page_title: Red Scare
section_title: First Red Scare (1917–1920)
hierarchical_section_title: Red Scare / First Red Scare (1917–1920)
caption_attribution_description: English: Identifier: baltimoreohioemp07balt (find matches) Title: Baltimore and Ohio employees magazine Year: 1912 (1910s) Authors: Baltimore and Ohio employees magazine Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company Subjects: Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company Publisher: (Baltimore, Baltimore and Ohio Railroad) Contributing Library: University of Maryland, College Park Digitizing Sponsor: LYRASIS Members and Sloan Foundation View Book Page: Book Viewer About This Book: Catalog Entry View All Images: All Images From Book Click here to view book online to see this illustration in context in a browseable online version of this book. Text Appearing Before Image: given quarters on the second floor of this building, the hotel service having been discontinued,In 1912, extensive improvement was made on the property. The interior of the building was remodeled and an addition waserected at the north end of the building to accommodate the Station Baggage and Express Company employes and service. At the present time the first floor of the building is occupied by the foll£)wing offices: Ticket office, general waitingroom, mens waiting room, womens waiting room, restaurant and telegraph office. The second floor is used by theDivision officers. The building contains sixteen rooms and is occupied by seventy-two employes. It is equipped with allmodern conveniences and is an ideal place to work. Patrons of the road are generally impressed with its neat appearanceand with the small parks which surround the property and which are kept in fine condition. Current Events as Seen The Be,i rre,e,„ii^ lg,.,„,/ ihe HoUheiik tytdemic • \0 WHERE TO GO BUT OUT Text Appearing After Image: 48 —Courtesy New York Tribune by the Cartoonists FRA;4CE: vol think him SAre^Q^1pN^-VMP BLT VOU DO NOT LIVE NEXT VVHEN THE NEW COOK ARRI\KS ON THl. JOB Note About Images Please note that these images are extracted from scanned page images that may have been digitally enhanced for readability - coloration and appearance of these illustrations may not perfectly resemble the original work.
context_page_description: A "Red Scare" is the promotion of a widespread fear of a potential rise of communism or anarchism by a society or state. The name refers to the red flags that the communists use. The term is most often used to refer to two periods in the history of the United States which are referred to by this name. The First Red Scare, which occurred immediately after World War I, revolved around a perceived threat from the American labor movement, anarchist revolution and political radicalism. The Second Red Scare, which occurred immediately after World War II, was preoccupied with the perception that national or foreign communists were infiltrating or subverting U.S. society and the federal government.
context_section_description: The first Red Scare began following the Bolshevik Russian Revolution of 1917, and the intensely patriotic years of World War I, as anarchist and other left-wing social agitation aggravated national, social, and political tensions. Political scientist and former member of the Communist Party Murray B. Levin wrote that the Red Scare was "a nationwide anti-radical hysteria provoked by a mounting fear and anxiety that a Bolshevik revolution in America was imminent—a revolution that would change Church, home, marriage, civility, and the American way of Life". Newspapers exacerbated those political fears into anti-foreign sentiment because varieties of radical anarchism were becoming popular as possible solutions to poverty, often by recent European immigrants (cf. hyphenated-Americans). The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), also known as the Wobblies, backed several labor strikes in 1916 and 1917. These wartime strikes covered a wide range of industries including steel working, shipbuilding, coal mining, copper mining, as well as other industries necessary to make wartime necessities. After World War I ended the number of strikes increased to record levels in 1919 with more than 3,600 separate strikes that spanned from steel workers, to railroad shop workers, to the Boston police department. The press portrayed them as "radical threats to American society" inspired by "left-wing, foreign agents provocateurs". Those on the side of the IWW claim that the press "misrepresented legitimate labor strikes" as "crimes against society", "conspiracies against the government", and "plots to establish communism". Opponents, on the other hand, saw these as an extension of the radical, anarchist foundations of the IWW, which contends that all workers should be united as a social class and that capitalism and the wage system should be abolished.
  In 1917 as a response to World War 1 Congress passed the espionage act of 1917 to prevent any information relating to national defense to be used to harm the United States or aid her enemies. The Wilson administration used this act to make anything "urging treason" a "nonmailable matter" . Due to the espionage act and the then Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson, 74 separate newspapers were not being mailed.
  In April 1919, authorities discovered a plot for mailing 36 bombs to prominent members of the U.S. political and economic establishment: J. P. Morgan Jr., John D. Rockefeller, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, U.S. Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer, and immigration officials. On June 2, 1919, in eight cities, eight bombs simultaneously exploded. One target was the Washington, D.C., house of U.S. Attorney General Palmer, where the explosion killed the bomber, who evidence indicated was an Italian-American radical from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Afterwards, Palmer ordered the U.S. Justice Department to launch the Palmer Raids (1919–21). He deported 249 Russian immigrants on the "Soviet Ark", helped create the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and used federal agents to jail more than  5,000 citizens and search homes without respecting their constitutional rights.
  Yet, in 1918, before the bombings, President Woodrow Wilson had pressured the Congress to legislate the anti-anarchist Sedition Act of 1918 to protect wartime morale by deporting putatively undesirable political people. Law professor David D. Cole reports that President Wilson's "federal government consistently targeted alien radicals, deporting them ... for their speech or associations, making little effort to distinguish terrorists from ideological dissidents." President Wilson used the Sedition Act of 1918 in order to limit the exercise of free speech by criminalizing language deemed disloyal to the United States government.
  Initially, the press praised the raids; The Washington Post said, "There is no time to waste on hairsplitting over [the] infringement of liberty", and The New York Times said the injuries inflicted upon the arrested were "souvenirs of the new attitude of aggressiveness which had bee
caption: Political cartoon from 1919 depicting the Russian revolution's impact on the Paris peace talks
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