Right wing cries of "Socialist" are nothing more than racist Cold War red-baiting

In case you haven't noticed, some of your friends and neighbors are acting more than a little strange lately--even strange for Republicans or your garden variety Libertarian. Some of them are crying out--pathetically and impotently since it's their lot to do so--that, "There are socialists taking over!" What does that mean?

It doesn't make a lot of sense, even to those exclaiming it since they don't tend to know much at all about American history. Such are the vagaries of the ignorant and the terminally afraid.

According to Webster's newest edition, the term "red-baiting" arose around 1928, only eleven years after the Bolshevik counterrevolution in Russia against a revolutionary coalition (mostly of the left) that had deposed the Tsar in February 1917 (hence, the Bolsheviks called their own seizure of power, "The October Revoultion"). In many respects, 1928 was a flush year, a time when the bloated markets and an unregulated economy seemed to offer a "permanent" prosperity, which seems as laughable today as it did then. Systematic regulation of the economy was almost unheard of at the time, and the good times seemed to have no end. We know what happened after that: the Great Depression and another world war. Cries of "socialist" were being heard everywhere after 1933, just as they had at the end of WWI.

1928 was part of the tail-end period of Republican rule that began with the end of the Progressive and Wilsonian eras, meaning a feeding frenzy for the financial and business sectors, it being a venerable (and convenient) cycle in American politics and economy. But Republicans didn't invent red-baiting: It has a long and sordid history in America that reaches as far back as the labor clashes of the late-1870s, well into the 1900s, and came out of key events like the Haymarket bombing and the countless strikes, clashes, and protests that came afterward.

Today, we're hearing it come from the mouths of former presidential candidate John McCain, conservative pundits like Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh, and free market extremists of every stripe inside and outside of the beltway. That they're reactionary nuts is a given, but they are part of a very sad tradition in American politics and culture. They're no different than the scabs, the lynch mobs, Indian killers, the company goons and Pinkertons, and the bought newspaper editors, writers, and journalists of America roughly one hundred years ago.

Some moments truly define our times, and 1886 was one of those years.

1886 is one of those flashpoint years that tend to define the next few decades. There would be other key years that would contribute to the genesis of red-baiting, and the Haymarket bombing was one of those catalysts that come along and change everything, and sometimes for generations.

On the night of May 4th, 1886, several hundred Chicago immigrant workers assembled at Haymarket Square to protest the shootings of locked-out workers by the police the day before. Their radical demands? A call for an eight-hour workday. Many of the same police "shooters"were there to meet them that night and ordered the workers to disperse. Sometime after 10:00 PM, someone threw a bomb close to the police lines and the shock waves have reverberated ever since, partly in the form of future red-baiting. The reaction couldn't have been stronger, and many innocent workers were stripped of their rights and detained illegally if not outright killed in the subsequent hysteria. Sound familiar? It wasn't to be the first or the last time.

The newspapers of the time wrote that the organized immigrant workers were anarchists (in reality, a tiny minority were) who were ..."long-haired, [and were] wild-eyed, bad-smelling atheistic, reckless foreign wretches, who never did an honest hour's work in their lives, but who, driven half-crazy with years of oppression (before coming to 'the land of the free') and mad with envy of the rich... [came to America]."(Albany Law Journal, 15 May 1886) A cultural theme was created out of events like the Haymarket bombing, but its roots came from an already prevalent racism and anti-immigrant nativism, not unlike today's, but with its hands untied and its mouth un-gagged, so it ran riot. Was it all really about "radicals" and "anarchists" threatening the status quo? We don't know this entirely, but we can see from the results of this social behavior over the decades that red-baiting was once a very effective tool in limiting organized labor and movements working for civil rights.

In essence, the GOP is trying to play an old game that has--for all intents--ended. But who threw that bomb on May 4th, 1886?

