Wednesday, March 2, 2011

A Red Scare in 1920

There was great fear of the Communists in the United States not only during the McCarthy Era, but also just after World War I. This article from the 4 January 1920 issue of the Milwaukee Journal reports on nation-wide arrests of radical elements with a tone that suggests the newspaper didn’t take the revolutionaries too seriously. I’ve included only the opening and closing of the article.  If you want the whole, it is available on Google News.




I’m particularly impressed by the estimate that the radicals had $200,000,000 to support their activities — a truly enormous sum in 1920 that would have bought a lot of bombs.

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