Women, Gender, and Red Scares in the Modern United States

The first Red Scare, after World War I, and the Red Scare that followed World War II, both impacted American women in remarkably similar ways. Many women found their lives hemmed in by antifeminism and the conservative gender ideology that underwrote anticommunist national identity in 1919, and then again in the late 1940s. This cultural nationalism tied traditional gender norms to the defense of American values and ideals, positioning the family as a bulwark against communism while making women’s performance of gender roles symbolic of national health or sickness. Within this gendered nationalism, the first Red Scare offered opportunities for conservative women to join the antiradical cause as protectors of the home. These same antiradicals maligned radical and progressive women for their feminism and their social activism. The second Red Scare played out in similar fashion. Anticommunism provided a safe platform for conservative women to engage in political activism in defense of the family, and in turn, they participated in broader efforts that attacked and weakened civil rights claims and the social justice efforts of women on the left. In each Red Scare the symbols and rhetoric of anticommunism prioritized women’s relationship to the family, positioning them either as bastions of American virtue or as fundamental threats to the social and political order. Gender proved critical to the construction of patriotism and national identity.

The Adversity and Empathy of Emma Goldman

Chapter 4 examines how Emma Goldman wrote her 1931 Living My Life to challenge the state authority that had deported her during the first Red Scare, turning inward before a global audience to analyze experiences in the family, factory, anarchist circles, prison, and in nursing. Through autobiography Goldman theorized two approaches to antiauthoritarian politics. Whereas an adversarial approach aimed to emancipate the people through targeting and removing agents of oppression, empathy would raise awareness of the people that suffer structural injustice. The chapter traces this shift in anarchist politics across Goldman’s descriptions of her assistance with the attempted murder of Henry Clay Frick and her response to the assassination of President William McKinley. Recognizing Goldman’s claim of experience elevates Living My Life among her anarcha-feminist essays and speeches, and it explains why she revealed her previously secret involvement with the attack on Frick though it made difficult her return to the United States.

The First Red Scare

The first Red Scare, which occurred in 1919–1920, emerged out of longer clashes in the United States over the processes of industrialization, immigration, and urbanization as well as escalating conflict over the development of a labor movement challenging elite control of the economy. More immediately, the suppression of dissent during World War I and shock over a revolution in Russia that energized anti-capitalist radicals spurred further confrontations during an ill-planned postwar demobilization of the armed forces and economy. A general strike in Seattle in February 1919 that grew out of wartime grievances among shipbuilders raised the specter of Bolshevik insurrection in the United States. National press attention fanned the flames and continued to do so throughout the year. In fact, 1919 became a record strike year. Massive coal and steel walkouts in the fall shook the industrial economy, while a work stoppage by Boston police became a national sensation and spread fears of a revolutionary breakdown in public order. Ultimately, however, much of the union militancy of the war era was crushed by the end of 1919 and the labor movement entered a period of retrenchment after 1922 that lasted until the 1930s. Fall 1919 witnessed the creation of two competing Communist parties in the United States after months of press focus on bombs, riots, and strikes. Federal anti-radical investigative operations, which had grown enormously during World War I and continued into 1919, peaked in the so-called “Palmer Raids” of November 1919 and January 1920, named for US Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, who authorized them. The excesses of the Department of Justice and the decline of labor militancy caused a shift in press and public attention in 1920, though another Red Scare would escalate after World War II, with important continuities between the two.

AGAINST INTOLERANCE: THE RED SCARE ROOTS OF LEGAL LIBERALISM

This article argues that important antecedents of post-New Deal American liberalism emerged in response to the First Red Scare. As war hysteria gave way to patent antiradicalism, the pervasiveness of peacetime state-sponsored repression undermined progressive confidence in administrative governance and generated support for so-called personal rights. At the same time, the suppression of meaningful labor activity during the early 1920s buttressed conservative confidence in the judiciary and emboldened lawyers and business advocates to oppose state policing of putatively private beliefs. The result was increasing convergence around a new liberalism, defined against “intolerance,” which laid the groundwork for judicial enforcement of free speech and minority rights.

EXPELLING THE FOREIGN-BORN MENACE: IMMIGRANT DISSENT, THE EARLY DEPORTATION STATE, AND THE FIRST AMERICAN RED SCARE

This essay explores the impact of the First Red Scare on immigrant populations, focusing on the function that detentions, deportations, and attempted deportations occupied within the broader antiradical politics of the period. I assert that deportations were far more than an instrumentalist tactic of the Red Scare, but instead, were part of a much longer trajectory of expanding anti-immigrant enforcement and the postentry social control of foreign-born residents. Antiradical raids during the era have held a prominent place in the scholarly imagination, which has remained overly constrained by the exceptionalist and episodic narratives put forth by its earliest historians. I trace the evolution of scholarship on the Red Scare's temporal boundaries, the motivations for targeting immigrants, and the debates over how radical a rupture this period represented from earlier practices of antiradicalism and anti-immigrant politics. In doing so, I argue that Red Scare deportations must be understood in relationship to the broader deportation practices of the period and the rapid (and more consistent) growth of removals instigated because of racialized criteria of poverty, crime, health, or violations of an ever-stricter border regime.

