many Americans as Covid-19 in a population that was only a third that of 2025. Even as that pandemic spread like wildfire, deadly race riots raged in many American cities. Then there were major labor strikes that caused serious disruptions. Add anarchist bombings, and many came to fear a vast communist conspiracy to tip the country over into revolution. In response, US Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, whom anarchists had tried to bomb twice in 1919, set out to suppress radical organizations.
The Palmer Raids
From late 1919 through early 1920, Palmer organized a series of nationwide police actions that came to be named after him: the Palmer Raids. Wartime laws such as the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 had criminalized many forms of speech. The Sedition Act in particular had criminalized disloyal language towards the US government, whether spoken or written. With many Americans terrified by the prospect of a Bolshevik-style revolution in the US, Palmer weaponized those statues to go after radicals on the left. As tensions mounted in the summer of 1919, the attorney general startled the House Appropriations Committee with alarmist testimony.
Palmer falsely stated that radicals planned to “rise up and destroy the government in one fell swoop”. He requested a huge budget increase to thwart that, but the committee eventually gave him only 5% of what he had asked for. Thwarted but undaunted, the attorney general ordered the arrest of a New York anarchist group, and charged them under a Civil War law. A federal judge swiftly tossed out the case on grounds that the defendants wanted to change the government through their free speech rights, not violence. Criminal statutes did not get Palmer what he wanted, so he turned to Plan B: immigration laws. He would use immigration statues to go after non-citizen and naturalized leftist radicals, who could be deported regardless of whether they were violent or not.
The Widespread Abuses That Birthed the ACLU
Palmer ordered then-24-year-old J. Edgar Hoover to investigate and identify leftist targets. That November, the attorney general oversaw a nationwide police dragnet that went after labor activists, socialists, communists, and anarchists. The operation particularly focused on Eastern European Jews and Italian immigrants, and sought to deport them along with other “undesirable” foreigners. Basic civil rights were ignored – Hoover later admitted to “clear cases of brutality” – as roughly 10,000 were rounded up across the country. Of those, approximately 3500 were held in detention. Eventually, 556 resident aliens and naturalized citizens were deported.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was founded in response to the raids. It released a report that carefully documented illegal arrests, entrapment, and unlawful detentions. At the time, however, most of the country, still in the grip of panic and a Red Scare, cheered on the Palmer Raids. Finally, in June, 1920, a federal judge decried the Department of Justice’s actions, and ordered the release of seventeen detained aliens. He wrote: “a mob is a mob, whether made up of Government officials acting under instructions from the Department of Justice, or of criminals and loafers and the vicious classes”. That finally brought the raids to an end.
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Some Sources & Further Reading
Avrich, Paul – Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background (1991)
History Halls – Moral Panics: When Coffee Was Controversial
Murray, Robert K. – Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919-1920 (1955)
