The Palmer Raids: The History of the Arrests and Deportations of Anarchists and Communists in America during the First Red Scare

ISBN: 9781673626926
$9.99
$9.99
*Includes pictures
*Includes excerpts of contemporary accounts
*Includes a bibliography for further reading
*Includes a table of contents

"The war power is of necessity an inherent power in every sovereign nation. It is the power of self-reservation and that power has no limits other than the extent of the emergency." – Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, December 1918

While the period from 1945-1955 was the longest and most extensive period of time in American history when a fear of communism gripped the country, it was not the first. World War I was the first major foreign conflict the U.S. was involved in, after being safe behind the Atlantic Ocean, and Americans were now afraid of espionage and sabotage. As a result, people of German descent came under suspicion, and this subjected innocent German-Americans to mob violence, much of it perpetrated by a vigilante group called the American Protective League (APL), which had a quarter of a million members dedicated to rooting out German spies. When they did not find enough, they turned their sights on homegrown subversives, namely the International Workers of the World, the “Wobblies.”

With the end of the war, concern over German subversives was replaced with concerns over communist subversives. By 1919, the Bolshevik Revolution had spread throughout Central Europe and seemed to threaten the rest of the world. In America, newspaper stories openly worried about a similar revolution in the country. A rash of strikes fed fears that class warfare, fomented by foreign communist forces, would break out at any moment.
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