The Enemy Within (37 page)

 
Anti-Masonry, like the Illuminati scare, was intensely focused and time limited—analogous, in medical terms, to a fast-moving epidemic. Other currents of public alarm, in roughly the same period, are better described as endemic; they waxed and waned, diffused and sharpened—but never disappeared entirely. And they helped to shape the cultural matrix in which new scares might emerge.

For example, anti-Catholicism was a long-established tradition among the largely Protestant population of early America. And starting in the 1830s, it gained new force in response to the arrival of large numbers of Catholic immigrants, especially the Irish fleeing famine. Occasionally this antagonism flared into open violence, as, for example, in the burning of an Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts in 1834. A variety of specifically anti-Catholic organizations formed at midcentury, one of which, the American Protective Association, would eventually claim over two million supporters.

Meanwhile, Mormonism—a new and wholly indigenous religious movement, founded by Joseph Smith in the 1820s and growing rapidly thereafter—evoked a similar kind of alarm. Public pressure, up to and including mob violence, soon forced the Mormons to leave their original home ground in upstate New York and New England for the wilderness territory of Utah. En route, Smith was seized and murdered by a lynching party and his followers subjected to repeated harassment.

Both Catholics and Mormons were suspect in the eyes of the Protestant majority for owing their primary allegiance to an external, and highly centralized, system of authority—the papacy in one case, the “prophet” Smith and his church councillors in the other. “The papal hierarchy declares its complete sovereignty over the state, and . . . decrees that the papal fiat is superior to the voice of the people”: thus the official view of the American Protective Association. “What, then, is the real strength of Mormonism?” asked a foremost critic of that group. “It is an ecclesiastical despotism ruled by a man who is prophet, priest, king, and pope, all in one.” (With the Mormons, to be sure, there were additional issues of “secret rites” and of practices abhorrent to conventional morality, like polygamous marriage.) Such authoritarian structures were thought virtually to require the hatching of conspiracies, of “plots,” against the national mainstream.

These anxieties reflected a broader sense that republican governance was fragile and easily subverted. The same theme appeared also in politics; each of the leading parties of the day, Whigs and Democrats, accused the other of threatening core principles and institutions. No less was true of the ripening sectional conflict between North and South. Northerners denounced a “Slave Power conspiracy,” while Southerners voiced a similar feeling of threat by abolitionists. In all these different venues, then, the language of conspiratorial menace was pervasive. And so, too, was its emotional substrate—fear, distress, and hatred.

But of public “scares,” in the epidemic sense, there was nothing during the long and tumultuous middle decades of the 19th century. In the pre-modern period, warfare and witch-hunting had proceeded largely in alternating sequence—one or the other, not both at the same time. Perhaps something of the same dynamic can be attributed to this later era as well. Sectional conflict, followed by grinding, unimaginably bloody Civil War, consumed energies that might otherwise have gone toward hunting for enemies within.

 
The Civil War was such a watershed moment that antebellum and postbellum seem, in retrospect, different worlds. Part of the difference was a vast increase in labor organizing—and labor conflict—with the coming of a fully industrial age. To be sure, unions had been formed, and strikes staged, as far back as the 1820s. But none of the previous agitation remotely approached what developed in the century's closing years. This, in turn, set the stage for a new round of reactive (and reactionary) response, some of which invites direct comparison with old-style witch-hunting.

There was, to begin with, an international context here: the rapid growth of trade unionism in Britain and France, the spread of Marxian socialism, anarchism, and other such radical ideologies, the dramatic saga of the Paris Commune (a workers' uprising in the French capital) in the spring of 1871. Together, such events helped raise a specter of foreign-born “Red Revolution”—a modern-day equivalent of Satanism—that would haunt American public life for over a century to come. Moreover, anxiety about overseas developments would mesh very tightly with a range of concerns rooted much closer to home. The as-yet unfamiliar system of factory production, the seemingly chaotic environment of modern cities, immigration on a massive scale, the “tramp menace” (thousands of unmoored men set loose to roam around the country), and a rising homicide rate all played into the mix. “There never was a time in the history of the world when an enemy of society could work such mighty mischief as today,” declared clergyman and author Josiah Strong in his immensely popular book
Our Country
(1885). “The more highly developed a civilization is, the more vulnerable does it become.”

Such feelings of vulnerability were not altogether illusory; indeed, they incorporated real events and actual dangers. The actions of the French Communards cast an especially long shadow. That workers could seize control of government, execute bishops and other conservative opponents, requisition property, and abolish debt seemed, in the words of a New York newspaper editorialist, “to uproot society and organize Hell.” Perhaps other countries, too—including the United States—might soon be engulfed in “a sudden storm of communistic revolutions,” reflecting “the deep, explosive forces which underlie all modern society.” The Paris Commune would, in years to come, remain a touchstone for all manner of anti-radical opinion.

The 1870s were, for the most part, a decade of economic depression; as such, they spawned a broad range of worker unrest. There was the Granger movement, organized by cooperative associations of farmers in the Midwest to counter the enormous commercial power of the railroad companies. There were strikes in the coalfields of western Pennsylvania, led by the so-called Molly Maguires (a semisecret organization of mostly Irish miners). There were large protest demonstrations, with accompanying violence, in the major urban centers: for instance, the Tompkins Square Riot of 1874, in New York City, sparked by a parade by laborers carrying the red flag of the Commune.