UNDERSTANDING A NATIONAL AND GLOBAL RED SCARE/RED SUMMER THROUGH THE LOCAL INVENTION OF SOLIDARITIES

As the centennial of the First Red Scare arrives, the time has come to revisit our understanding of it. This methodological article makes the case that the field still struggles with the fundamental problem that the incidents we have collected as the “Red Scare” and “Red Summer” and madenational, manifested often as disparatelocalevents that responded to immediate conditions. It argues that responding to the local events of the Red Scare/Red Summer to better understand regional history is not an inadequate response that distracts us from a more worthy attempt to synthesize national currents. Through analyzing smaller-scale strikes and incidents of racial violence, looking at the variance in form and response of local governments, and seeing the global interconnections of the Red Scare through the lens of localities, we can gain new ground toward a broader, more multifaceted understanding of this transformative era.

NEW WOMEN IN RED: REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA, FEMINISM, AND THE FIRST RED SCARE

This essay seeks to reinterpret both the gendered rhetoric of the First Red Scare as well as the reasons why many feminists came under attack in the years following World War I. It underscores the ways in which women's activist concerns were de-legitimized through accusations of Bolshevism, but also highlights the very real attractions that the Soviet system held for American women seeking peace, economic independence, voting rights, professional opportunity, and sexual freedom. Although a number of historians have demonstrated the ways in which a focus upon gender and women offers important insights into the First Red Scare, they have given only minimal attention to the Soviet Union's appeal, presumably wishing to avoid giving credence to inflammatory and exaggerated right-wing rhetoric. However, this tendency has the effect of distorting the historical record and, in particular, of eliding revolutionary Russia's role in fostering the American feminist imagination. Attention to several prominent targets of the First Red Scare, including Louise Bryant, Emma Goldman, and Rose Pastor Stokes, helps to clarify these dynamics.

Chronicling subversion: The Cronaca Sovversiva as both seditious rag and community paper

The Cronaca Sovversiva (Subversive Chronicle) was an anarchist newspaper, known today for the views of editor Luigi Galleani, whose ideas are associated with multiple bombings carried out in the United States throughout the 1910s and 1920s, the First Red Scare and the executed anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. A broad reading of the Cronaca Sovversiva , which focusses on more than its connections to controversy, violence and repression, reveals how a periodical produced by a wide range of artists, writers and activists became central to how many Italian immigrants understood and engaged with industrial capitalism. This paper argues that the Cronaca Sovversiva built an audience over time by incorporating a wide range of perspectives, addressing local and global issues and linking readers with other forms of literature as well as community events and projects. Diverse works of radical literature, art and announcements in the periodical, set within the predictable, repetitious framework of a weekly community paper, allowed a germinating militant movement to develop throughout and outside the Cronaca Sovversiva ’s pages.

Haymarket Riot and Conspiracy

The Haymarket Riot and Conspiracy of 1886 is a landmark in American social and political history. On May 4, 1886, during an open-air meeting near Haymarket Square in Chicago, someone threw a dynamite bomb into a squad of police, sparking a riot that resulted in the deaths of seven police officers and at least four rioters. Eight anarchists were brought to trial. Though the bomb-thrower was never apprehended, the eight radical leaders were charged as accessories before the fact for conspiring to murder the police. After the longest criminal trial in Illinois history up to that time, seven men were convicted and condemned to death and one to a long prison term. After all appeals were exhausted, four were executed, one cheated the hangman with a jail cell suicide, and the death sentences of two others were commuted to life imprisonment (all three incarcerated men were later pardoned by Governor John Peter Altgeld in 1892). The Haymarket bombing and trial marked a pivotal moment in the history of American social movements. It sparked the nation’s first red scare whose fury disrupted even moderately leftist movements for a generation. It drove the nation’s labor unions onto a more conservative path than they had been heading before the bombing. The worldwide labor campaign for clemency for the convicted men became the foundation for the institution of International Workers’ Day on May 1, a holiday ironically observed in most countries except for the United States. It also began a tradition within the American left of memorializing the Haymarket defendants as the first martyrs to their cause.

Revolution and Repression

This chapter examines how the First World War and its aftermath fundamentally altered global politics. Empires crumbled, socialist and nationalist revolutions erupted, and millions perished. Meanwhile, in the United States, rising patriotic fervor and wartime demands for “100 percent Americanism” marked immigrant anarchists as doubly dangerous, and Russia's October Revolution amplified antiradical fears. America was distressed by widespread racial violence, its first Red Scare, and a colossal postwar strike wave. In this context, the federal government proved willing to suppress radical speech and deport politically undesirable immigrants, efforts that were met with an unprecedented upsurge in anarchist violence, itself both a result and a cause of increasing repression.