Ironically (or not), nobody ever discovered who threw the bomb that harmed dozens of workers (killing a policeman, wounding seventy others--police shot four workers to death during the melee) that day, but the red-baiting that followed has continued into our own era. There's a good reason for this. Until very recently, red-baiting worked, keeping down efforts of immigrants, minorities, and workers, from organizing to protect their basic rights from employers and ownership. With the Soviet Union gone, the game has become a dead one, not that the truth ever stopped the Republican Party from doing something inadvisable. Their love of "the good old days" (that never were) is legendary.

To the current GOP, it's still 1919, the Cold War generally, 1949 specifically, or even 1889. But never mind that, there are careers to be made as well in our market economy, even in the ranks of the police:

As the city [of Chicago] writhed in fear, kept at a high pitch by a frenzied press, [Police Captain Michael J.] Schaack took center stage as a detective-hero, casting himself in the role of master detective, a figure that in the nineteenth century gripped the popular imagination, whose daring and skill would unlock mysteries and bring him acclaim as the man who had not only solved "the crime of the century" but rescued the city and nation from destruction. How could his vision be marred by such piddling details as apprehending the actual bomber? Instead, he bragged unceasingly of his cleverness and courage in rooting out secret conspiracies, confident that no one in the fear- ridden city would dare challenge his boastful disclosures, however absurd or incredible.

This self-styled master detective left no stone unturned to keep himself in the public eye. Not only did he falsely announce the discovery of bombs, but he actually sought to set up anarchist cells on his own. (Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), pp.12-22.)

We've heard similar bragging and a general lack of results in our own era. The effect of Haymarket and the media hysteria that was whipped-up virtually destroyed the first genuine national union, the Knights of Labor, founded out of the bloody railroad strikes of 1877. Later, elements of the Knights would go on to form the radical I.W.W. (Industrial Workers of the World) in 1905, the first American union to admit women, immigrants, and African-Americans. Sometimes, there are unintended consequences to repression, and sometimes things simply happen on-accident.

The 1901 assassination of big business ally President William McKinley by the lone (and deranged) anarchist Leon Czolgosz also inflamed the passions of a racialist and anti-immigrant, nativist America against the progressive left and unionization. It was a short walk. Ongoing and brutal labor violence and economic downturns only aggravated things, and the situation continued to feed on itself, and the cops and the politicians were there to fan the flames. It should sound familiar that there was a feeling by the end of WWI that things were coming-apart in America. In the backdrop of this were the ongoing public lynchings of African-Americans, often created and attended by the same mobs that were hanging union organizers. This escalated at war's end. The tone of the time was one of incredible violence and anger, and scapegoating was commonplace.

Just one hundred years ago, Americans were still working 10-14 hour work days, sometimes as many as 16 hours if they were working in immigrant-filled sweatshops and factories for starvation wages. To say that there were plenty of reasons for American and immigrant workers to be angry about would be understating the issue, and change was long-in-coming. It wasn't until 1916 when the Adamson Act made an eight hour workday national law, affecting private workplaces. But this didn't end things...

A 1917 Supreme Court decision confirmed the Adamson Act's constitutionality, but most Americans didn't get that eight hour workday until 1938 with the New Deal and the FLSA (Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, 29 U.S.C. Ch. 8). There would be many more labor battles and more unnecessary violence in the years between the wars, and it was all avoidable. After decades of brutal back-and-forth between organized labor, politicians, the police, goons, and ownership, things started coming to a head during WWI. This became particularly acute in its aftermath when an economic downturn brought the Seattle General Strike in early-1919, a national coal strike, the Boston Police Strike, and a national steel strike. Ever wonder why you were never taught about any of this?

Strikes in solidarity with American workers also broke-out in several parts of Canada, especially in its Northwest provinces. To America's wealthiest, it seemed that things were coming apart and that their position was endangered. This wasn't necessarily true, but it's an indicator of how tenuous American elites have viewed their position as for some time. They still do. There were definitely warning-sings back in 1919.

True, small-scale bombings by anarchist groups had gone on for decades without much attention given to them, but in the postwar climate of fear and paranoia, all it took was a series of them to set things off like never before. These acts came first at the end of April, and once again on June 2, 1919 in a wave of bombings that targeted America's wealthiest, including the home of President Wilson's Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer (FDR's neighbor at the time), major banker J.P. Morgan, oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller, and numerous other "captains of industry"and government.