But most impressive by far was the great railway strike of 1877, prompted by wage cuts and other grievances of railroad workers in no fewer than 17 states. Indeed, this can reasonably be called the first strike, in any industry, of truly national proportions. And it turned violent at numerous points, as police, militiamen, and federal troops were mobilized in opposition. The toll in lives lost ran to over 100; the value of the properties destroyed was incalculable. Chicago, the strike's epicenter, was temporarily paralyzed when workers in other industries walked out in sympathy. The reaction of the “respectable classes,” especially the business community, was predictably furious: the strikers were denounced as “ragged Commune wretches,” as advocates of a “French Communism, entirely at war with the spirit of our institutions,” and so on.

The 1880s brought more of the same: more strikes, more bitter antagonism between the “respectable” and the working classes, more police and military intervention, more property destruction, more deaths. According to one estimate, the year 1886 alone witnessed a total of 1,400 strikes, involving over 600,000 workers.

That same year, 1886, was also the year of the notorious Haymarket Riot—and then of a full-blown Red Scare. Its immediate precursor was a tide of labor protest in many parts of the country, building through the spring toward a national strike on May 1 for enactment of the eight-hour workday. As part of this larger ferment, a bitterly contested work stoppage at the McCormick Harvester plant outside Chicago led, on May 3, to violent clashes between worker pickets and privately-hired Pinkerton guards, resulting in three deaths and more than a dozen injuries. The following evening, radical leaders called a protest rally in Chicago's Haymarket Square. After some hours of speech making, police arrived with orders to disperse the crowd. At that moment, a bomb was tossed into the ranks of the advancing officers; mayhem ensued, with gunfire from both sides. When peace was finally restored, seven policemen and several demonstrators lay dead; others were mortally injured.

Public reaction was rapid and severe. Business leaders and municipal officials alike struck a pose of horrified condemnation. Some construed Haymarket as the prelude to outright revolution. Others feared a takeover of their city by gangs of criminals and unemployed laborers. And all looked expectantly for signs of underlying “conspiracy.” Newspaper comment rose to a highly emotional pitch, with the rally's organizers likened to devouring animals—“hyenas . . . vermin . . . wolves.” Police dragnets brought the arrest of several dozen local activists, many of whom according to one breathless account, “looked like communists.”

Failing to identify the actual bomb-thrower, detectives and prosecutors focused on radical leaders who had supposedly “encouraged . . . by print or speech” the resort to violence. Trials were held in late summer. The state's attorney described to the court an “anarchist conspiracy . . . beyond the pale of moral forces.” (Even “the firing upon Fort Sumter [at the onset of the Civil War] . . . was,” he declared, “as nothing compared with this insidious, infamous plot to ruin our laws and our country secretly.”) Ten anarchist and socialist leaders were indicted, eight were tried and convicted, and seven were sentenced to death. In the end, four would actually be executed and a fifth committed suicide, while the sentences of the remaining pair were commuted to life in prison.

The riot itself, the follow-up investigation, and the court proceedings all made sensational news, reported in detail throughout the country. Fears of a similar “uprising” rippled along to other cities and towns, especially those in which radical groups were most active. Police raids on socialist meeting halls became a frequent occurrence. In some communities vigilantes acted on their own to suppress the “traitors” in their midst. Labor groups, too, suffered frequent harassment; union organizing was widely seen as a cover for revolutionary “plots.” Many of the Haymarket principals were of German birth (or extraction); thus, in 1888, a Chicago congressman introduced legislation “to provide for the removal of dangerous aliens from the territory of the United States.” The link between radical activism and foreign influence would henceforth remain a staple of common belief.

 
Reaction to Haymarket helped move the center of the labor movement in a strongly anti-socialist direction. The American Federation of Labor (AFL), founded just months after the riot, would quickly achieve preeminence; most (not all) of its member units embraced “pure and simple unionism,” short-term goals, and gradualist methods. But other unions, such as the International Workers of the World (IWW), espoused a more confrontational approach, and labor strife continued into the new century at a generally high level. This, along with the assassination of President William McKinley by a professed (perhaps crazed) anarchist, helped keep antiradical feeling alive. There were also political assassinations of several European heads of state during roughly the same time period. And socialist organizing proceeded apace on both sides of the ocean.

Then came the “Great War” of 1914-18, with all its concurrent suffering and death—and, in its final year, the triumph of Bolshevism in Russia and Marxist-inspired revolts elsewhere across Europe. American participation in the war was limited in time (18 months) but massive in scale (nearly one million men in uniform). Rising military fervor helped spawn a clutch of patriotic organizations like the National Security League and the American Defense Society. Their initial focus was the German enemy in the field, and pro-German “collaborators” at home. (Thanks in part to their efforts, the teaching of the German language was outlawed in many school systems, and some individual Americans of German descent went so far as to adopt new surnames.) When radical activists opposed the war on political grounds, public animus turned in that direction, too. Congress enacted laws to criminalize both action and speech against the government: most notably, the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918. These enabled proceedings against socialist leaders like Victor Berger and Eugene Debs, both of whom were eventually jailed.

With the armistice of November 1918, the American economy began a difficult process of readjustment to peacetime production; there was rapid price inflation, and then a sharp rise in unemployment. And there were strikes, strikes, and more strikes: some 3,600, involving over four million workers, during the year 1919 alone. Several of these attained huge proportions. First came the Seattle general strike of January-February, starting as a walkout by shipyard workers and quickly joined by many from other industries. The city was temporarily paralyzed; federal troops were called in, and police were fully mobilized. The more conservative labor organizations, such as the AFL, declined appeals for support, and most of the strikers returned to work after just a few days. But by then public opinion had been seriously engaged against them, in Seattle and around the country.