Red Scare Essay

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The United States’ involvement in World War I sparked widespread fear of radical spies on the homefront, which launched a crusade against a manufactured enemy, the “other” that they hated and feared: progressive organized laborers, immigrants, anarchists. In response to the Red Scare of 1919 and 1920, government agencies and private ventures, including 200,000 American citizens, formed an intelligence network that employed warrantless searches and neighbor spying on neighbor (The Life and Death 36); Paul Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 93. During the Red Scare, the Bill of Rights and generally the United States Constitution, in practice, did not apply to immigrants. Sacco and Vanzetti. …show more content…

36). Vigilant typecasting seeped into the consciousness of law enforcement and the American public over the course of the war and beyond. In 1920, two Italian-born American immigrants and admitted anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were arrested for crimes, many argue falsely, for which they paid the ultimate price. In 1928, the critic Edmund Wilson wrote that their case “revealed the whole anatomy of American life, with its classes, professions, and points of view, and all their relations, and it raised almost every fundamental question of our political system” (Am on Trial 64). The case lives on in infamy because of the distortion of justice that occured in order to prosecute a manufactured enemy. Ripples from the case’s impact remain in our political conscience, in our views of “the other,” and in our perceptions of the role of international opinion in domestic considerations, as well as in art forms from plays to songs, and in immigrant

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