Out of this general state of paranoia and an anti-immigrant and racialist hysteria came the first national Red Scare. Race riots and lynchings of unionizers, immigrants, and African-Americans would also occur during the panic, showing that a significant portion of the fear was racially-inspired, including a specific racism directed at Eastern European immigrants thanks to the Russian Revolution. The irony is that several of the bombing attacks probably came from Italian "Galleanist" anarchists, many of them operating out of New Jersey, and that they were actually known to law enforcement at the time.

All these kinds of confrontations were avoidable through the passage of progressive legislation that would merely give the working-class some marginal breathing room, but they met strenuous opposition, and from both major parties until the advent of the New Deal. As one can imagine, the Republican Party was violently opposed to these kinds of pieces of social legislation at the time, and still are today. Republicans labeling the New Deal as "socialist," "communist," and even went so far as to later label them as "Kremlin inspired" during the Second Red Scare of late-1940s into the 1950s, the era of Joe McCarthy and HUAC (the House Un-American Activities Committee, an apt name) and the communist witch hunts. For some reason, the GOP of today thinks this is going to work again in a climate where they're disgraced, where the public is fully-aware of their primary responsibility for the current economic crisis.

But what red-baiting really constitutes are attempts at keeping the "little people" at the bottom by dividing them and diverting them from their own economic interests through scapegoating, by throwing the attention off of ownership and big money. Issues of racism and hollow nationalism fit that bill nicely in the past, and many chomped at the bit of bigotry and ignorance to their eternal shame. How little has changed since then, but ignorance is a double-edged sword: the kids don't remember most of this, or red-baiting's emotional appeal to earlier generations.

For most young Americans of this historical moment--many-of-whom weren't even alive during the Cold War--little of this registers or matters and red-baiting has not only lost its effectiveness, but its original context and meaning. It's a dead horse. Nowadays, red-baiting is just the babbling of scared racists and bigots who are becoming more and more culturally and demographically isolated. The reality is, that that's all it ever was, ultimately: little people who felt their way of life was being threatened throwing the ugliest fit imaginable and accomplishing their own downfall.

To most Americans now, it's weird watching footage of Dixiecrats and Republican politicians of days old calling Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and desegregation activists "communists," "pinkos," "commies," "socialists," and much worse. And that's exactly how weird Republicans yelling "socialist" sound today. Not only do they sound out-of-touch, they sound as demented and bizarre as they all really are. It was a long road to this present state of affairs, but one thing's certain: red-baiting no longer works, and the GOP and red-baiters everywhere are obsolete examples of those still living in the back alleys of America's very dark racialist and classist past.

If the Republican Party wishes to continue engaging in this self-flagellation, why not cut to the chase? Why not call our new president what you're thinking he is--that he's a "socialist" (check) and a "nigger" (unchecked)? Because, that's become unacceptable to the average person in the United States. But leave it to the GOP to channel the black heart of where our culture has been for the new age, they're doing the lord's work, they'll tell you. Thanks for the reminder, and thanks for letting us know where you really stand. Time's up, but at least there's Google so that they can spell "socialist" correctly. Fat chance.

29 U.S.C. CH. 8:

http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/29/ch8.html

"The First Red Scare: Facts, Discussion Forum, and Encyclopedia Article," Absolute Astronomy.com, 2009: http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/First_Red_Scare

Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), pp.12-22. : http://www3.niu.edu/~td0raf1/history471/Frank%20Donner%20brief.htm

Kenneth D. Ackerman's "Young J. Edgar" (review)

Reading Kenneth D. Ackerman's book, one has to wonder why the "Palmer Raids" weren't called the "Hoover-Caminetti Raids." It's unlikely that there will be a better telling of the Palmer Raids--and by his almost central role in them--the early-years and rise of J. Edgar Hoover within the bureaucracy of the Department of Justice. Few have ever achieved the power that Hoover did at such a tender age (a mere 24 when Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer tapped him to run the new Radical Division in that fateful year of 1919), and Mr. Ackerman's keen eye for important anecdotes, social scope, personal details, and the importance of key-documents serves this book well.

