What do you think?
Rate this book
Red Scare: A study in national hysteria, 1919-1920
.
337 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1955
4 people are currently reading
104 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 10, 2023
“Occurring more than thirty years ago, the Red Scare with all its hysteria and its many sensational events is presently unknown to millions of Americans. Indeed, even those other millions who actually lived through the hectic Scare days probably remember it only with a vagueness that is natural to memories held for a long time in the recesses of the human mind.” Murray, Red Scare (1955, p. 278)
Historiography can be like psychotherapy for the national ego. While some histories help the reader to recollect the glory and to face the anguish of our collective past, other books of history have the opposite effect, inducing forgetfulness in order to shield the reader’s ego from memories too painful to deal with consciously. Murray’s Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919-1920 unfortunately belongs in the second, opiate category of psycho-histories, drifting from small fire to small fire without revealing the extent to which the USA had become engulfed in the flames of revolution.
Why a ‘Scare’? Why a ‘Hysteria’? Murray’s title conforms to the common sense but mistaken understanding of socialism in 1920 America. The title seems to aver that it was all an overreaction. The US was never in serious danger of going red, ostensibly because socialism is so thoroughly un-American in its most basic principles. For Murray, America woke up from the threat of socialism (which he frequently confuses with communism) as though from a bad dream, a nightmare, a phantom conflict destined to be overcome in waking life by that overwhelming consensus seeking to maintain the status quo (where?). It was all a bad dream; go back to sleep. But the danger of revolution in 1920 was very real, making the threat to America faced by McCarthy’s committee in 1955 appear negligible. I feel the proper historical question is not “How could people fear socialism, which has no chance of success in the US?” but rather “Why did the socialist revolution of 1920 fail in the US?”
There are I believe three factors which contributed to the demise of the socialist party in America in 1920: extreme nationalism, just as extreme internationalism, and the decision in every branch of the federal government to withhold from Americans certain constitutional rights and liberties in an effort to save the nation itself.
Nationalism and xenophobia emerged as reactions to the influx of vast throngs of immigrants. Then as now, immigrants came here to work, but their very numbers pushed down the wage scale while driving up the cost of housing and food. Working men and women were forced to organize into unions and parties to survive, and this organization, together with lots of ethnolinguistic foreignness, made them appear both conspiratorial and radical. Many German speaking immigrants were fleeing adverse political conditions of their native lands, but because the US was at war with Germany, these workers’ loyalties were suspect--their closing of ranks under the socialist party or the union locals appeared to the nationalist mind to be motivated by sedition or espionage. This energetic nationalism emanated from a highly vocal segment of US born Americans and was carried over after the scare through jingoist slogans like “return to normalcy” and “one-hundred percent Americanism.” This nativism also contributed to the growth of the Ku Klux Klan, the American Legion, and other terrorists claiming to be acting out of patriotism.
Opposite to this resurgent nationalism stood the sudden emergence of internationalism. When the Bolsheviks in Russia killed off the priests in the name of the workers of the world, liberal clergymen and their congregations in the US were led naturally to reexamine their fragile alliances with the socialists. Debs had emphasized the virtues of pacifism, cooperation, and charity, which were appealing to Christians and Socialists alike. But now the specter of world revolution drove liberal Christians (the same ones who took away the German’s beer and gave women the right to vote) away from the socialist fold. Gomperz brought the more conservative skilled laborers into the American labor movement with the American Federation of Labor, an organization repulsed by the ideas of international solidarity and class struggle. And the more the radical left acted up with their sporadic bombings and other seemingly random acts of ‘direct action,’ the less people of America’s substantial middle class felt sympathy for exploited workers in their struggles against capitalism.
But the most significant reason socialists failed in America was far more legal than ideological. Tragically, the US felt the need to subvert democracy and freedom in order to save them both. The presidential election of 1920 was a disaster for democracy. Some say that Debs the socialist pulled the most votes in a three way race. The ballots went to god knows where, and we will never know if Debs was elected or not. In any case, the two most popular planks of the socialist platform, social security and a minimum wage, were soon incorporated into the democratic party platform. Bottom line is: the republican Harding was certified the winner in 1920, and the socialists’ reforms would have to wait. While citizens were essentially losing the vote like never before, many people in America were also subjected to unfair prosecutions and impulsive deportations, without due process and without habeas corpus. Workers who organized other workers were witnessed at union halls and in workplaces by company spies, private investigators who posed as workers but were actually snitching for employers. Sedition laws and loyalty oaths made free speech guarded and the free press all but non-existent.
