Domestic Radicalism: The Red Scare

Background.

Amid the bloodshed of World War I a revolution took place in Russia in February 1917 (according to the old-style calendar then used by the Russians). Czar Nicholas II was overthrown, and the following October (old-style) communist Bolsheviks (colloquially referred to as "reds"), led by Vladimir Lenin, overthrew a provisional government headed by Aleksandr Kerensky. By March 1919 the Soviet Union was seeking to export its revolutionary communism to other countries. Anxieties over Communist influences in the United States were heightened in April, when thirty-six government officials, including Arty. Gen. A. Mitchell Palmer and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., were mailed package bombs that were presumed to have come from radicals. By September 1919, after two factions of the Socialist Party of America broke away from that organization to form the Communist Labor Party and the American Communist Party, a...

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