It's more than just important historiography, it's an accessible treatment on our history, and is required reading for those of us who value our liberties and eschew the politics of the "strong man" and frontier justice.

Most of the book covers the Palmer Raids (late-1919-to-late-1920) themselves, but we learn a number of things about J. Edgar Hoover's early-years that appear to have escaped some authors: his mother's stern authoritarianism and emotional coldness, the emphasis on punishment in Hoover's psychology and behavior that emerges early in his youth (Hoover loved attending lurid trials), a possible African-American ancestor, the effects of his father's mental illness on his behavior at home, the demographics of Washington D.C. and his own neighborhood (Hoover's own during the early-part of the 20th century was populated with Blacks and Whites), the racism of the times towards immigrants (especially Russian, thanks to the October revolution in 1917), the working-class, and Blacks. Hoover--and most of his contemporaries in government--held these xenophobic views. They were very common in America at that time.

Like Hitler, Hoover's father was a government clerk, a functionary, and Hoover modeled himself as the ultimate apolitical bureaucrat over time. Ackerman brings the era Hoover grew-up in with a storyteller's skill and a historiographer's discipline. The years covering the Palmer Raids are brought to breathtaking life, and the parallels with our own war on terror are inescapable without any need on the author's part in citing them.

This serves the text well, as it never lapses into the pedantic or the fantastical, as many Hoover biographies tend towards. What we get is what we really know about the Palmer Raids--the attorneys and government bureaucrats who fought the illegal nature of the raids and subsequent detentions, their effects on people and their liberties, Hoover's role in them (a central one), the major events of 1919 that contributed to their creation, and their enduring legacy.

Was the threat as great as people thought at the time? One gets the feeling that some in the federal bureaucracy were still fighting WWI, a period replete with its own abuses of civil liberties and crackdowns under the Espionage and Sedition Acts, as well as the Immigration Act of 1918 that gave the Palmer Raids some of their dubious legal foundation. As with most postwar periods, a deep recession occurred, and labor violence was prevalent. So was fear of the American left and immigrant communities. Ackerman makes a good case that it certainly appeared revolution and chaos were nigh, and notes that the issues are the same now as they were then.

Context is everything. In January of 1919, Seattle was in a general strike that lasted around a week, while in March, the Third International was declaring an international revolution with communists (Bolshevism directed by Lenin) at its vanguard. Then, there were the "May Day" bombings that targeted J.P. Morgan, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, a Rockefeller, four cabinet members, and a commissioner of immigration. And there was more-to-come. A police strike in Boston, a national coal and steel strike (imagine the effect of 1 million going-on-strike in a crucial industry today), and more bombings throughout the nation, even as late as September of 1920 when the hysteria had already died down.

It's a minor-quibble, but another aspect of the raids (including those of the Lusk committee in New York City) and bombings could have been stimulated by real espionage, some of it by Russian operatives, double-agents, as well as informants and provocateurs working for Great Britain's SIS office. It's a little-known sidebar, and Ackerman does include American Military Intelligence in the picture, so he has some of it covered. Hoover was probably aware of this angle, and had files from Military Intelligence on one of the possible players in the September, 1920 bombing of Wall Street: Kurt Jahnke.
Hoover may even have known from existing-files from his friends at Military Intelligence of the possible involvement of Sidney Reilly (and many other players) in wartime profiteering, espionage, and the bombing of munitions dumps at the Black Tom Terminal in New Jersey, 1916. He might have been aware of Reilly's possible connections to some of the bombings of 1919 in the United States. New York City was a hub for international commerce and espionage--frequently the same thing--during the era, and most of the players were double and triple-agents. This is the lot of the informant/provocateur and secret agent. Jahnke also worked for Sidney Reilly. Again, a minor-quibble, and easily a subject for another book. This absence does nothing to impair "Young J. Edgar."