But the true turning point for the socialists came when they momentarily crippled the American war effort by coordinating a national steel strike that left the dough boys without bullets or shells. Once the war was over, the returning soldiers were set loose on the socialist leadership. They were forbidden to use bullets, but instead used ash brickbats, spade handles, even baseball bats. The names and addresses of the socialist union leaders had been gathered by the company spies, so it didn’t take long for the American Legion (as the returning Great War vets were now called) to beat the crap out of the socialist and union leaders. Those who died, having been savagely beaten to death, were viewed in open caskets. The socialists believed that when the people viewed the battered faces, they would become stronger in their convictions. The opposite occurred. Most people sympathetic to socialism lost their taste for revolution and quietly withdrew from politics.
In the end, it took violence and bloodshed to finish the work begun by legal harassment and the suspension of liberties. To say that socialism failed because it is un-American essentially disseminates the propaganda of the roaring twenties. Sadly, the suppression of American socialism in 1920 was itself in many ways the most un-American assault on our liberal democracy since the institution of slavery. 1920 was not socialism’s Waterloo; it was America’s Tiananmen. The people were forced to submit to the flag while the memory and trauma of a vast political upheaval was submerged, possibly forever, into America’s collective unconscious. Within a generation or two, socialism sank like Atlantis into a sea of oblivion.
See "May Day," a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It is a great record of the conflict between socialists and servicemen and is available for free from from either Gutenberg.org or Marxists.org. If you want the long view on America’s socialist heritage, see Philip Dray’s There is Power in a Union. Steel strike details are available in Warne’s Steel Strike of 1919. I am curious to see how these events are spun in the recently published American Midnight by Adam Hochschild. Hopefully his book will be a book enticing us to remember and not one like Murray's that asks us to forget.
Historiography can be like psychotherapy for the national ego. While some histories help the reader to recollect the glory and to face the anguish of our collective past, other books of history have the opposite effect, inducing forgetfulness in order to shield the reader’s ego from memories too painful to deal with consciously. Murray’s Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919-1920 unfortunately belongs in the second, opiate category of psycho-histories, drifting from small fire to small fire without revealing the extent to which the USA had become engulfed in the flames of revolution.
Why a ‘Scare’? Why a ‘Hysteria’? Murray’s title conforms to the common sense but mistaken understanding of socialism in 1920 America. The title seems to aver that it was all an overreaction. The US was never in serious danger of going red, ostensibly because socialism is so thoroughly un-American in its most basic principles. For Murray, America woke up from the threat of socialism (which he frequently confuses with communism) as though from a bad dream, a nightmare, a phantom conflict destined to be overcome in waking life by that overwhelming consensus seeking to maintain the status quo (where?). It was all a bad dream; go back to sleep. But the danger of revolution in 1920 was very real, making the threat to America faced by McCarthy’s committee in 1955 appear negligible. I feel the proper historical question is not “How could people fear socialism, which has no chance of success in the US?” but rather “Why did the socialist revolution of 1920 fail in the US?”
There are I believe three factors which contributed to the demise of the socialist party in America in 1920: extreme nationalism, just as extreme internationalism, and the decision in every branch of the federal government to withhold from Americans certain constitutional rights and liberties in an effort to save the nation itself.
Nationalism and xenophobia emerged as reactions to the influx of vast throngs of immigrants. Then as now, immigrants came here to work, but their very numbers pushed down the wage scale while driving up the cost of housing and food. Working men and women were forced to organize into unions and parties to survive, and this organization, together with lots of ethnolinguistic foreignness, made them appear both conspiratorial and radical. Many German speaking immigrants were fleeing adverse political conditions of their native lands, but because the US was at war with Germany, these workers’ loyalties were suspect--their closing of ranks under the socialist party or the union locals appeared to the nationalist mind to be motivated by sedition or espionage. This energetic nationalism emanated from a highly vocal segment of US born Americans and was carried over after the scare through jingoist slogans like “return to normalcy” and “one-hundred percent Americanism.” This nativism also contributed to the growth of the Ku Klux Klan, the American Legion, and other terrorists claiming to be acting out of patriotism.
