Red Scare Essay

The Red Scare was a period of time, post-World War I, in the United States in which people feared the rise of communism, socialism, and anarchism. Some say that what caused the red scare was the Russian revolution and the overthrowing of the czar by the Bolsheviks who implemented communism in Russia, which left the country in turmoil. However, the real cause of the red scare was the wave of strikes that hit the US due to the fact that lots of people were left jobless and war industries without contracts after World War I ended, and many other issues rising such as the demand for higher wages. In a short amount of time, lots of people became extreme anti-communists including A. Palmer Mitchell whose solution to this problem was deportation of

“seditious” aliens and many other factors that contributed to the chaotic nonsense that the US went through at that time.
Mitchell Palmer served as the attorney general at that time, and his main priority was to rid America of any communists or anarchists, or “sweep the nation clean of such alien filth” as he said.

After a mishandled attempt to blow up Mitchell Palmer, he found exactly what he needed to blame everything that’s happening on the communists. A campaign against communism was set up and many propaganda posts and published works were being widely spread around in the US. This campaign accused communists of starting the strikes to create disorder in America, and deemed it as one of the “plots to establish nationwide communism”, “conspiracies against the government, and “crimes against society”. After brainwashing so many Americans, Mitchell Palmer started advocating for the deportation of all communists, and anarchists who are mostly German and Russian aliens. He also viewed this as the perfect opportunity to get rid of as many Germans as possible since America attempted on banning all German culture and customs. Also, because Germany announced it would start an unrestricted submarine warfare, it led to extreme anti-German

hysteria.
Not only did Mitchell Palmer advocate for the deportation of “suspicious terroristic communists”, he also set up a series of raids called the Palmer raids. The United States Department of Justice would capture, arrest, and detain anarchists without any legitimate reason to do so. It was one of the greatest violations of civil liberties and is completely unconstitutional. He would argue that these people are the greatest threat to the United States Government if they were allowed to carry out the principles of the Communist Party, and that the US would have the “horror and terrorism of Bolsheviki tyranny” that would lead to self-destruction of the nation.
This led to the US becoming a totalitarian dictatorship for a brief time period because the effects of the red scare were extreme, such as forcing people to speak English at the phone.

The only explanation to that is the government is eavesdropping and spying on its citizens, which is a total invasion of privacy just to make sure there are no sympathetic people to the “terroristic communists”. They even banned Beethoven’s music, and they would imprison people who play it. That is the level of absurdity and extremism the US government has reached at that time. What Mitchell Palmer did just worsened the situation in America because he was discriminating against people who were expressing their opinion of what they believe is the best choice of political party for America, a freedom guaranteed by the 1st amendment in the Bill of Rights. He and his supporters made very serious accusations against these people and have wronged them

greatly.
In conclusion, the US capitalists and people like A. Mitchell Palmer needed a scapegoat to blame for the hundreds of thousands of people going on strike to avoid the actual issues that are being addressed by the strikers because what the actually really feared were not the communists, but that they would lose control over what they had. They did not want to grant workers higher wages for less amount of work (8 hour work day), they wanted more money. So to avoid this problem that directly affected them, they created another one. The humiliation and inhumanity they put left-wing radicals, communist and socialist supporters through was cruel and they did not deserve that. The Palmer raids might have not detained the “suspicious and sympathetic to communism” people in brutal camps or killed them with poisonous gas; but one would think what they were doing reflects exactly on the fundamental principles of Hitler’s strategy against the Jews, who had nothing to do with the genuine problem the country was facing.