Jahnke is directly-linked to both Black Tom and the Wall Street bombings, as well as Reilly and various spy agencies at that time. The Black Tom bombing is usually ascribed to "German" saboteurs, but the event was also useful as one more action that pushed America into siding with Great Britain in WWI. The seizing of a Sinn Fein activist during the raids also tends towards these possibilities. British intelligence had been working overtime towards getting Americans involved in the Great War. With the war over, and Russia in a revolutionary stasis, British interests were eying the Baku oil fields, and wanted to dominate Russia economically.

They were hardly alone: so did the American State Department and sundry other business interests. One of them was J.P. Morgan. The 1920 bombing of Wall Street came at a propitious moment for Britain--it likely sealed the deportation of Ludwig Martens, then trying to gain recognition for the Soviet regime in America. Major banking and business interests were interested. The Red Scare killed any possibility for recognition for at least a decade. Then there's the war we almost had between Great Britain and Japan during the early-1920s...

In March of 1919, Hoover was made A. Mitchell Palmer's assistant at the Department of Justice, and would shortly head the Bureau of Investigation's Radical Division after June of that year. It's just one of several fateful mistakes made by appointed politicians in our nation's history, and one-of-many that would propel J. Edgar Hoover into a position of unchallenged power and authority for nearly fifty years. Much of this was dumb luck. Even a good number of Hoover's challengers during the legal fight against the raids seemed to underestimate his role, and he did as much as he could over the years to hide it. The truth is, he was practically the architect of the Palmer Raids, and his subsequent career almost plays like a rerun of them, even decades later.

Ackerman asks us an important question as citizens of a democracy: how do we balance public safety and civil liberties in a time of upheaval and unrest? We should be wary of those in public office who feel they know all the answers to these questions in the immediate aftermath of any terrorist attack or bombing. One has to wonder if the raids would have happened at all had a bomber not tripped on his way to Palmer's front-door the night of June 2nd, 1919. Attorney General Palmer wasn't the only person on the list of the terrorists. Nearly all were prominent politicians or businessmen. To most, it appeared that Bolshevik revolution was spreading throughout the globe and onto American shores in the form of immigration.

Today, we don't really know what the threat even constitutes, but the reactions have been not only similar to those during the years 1919-1920, they have gone much further. At the time of this writing, habeas corpus is still in-suspension by the Military Commissions Act of 2006, a piece of legislation that Mr. Ackerman astutely lists in his notes. With the Senate Judiciary hearings into the U.S. Attorney firing scandal (that's now being connected by committee chair Sen. Patrick Leahy to the warrantless wiretapping programs of the Bush administration), we're finding that people of the same age as Hoover circa-1919 are being given unparalleled power at the Department of Justice and other sectors of the federal bureaucracy. We're only beginning to discover what they've done in the name of fighting terrorism, now that our current national hysteria has begun to abate.

Monica Goodling and several other appointees at Justice were being consciously culled from Regents School of Law in-the-aftermath of September 11th, 2001. We should be asking ourselves why. "Are we creating new Hoovers?" asks Kenneth Ackerman. We very well could be. Were it not for legal scholars and attorneys like Felix Frankfurter, Clarence Darrow, as well as men like Secretary of Labor William Wilson, or assistant Sec. of Labor Louis F. Post, the precedents of the Palmer Raids would have stood. Were it not for them--as Mr. Ackerman notes--our very concepts and legal traditions surrounding civil liberties would be as impoverished as they were in 1919. As in Hoover's day, the key to curing unaccountable power will be in finding the incriminating files.

5,000-10,000 human beings were shunted into detention centers in various locations throughout the country without access to legal representation, or even a working-toilet under the Palmer Raids. Hundreds of "radical aliens" were deported from Ellis Island in a horrible inversion of the American dream. Can it happen again? In various-forms under the war on terror, it already has.

J-7 would like to thank Mr. Ackerman and publicist Gene Taft for allowing us the honor of reviewing this very important book. "Young J. Edgar-Hoover, The Red Scare, and the Assault on Civil Liberties," is available now from Carroll & Graf, at $28.95. Ignore its message at your own peril.