Opposite to this resurgent nationalism stood the sudden emergence of internationalism. When the Bolsheviks in Russia killed off the priests in the name of the workers of the world, liberal clergymen and their congregations in the US were led naturally to reexamine their fragile alliances with the socialists. Debs had emphasized the virtues of pacifism, cooperation, and charity, which were appealing to Christians and Socialists alike. But now the specter of world revolution drove liberal Christians (the same ones who took away the German’s beer and gave women the right to vote) away from the socialist fold. Gomperz brought the more conservative skilled laborers into the American labor movement with the American Federation of Labor, an organization repulsed by the ideas of international solidarity and class struggle. And the more the radical left acted up with their sporadic bombings and other seemingly random acts of ‘direct action,’ the less people of America’s substantial middle class felt sympathy for exploited workers in their struggles against capitalism.
But the most significant reason socialists failed in America was far more legal than ideological. Tragically, the US felt the need to subvert democracy and freedom in order to save them both. The presidential election of 1920 was a disaster for democracy. Some say that Debs the socialist pulled the most votes in a three way race. The ballots went to god knows where, and we will never know if Debs was elected or not. In any case, the two most popular planks of the socialist platform, social security and a minimum wage, were soon incorporated into the democratic party platform. Bottom line is: the republican Harding was certified the winner in 1920, and the socialists’ reforms would have to wait. While citizens were essentially losing the vote like never before, many people in America were also subjected to unfair prosecutions and impulsive deportations, without due process and without habeas corpus. Workers who organized other workers were witnessed at union halls and in workplaces by company spies, private investigators who posed as workers but were actually snitching for employers. Sedition laws and loyalty oaths made free speech guarded and the free press all but non-existent.
But the true turning point for the socialists came when they momentarily crippled the American war effort by coordinating a national steel strike that left the dough boys without bullets or shells. Once the war was over, the returning soldiers were set loose on the socialist leadership. They were forbidden to use bullets, but instead used ash brickbats, spade handles, even baseball bats. The names and addresses of the socialist union leaders had been gathered by the company spies, so it didn’t take long for the American Legion (as the returning Great War vets were now called) to beat the crap out of the socialist and union leaders. Those who died, having been savagely beaten to death, were viewed in open caskets. The socialists believed that when the people viewed the battered faces, they would become stronger in their convictions. The opposite occurred. Most people sympathetic to socialism lost their taste for revolution and quietly withdrew from politics.
In the end, it took violence and bloodshed to finish the work begun by legal harassment and the suspension of liberties. To say that socialism failed because it is un-American essentially disseminates the propaganda of the roaring twenties. Sadly, the suppression of American socialism in 1920 was itself in many ways the most un-American assault on our liberal democracy since the institution of slavery. 1920 was not socialism’s Waterloo; it was America’s Tiananmen. The people were forced to submit to the flag while the memory and trauma of a vast political upheaval was submerged, possibly forever, into America’s collective unconscious. Within a generation or two, socialism sank like Atlantis into a sea of oblivion.
See "May Day," a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It is a great record of the conflict between socialists and servicemen and is available for free from from either Gutenberg.org or Marxists.org. If you want the long view on America’s socialist heritage, see Philip Dray’s There is Power in a Union. Steel strike details are available in Warne’s Steel Strike of 1919. I am curious to see how these events are spun in the recently published American Midnight by Adam Hochschild. Hopefully his book will be a book enticing us to remember and not one like Murray's that asks us to forget.
August 14, 2019
Robert K. Murray published this book in 1955 in which he describes the political climate of 1919. Most of his assertions could be repeated, in slightly altered fashion, today and still be relevant. Contemporaneous events in Russia, distrust of labor unions, and general unease with non-conformity led ordinary people to believe that an alien horde was about to replace their culture, take their jobs, and marry their daughters. An ambitious political figure, abetted by a sensationalist media, rode the panic to the top, until he over-reached. The line from A. Mitchell Palmer to Joe McCarthy to more recent figures is well defined. With understatement galore, Murray says: "The Scare...to some extent colors public opinion today." No, it does not color it; it defines it. For those who think the Red Scare refers to the HUAC/McCarthy years, this is a must read about a time far worse than anything we have ever experienced...until now.
March 16, 2020
I like the author, Robert Murray. His writing is straightforward, not filled with a bunk of $15 words and extra and repetitive comments to fill up chapters. That said ‘The Red Scare’ is just that...hysteria and overreaction to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and its waves that washed upon our shore only to flow back into the sea; not so much because of our government’s vigilance but because it’s message had no real substance. This material would have made an excellent long essay. 3 stars, which means I finished the book but would not recommend it.
September 25, 2021
Excellent for historical research purposes
December 29, 2021
The parallels to modern “discussion” about Critical Race Theory are truly uncanny
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews