Quote: >With the specter of Russia looming so large, socialism terrified Americans more than anarchism did. “Over the next few years,” Hochschild writes, “peop

Quote: >With the specter of Russia looming so large, socialism terrified Americans more than anarchism did. “Over the next few years,” Hochschild writes, “people would blame Bolshevism for everything from strikes to anti-lynching protests to loosening sexual mores to untrimmed beards.” When the Boston police went on strike, the Wall Street Journal hysterically announced that “Lenin and Trotsky are on their way.” A Los Angeles Times editorial asked, “Has Bolshevik Russia presented any more alarming spectacle than this?” The cops did not mount a communist putsch. They just wanted pay raises, shorter shifts, and the same right to unionize that local firefighters enjoyed. Instead, the strike ushered in a more prosaic kind of disaster: with so few police officers on duty, looters smashed their way into stores, and criminals from other cities took trains to Boston to grab some loot of their own. Wilson lamented that Boston was “at the mercy of an army of thugs” and described the episode as “a crime against civilization.” >In November 1919 and January 1920, with the Red Scare nearing its apogee, Palmer’s men rounded up thousands of suspected socialists, anarchists, and communists and threw them into makeshift prisons, where they awaited deportation. He singled out the Wobblies, of course, but also the Union of Russian Workers, often on the flimsiest evidence. In Detroit, for instance, agents interrogated every theatergoer watching a Russian-language play. No court ever convicted a single member of violence.