The Red
Scare
By
Herbert F. Janick
Between
November 1919 and April 1920 three hundred and thirty-six foreigners,
mostly Central and Eastern Europeans with connections to the
Union
of Russian Workers, were arrested in Connecticut by the Federal
Bureau of Investigation and charged with violations of the
Alien
Act of 1918. All were jailed for long periods, often without
benefit of a lawyer, before hearings were held that were not
governed
by normal judicial procedure. Fifty-nine "radicals"
were finally deported to Russia. Local police and private organizations,
such as the American Legion and the American Protective League,
joined the hunt for Bolsheviks. The General Assembly did its part
by passing a "Red Flag" law forbidding the display of
a flag of this color. (This law was not declared unconstitutional
until 1971.) Such are the high—or low—points of the Red Scare
in Connecticut.
There
were a number of causes of this antiradical hysteria. World
War
I produced a climate of intolerance. Connecticut's Yankee leadership
saw in the mobilization for war an opportunity to bring at
least
superficial unity to this ethnically diverse state. Concerned
at the large percentage of foreigners in the state's population—seventy
percent were either first- or second-generation according to the
census of 1910—Connecticut's Yankees equated patriotism with
conformity. The State Council of Defense sponsored Americanization
campaigns.
The Home Guard, clad in military uniforms, watched for subversives.
Governor Marcus Holcomb (1844-1932) railed against foreigners
and publicly recommended jail sentences for those conducting
schools
in languages other than English.
In
this atmosphere it is understandable that the dislocations
of
the postwar years should intensify nativist sentiments. Fear
of Bolshevism was pervasive. A judge in Ansonia, for example,
estimated
that fifty percent of the city's population was made up of dangerous
radicals and members of the Industrial Workers of the World.
The
numerous strikes that paralyzed Bridgeport, Waterbury, and New
Haven after the Armistice of November 1918 were blamed on foreign
elements. The strikes proved, said Judge George Wheeler of
Bridgeport, "that some elements in the pot in Connecticut have not melted."
Political debate over whether the vote should be extended to women
and whether the United States should abandon traditional policy
and join the League of Nations—both especially controversial in
Connecticut—further unsettled life.
By
1921 Connecticut had returned to normalcy. Women had the vote.
The Senate had rejected the League. The Republican party under
J. Henry Roraback ushered in a decade of prosperity and business
dominance. Nevertheless, in subtle ways Yankee-ethnic conflict
persisted through the 1920s over such issues as the Blue Laws,
Prohibition enforcement, and educational policy.
For
Further Reading
The
best work on nativism of the post-World War I years on a national
scale is Robert Murray, Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria (Minneapolis,
1955). Bruce B. Shubert, "The Palmer Raids
in Connecticut; 1919-1920," Connecticut Review (October
1971), provides valuable local detail. The pressure for wartime
unity is exhaustively treated in Bruce Fraser, "Yankees at
War: Social Mobilization on the Connecticut Homefront, 19 17-18" (Ph.D.
Dissertation, Columbia University, 1976).
*
Entry under revision.
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