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3 Red Scare The Triumph of Countersubversion Hindsight encourages us to see 1919 as an auspicious moment for countersubversive politics, with the war’s legacy of intolerance and the global climate of insecurity leading to a yearlong campaign of domestic repression. But despite the disorder emanating from Europe and the controversy over the presence of pro-Bolshevik radicals in America, the coming of peace also raised serious problems for countersubversives. The Wilson administration had sponsored domestic countersubversion in 1917 and 1918 on the grounds that antiwar dissenters were aiding Germany by undermining the war effort. For many supporters of the war, only the clear and present dangers of great-power conflict justified the imposition of sweeping federal restrictions on civil liberties. Far from charging toward a Red Scare, the government actually began 1919 by beating a retreat from political policing. The Sedition Act had been passed as a measure of war and was no longer legislatively applicable. Attorney general Gregory resigned in February to attend the Paris peace talks and before departing told the American Protective League to wind up its operations and sharply reduced the number of bureau agents investigating radicalism.1 A judge dismissed legal proceedings against John Reed and a number of other radicals in April, raising hopes of a more general amnesty.2 The new attorney general, former alien property custodian A. Mitchell Palmer, warned that, absent the swift passage of a peacetime sedition law, hundreds of “dangerous aliens” would soon have to be turned loose onto American streets.3 But Congress showed little interest, especially after Overman completed his hearings in the spring. Some states began to take matters into their own hands: unrestricted by questions of federalism, state sedition laws could take up the slack where the national government fell short. Nevertheless, optimistic liberals tentatively began to voice the hope that the excesses of the war years were coming to an red scare . 61 end and that the United States was returning to a more tolerant position on political dissent. Nevertheless, much of the private-sector machinery of countersubversion still remained in place. Voluntarist groups were less concerned with constitutional restrictions on political policing than Congress or the White House and, having benefited directly from the wartime campaign, sought to continue their activities . In so doing, they tended to drift away from the basic question of national security that had, at least in theory, shaped wartime policy and toward matters of personal interest. Having already demonstrated their efficacy, national security justifications for countersubversive activism persisted, but they became increasingly tenuous, as individual groups sought to denounce their rivals as disloyal, treasonous, and a danger to the general good. The radicalization of countersubversive politics over the course of 1919, then, was linked to the continuing shift of political initiative away from the state and toward groups within the private sector, a process that had already begun during the wartime loyalty campaigns. Indeed, federal countersubversion during the Great Red Scare took place toward the end of the year, effectively following in the wake of local and nonstate politics. Taken at face value, the idea that radicals represented an existential threat to national institutions—institutions that had persisted across more than a century of political discord, survived a civil war, and endured military conflicts with several of the world’s great empires—was absurd. To support their arguments, then, private-sector countersubversives pointed to the wave of industrial instability that followed the end of the war, blaming social discontent on radical activism and suggesting it was the first step on the path to revolution. Rather than seeing revolutionary politics as a symptom of a broader socioeconomic crisis, Bolshevism was depicted as the source. Confusing correlation with causation , countersubversives argued that radical machinations were creating the unstable conditions necessary for the seizure of power by coup and that only their repression would return America to normality. In his classic account of the history of political repression, Murray Levin characterizes the Red Scare as the result of an “almost universal belief in the imminent destruction of American civilization by a highly organized, brilliantly directed, and well financed Bolshevik conspiracy in America, which, in fact, did not exist. . . . This national panic without real cause was political hysteria.” It was certainly true that there was no powerful Bolshevik conspiracy in America: there was only Ludwig Martens and his Information Bureau and the disorganized membership of the Communist and Communist Labor Parties. But the suggestion that the fears of 1919 were without...

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