The Red Scare was the rounding up and deportation of hundreds of immigrants of radical political views by the federal government in The United States of America.
The word ‘Red’ came from the color of the soviet union flag, and the fact that communism would come to the United States.
The first red scare – the first red scare occurred after the First world war following the Bolshevik Russian Revolution of 1917 lead by Vladimir Lenin.
The Bolsheviks crushed the Romanov dynasty and inspired the fear of the anarchists.
Labor strikes at this time were on a huge rise in the U.S and the American media and government sensationalized them as being caused by immigrants.
when the WWI Armistice was executed in 1918, 9 million people worked in the war industries while 4 million served in the Army.
But once the war ended many people were left without jobs. Economic difficulties were on a rise and one of the first major strikes after the war called the Seattle strike of 1919 had 60,000 workers strike on February 6.
These strikers were labeled as REDS and were seen as a threat.
After this strike, all of the srikes were called as ”crimes against society” and ”conspiracies against the government”.
Because of the fear among the citizens, the strikers were branded as ”REDS”” and unpatriotics.
Hysteria took over and ”red hunting’ became popular.
colleges were called the ‘hot beds of Bolshevism’ and professors were labelled as radicals.
The second red scare came after the second world war from the last 1940’s through 1950’s.
This was called MsCarthyism and could be defined as making accusations of subversions or treasons related to mostly communists.
American leaders in the 1950’s then asked the citizens to be wary of the communists. This paranoia reached its max when a right winged republican called Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin, launched highly publicized probes into alleged communist penetration of the State Department, the White house, the Treasury and the US army.
Many thousands of americans faces congressional committee hearings, were deported, improsioned, loss of passport or long term unemployment.
Around 300 communists were found guilty of passing information to the soviets during WWII.
Changed in the composition of the Supreme court also resulted in the ending of the red scare.
Under Chief Justice Earl Warren the court limited the mechanisms designed to identify and punish communists, due to all of this the Red Scare lost its power.
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