The Revolt Against the Masses. Fred Siegel

      The armistice largely ended the fighting in Europe, but it opened a new chapter in the hostilities at home. In America, fear of the Germans was seamlessly succeeded by the Red Scare. The Bolsheviks’ effectively unconditional surrender to the Germans in March of 1918 had created a cat’s cradle of anti-Communist fears that intertwined with hostility to the Huns. With the Soviet surrender at Brest-Litovsk, Germany won control of the Baltic states (Poland, Belarus, and the Ukraine), with their attendant coal and oil resources, freeing the Kaiser’s army to focus on the Western Front with deadly effect. In this context, Lenin’s return to Russia in April 1917 by way of a sealed railroad car supplied by Berlin was seen as proof, and not only by conspiracists, that the Bolshevik leader was a German agent.

      Progressives and leftists, counseled by Raymond Robbins, who had worked for Wilson in 1912 and served as an unofficial ambassador to the Bolsheviks, adopted a counter-conspiracy, echoes of which persist to this day. Robbins, smitten by Bolshevism, wrote to Lenin, “It has been my eager desire . . . to be of some use in interpreting this new democracy to the people of America.” Robbins also mistakenly blamed the U.S. for forcing Lenin to agree to Germany’s harsh terms at Brest-Litovsk. During the next few years, explains historian Peter Filene, Robbins’s efforts shaped the opinions of a vast circle of American Progressives. The Progressives were enraged when Wilson succumbed to pressure from the French and the English, both suffering massive casualties on the Western Front, and gave half-hearted American military support to a campaign that tried to force the Bolsheviks back into the war. Most Americans accused the Bolsheviks of betrayal, in their abject surrender to the Germans, but the Progressives, Filene notes, saw this “betrayal,” the American intervention, as an American perfidy.

      Here too, Wilson, juggling principle and practicality, proved strikingly inconstant. In the words of historian Georg Schild: “The Wilson who agreed to the Allied intervention [against the Soviets] in the summer of 1918” and the Wilson who “one year later at the Paris Peace Conference” helped save the Soviet Union by insisting that the Germans relinquish their conquests on the Eastern Front “almost seemed like two different people.” Wilson the Progressive went to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 with the understanding that “we are running a race with Bolshevism and the world is on fire.” “From the eastern border of France all the way through Asia to the Sea of Japan,” notes historian Anthony Read, “not a single pre-war government remained in power.” From Berlin to Seattle, strikes and in some cases pro-Bolshevik revolutionary movements seemed like the wave of the future. Comintern chief Zinoviev confidently predicted, “In a year’s time, the whole of Europe will be Communist.” The leaders looking to remake the world at Versailles were confounded by Bolshevism; they didn’t know exactly what it was, much less how to contain it.

      The leaders gathered at Versailles, notes Read, saw themselves as men dancing on a live volcano that had destroyed the old Europe and was threatening continued eruptions. Harry Kessler, an Anglo-German count and a Soviet sympathizer, captured the scene: “The wave of Bolshevism surging in from the East resembles somewhat the invasion by Islam in the seventh century,” he wrote. “Fanaticism and power in the service of a nebulous fresh hope are faced, far and wide, by nothing more than the fragments of old ideologies. The banner of the prophets waves at the head of Lenin’s armies too.” Faced with the Soviet challenge, Wilson, who came bearing the new ideology of universal democracy, floated the idea that the Bolsheviks should be invited to the Paris Peace Conference. Churchill, who saw in Communism something akin to “legalized sodomy,” blocked the suggestion. Wilson the Progressive took a different tact: “War won’t defeat Bolshevism, food will,” he said. Capitalism had to reform itself, he argued, to stave off Bolshevik barbarism.

      Wilson’s efforts to reconstruct Europe largely failed, not only because the U.S. declined to join the League of Nations, but more significantly because the task at hand was impossible; what the war had sundered could not be put back together. Many former Wilson supporters were angry and disillusioned with the meager fruits of a war that had failed to make the world safe for democracy. But people across the political spectrum shared those feelings widely. Those who were soon to call themselves liberals were particularly incensed by wartime conscription, the repression of civil liberties, Prohibition, and the overwrought fears of Bolshevism in America.

      In 1918, with war still raging, the unions, emboldened by a surge in membership and squeezed by an inflation-borne decline in living standards, engaged in a wave of strikes, some of which were forcibly repressed by Pinkerton detectives, the APL, and local police forces. The walkouts led by the revolutionary Industrial Workers of the World, well known for work sabotage, seemed particularly ominous. The IWW, which sometimes called itself “Lenin’s advanced guard,” was led in part by “Big” Bill Haywood, who would soon be deported to the USSR. At the end of the year, in the wake of the armistice, the mayor of New York City, John Hylan, banned the Socialist red flag at public gatherings. Shortly thereafter, 500 soldiers and sailors broke up a Socialist rally at Madison Square Garden. The bad blood endured. In a November 11, 1919, celebration of the first anniversary of the war’s end, American Legionnaires and members of the IWW, (known as “Wobblies”) clashed in Centralia, Washington. Six Wobblies were killed in the name of combating the Red Scare.

      Communism was as yet ill defined in America. Wilson himself thought it might be merely a temporary way station on the road to liberal democracy. But every strike, confrontation, and racial incident was taken, on both left and right, as a manifestation of Bolshevism. Every challenge to the existing social order, no matter how justified, was attributed to the Red Scare. The new so-called African-American uppityness, meaning insufficient deference to whites, was attributed to homegrown Bolshevism. “Uppityness” was met with a wave of lynching and a resurgence of the KKK. White attacks on blacks set off riots in Chicago and Washington that required federal troops to suppress.

      The Red Scare intensified in June of 1919 when Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer was nearly killed by a terrorist bomb planted in his Georgetown home. Bombs went off in seven other cities that same night. The bombers were probably, notes historian Beverley Gage, from the Galleanisti group of Italian anarchists that included the as yet unknown Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. But the attacks were attributed to their conceptual cousins, the Russian Bolsheviki. The attacks reignited the intense nationalism of the war years and stoked a renewed hysteria. Palmer, who subsequently claimed to have a list of 60,000 subversives, engaged in a series of warrantless raids aimed at capturing the mostly immigrant “red radicals,” some of whom were jailed or shipped back to Russia. In the process, Palmer, with no reproach from Wilson, widely trampled on civil liberties and harassed the innocent as well as the likely guilty.

      The pre-war Progressives had hoped to transcend a politics based on ethnic and regional peculiarities to forge a reformed national polity grounded in Protestant moral uplift. But the attempt to forge national unity in order to prosecute the war heightened the ethnic tensions wrought by mass immigration. One of the arguments put forth for enacting Prohibition in 1919 was that it might help Americanize the booze-swilling immigrants who were in need of moral improvement through assimilation.

      Progressives, who had broadly supported Prohibition, saw it primarily as a means to protect working-class families from the economic depredations of drink. But the newly minted liberals were infuriated by what they saw as cultural continuation of wartime repression. “Like most sensible people,” shouted liberal Harold Stearns, “I regard Prohibition as an outrage and a direct invitation to revolution.”

      An aggressive nationalism and an accelerated Americanization became political twins. Both demanded something that, with the partial exception of the Civil War North, had never existed before: a coherent, irrefragable governmental power. In Europe, war had become intertwined with revolution; in the U.S., the war and the Bolshevik challenge called up the seemingly un-American concept of a General Will, a 100 percent Americanism that brooked no opposition.