recrimination dominate public discussion, passion prevails over reason. Many historians have noted this phenomenon. It is attributed to the continuance beyond the end of the war of the war hysteria. Unfortunately, the necessary emotional fever for fighting a war cannot be turned off like a water faucet. Enemies must continue to be found. The mind and heart cannot be demobilized as quickly as the platoon. On the contrary, like a fiery furnace at white heat, it takes a considerable time to cool.
Take World War I. Immediately after this war, President Wilson’s ideal of international community ran afoul of fierce Republican partisanship under the leadership of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, a man who had his eye on the Presidential elections of 1920. Congress’ failure to ratify Wilson’s dream of a League of Nations was regrettable, to say the least, in view of the unfortunate events in Europe that were to follow. Wilson himself can be said to be a victim of this partisanship, suffering a cleaving stroke down the left side of his face and body. This is a phenomenon noted by many historians.
On the labor front in 1919 there was an unprecedented number of strikes involving many millions of workers. One of the larger strikes was mounted by the A.F. of L. against the United States Steel Corporation. At that time workers in the steel industry put in an average sixty-eight-hour week for bare subsistence wages. The strike spread to other plants, resulting in considerable violence—the death of eighteen striking workers, the calling out of troops to disperse picket lines, and so forth. By branding the strikers Bolsheviks and thereby separatingthem from their public support, the Corporation broke the strike. In Boston, the Police Department went on strike and Governor Calvin Coolidge replaced them. In Seattle there was a general strike which precipitated a nationwide “red scare.” This was the first red scare. Sixteen bombs were found in the New York Post Office just before May Day. The bombs were addressed to men prominent in American life, including John D. Rockefeller and Attorney General Mitchell Palmer. It is not clear today who was responsible for those bombs—Red terrorists, Black anarchists, or their enemies—but the effect was the same. Other bombs popped off all spring, damaging property, killing and maiming innocent people, and the nation responded with an alarm against Reds. It was feared that as in Russia, they were about to take over the country and shove large cocks into everyone’s mother. Strike that. The Press exacerbated public feeling. May Day parades in the big cities were attacked by policemen, and soldiers and sailors. The American Legion, just founded, raided I.W.W. headquarters in the State of Washington. Laws against seditious speech were passed in State Legislatures across the country and thousands of people were jailed, including a Socialist Congressman from Milwaukee who was sentenced to twenty years in prison. To say nothing of the Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917 which took care of thousands more. To say nothing of Eugene V. Debs. On the evening of January 2, 1920, Attorney General Palmer, who had his eye on the White House, organized a Federal raid on Communist Party offices throughout the nation. With his right-hand assistant, J. Edgar Hoover, at his right hand, Palmer effected the arrest of over six thousand people, some Communist aliens, some just aliens, some just Communists, and some neither Communists nor aliens but persons visiting those who had been arrested. Property was confiscated, people chained together, handcuffed, and paraded through the streets (in Boston), or kept in corridors of Federal buildings for eight days without food or proper sanitation (in Detroit). Many historians have noted this phenomenon. The raids made an undoubted contribution to the wave of vigilantism which broke over the country. The Ku Klux Klan blossomed throughout the South and West. There were night