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Out of control federal agents invading the nation’s cities and kidnapping people en masse, a president and his cronies fomenting public anger and fear of immigrants, and dissent suddenly declared to be an illegal threat to national security.
All of that is happening now. But it also happened in 1919, at the height of what came to be called the first Red Scare, when a young J. Edgar Hoover and his new federal police force led a crackdown on dissent, focused on “radical” Americans born abroad.
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Hoover and then-Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer had plans to use another tool now favored by the Trump regime — mass deportation. But while Hoover and Palmer did succeed in silencing prominent dissenters, their deportation scheme largely came undone as the public became increasingly revulsed by the government’s performative cruelty and lawlessness.
It is a story with some lessons for our time about the danger of staying silent, and also of the power of opposition in the face of authoritarianism.
The deep roots of xenophobia
It may appear that the obsessive hatred of “foreigners” Trump tapped into 10 years ago emerged out of nowhere. But in fact, xenophobia has been at the center of American culture and politics since at least the 19th century. For example, nativist opponents of the then-recent waves of Catholic and Irish immigrants were a key constituency in the Republican Party that elected Abraham Lincoln president.
After World War II, America seemed to turn over a new leaf, signified by the passage under President Johnson of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which largely voided the exclusionary laws enacted during the first quarter of the 20th century. Generations of Americans grew up learning to celebrate the United States as a “nation of immigrants” and to value the economic and cultural contributions immigrants make to the country.
But in recent decades, politicians like Pat Buchanan and especially Trump have demonstrated that far from being banished, xenophobia and racism lurk under the surface and at the margins of American culture, waiting to be unleashed by those wishing to use it for political gain.
When Trump embarked on what he recently called his “war within” America, he had many models to follow. But the most darkly apropos was the first “red scare” that commenced just over a century ago.
When waves of immigrants — many from Eastern Europe and Italy, and many Jewish and Catholic — entered communities across the country during the turn of the last century, they were met with suspicion and discrimination. The fact that small groups of anarchist terrorists, many of whom were immigrants, engaged in bombing campaigns against business and government leaders (including Palmer himself) only added to the atmosphere of fear.
When President Wilson entered the nation into World War I in 1917, the declaration of war was met with widespread protests, many of them led by foreign-born labor activists. Palmer and Hoover spearheaded the government’s response to the anti-war movement by targeting “radicals,” many of whom were immigrants, by blaming them and their purportedly deviant cultures for endangering the nation during a time of war.
Among those targeted was Emma Goldman. Born in what was then the Russian Empire, Goldman came to the US at age 16 with little more than the sewing machine she needed to work in a sweatshop. But in a few short years she became one of the nation’s most prominent activists for causes ranging from labor rights to birth control, which she promoted through both publications and speeches — often attended by huge crowds — that she deliv