History of The Socialist Movement in The United States - Internal Strife and Public Prejudice

Internal Strife and Public Prejudice

But the next year, internal strife would cause a schism. After Vladimir Lenin’s successful revolution in Russia, he invited the Socialist Party to join the Communist Third International. The debate over whether to align with Lenin caused a major rift in the party. A referendum to join Lenin’s "Comintern" passed with 90% approval, but the moderates who were in charge of the Party expelled the extreme leftists before this could take place. The expelled members formed the Communist Labor Party and the Communist Party of America. The Socialist Party ended up, with only moderates left, at one third of its original size.

In addition, a wave of prejudice swept the country after the war. The nation indulged in anti-immigrant and anti-Communist sentiment. “After the Russian Revolution of 1917, America’s ruling class became almost obsessed with Communism." This was known as the first Red Scare. Anarchists had sent a number of mail-bombs to prominent businessmen and government leaders. However, “Little distinction was made between working-class Communists and the suspected anarchists."

Attorney General Palmer, after he himself received a bomb in the mail, set out to stop the “Communist conspiracy” that he believed was operating inside the United States. “Foreigners and labor unions were his prime targets." He created a secret organization, the General Intelligence Division, led by J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover soon amassed a card-catalogue system with information on 150,000 individuals and 60,000 groups and publications. Palmer and Hoover both published press releases and circulated anti-Communist propaganda. Then, on January 2, 1920, the Palmer Raids began.

In Manhattan, the target was the Russian People’s House, where 183 men were initially arrested… The arrests were particularly brutal. Some people were hurled down the stairs of the Russian People’s House. Others were beaten. Drunk with the success of the raid, Palmer went to Congress a week later to ask that a peacetime sedition act be passed... cheered Palmer in the halls of the Capitol.

On that single day in 1920, Palmer’s agents rounded up 6,000 people. In the subsequent trials, the Labor Department ruled that mere "membership in a Communist organization was sufficient ground for the deportation of aliens". However, it later ruled that the incarcerations and deportations were illegal, halting Palmer’s raids

The Red Scare was over, but Americans' xenophobia remained.

Americans feared that the millions of new immigrants would take jobs from the native-born. America’s capitalists had long been blaming the labor unrest of previous decades on radical dissidents among the immigrants… Americans seemed willing to transform their war-time fear of Germans to a post-war fear of the... immigrant industrial worker.

Congress soon passed the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, heavily restricting immigration from eastern and southern Europe.