Russian Revolution of 1917 Source: Wikimedia Commons

Red Dawn

Americans and the Bolshevik Revolution

11.10.17

One hundred years ago, Vladimir Lenin and his Bolshevik Party seized power in a revolution that would change the world. They would establish the world’s first Marxist state, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, a few years later. As the 20th century wore on, the USSR became the United States’s chief military and ideological foe. On this episode of BackStory, Brian, Joanne, and Nathan explore how that distant revolution had an immediate impact in the United States.

Russian Revolution; Soviet Union; U.S.-Russia/Soviet Union relations

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Segments

Ten Days That Shook The World

Historian Ben Whisenhunt describes the events on the ground when the Bolsheviks took over the Russian government. He also explains the role of John Reed, an American journalist who provided a key firsthand account of the revolution.

Music:

Toy Weapons (1) by Jahzzar
Become Death by Jahzzar
Be Kind by Ketsa

Bolshevism; Russian Revolution; Soviet Union; U.S.-Russia/Soviet Union relations; World War I; government

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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BRIAN: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

JOANNE: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory.

NATHAN: Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind the headlines. I’m Nathan Connolly.

JOANNE: I’m Joanne Freeman.

BRIAN: And I’m Brian Balogh. We’re going to start today’s show with a reporter named John Reed who went to Russia in September 1917. The Harvard-educated Reed was young, but he’d already made a name for himself as a daring foreign correspondent. He rode along with revolutionary general Pancho Villa in Mexico in 1913. And before going to Russia, Reed was a reporter on the Eastern Front of the First World War, which was still raging.

This is historian Ben Whisenhunt.

BEN WHISENHUNT: And so he was somebody who was, I think, officially a journalist, but even in those adventures, he becomes somewhat of a participant.

BRIAN: Whisenhunt says Reed arrived in the Russian capital of Petrograd, today’s St. Petersburg, at a historic moment.

BEN WHISENHUNT: The mood is very tense. The mood is very unsettled.

BRIAN: Russia was in turmoil. Czar Nicholas II, the last of a long line of autocratic rulers, had abdicated that spring. He was replaced by a group of liberal and moderate socialist lawmakers from the Russian parliament, who had formed a provisional government.

BEN WHISENHUNT: The problem with that came though was that they made a promise when they came to power in February. And that was they wanted to stay in the war.

BRIAN: That war being World War I. Czar Nicholas II had entered the conflict on the side of the Allied Powers in 1914.

BEN WHISENHUNT: Staying in the war was really extremely unpopular among ordinary Russian citizens. World War I was devastating. World War I had overwhelmed the Russian population. Russia itself was unprepared for the war in many ways, and so that was kind of almost a death sentence for this provisional or temporary government.

And so by the time John Reed arrives in September, they’ve gone through several months of basically another failing government, and the scene seems to be set for something to change. They don’t know what it was, but they didn’t believe that this government could last much longer.

JOANNE: And it didn’t. On November 7, 1917, Vladimir Lenin and his Bolshevik party toppled the provisional government. The Bolsheviks were the world’s first Marxist party ever to seize state power. They promised to build a worker’s paradise and a common motherland for all of Russia’s national and ethnic minorities. The Bolshevik Revolution would alter the history of Russia and the United States as well. And John Reed was in the thick of it all. He went on to provide Americans with one of the most widely read eyewitness accounts of the revolution.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

NATHAN: So today on the show, we’re marking the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution with a look at its impact on America. We’ll hear about warfare between Americans and Russians, the only direct confrontation between these two emerging superpowers. We’ll also ask why Lenin appealed directly to American workers and consider the first Red Scare, not in the 1950s, but in 1919. But first, let’s return to John Reed, who was in St. Petersburg on that November day, 100 years ago.

BRIAN: Vladimir Lenin had recently returned from political exile. He was the leader of a radical workers party called the Bolsheviks.

BEN WHISENHUNT: Which in Russian means the majority party. But rarely were they ever the majority party.

BRIAN: This is Ben Whisenhunt again.

BEN WHISENHUNT: And their basic agenda was one of what we’d think of as basically as socialism.

BRIAN: The Bolsheviks were just one of many revolutionary parties in Russia. But the provisional government was fragile, and it lacked popular support. The Bolsheviks also had a winning campaign slogan– peace, land, and bread. Peace for the soldiers who wanted out of the war, land for Russia’s impoverished peasants, and bread for its hungry workers.

On the evening of November 7th, which Reed would later call a cold, nervous night, the Bolsheviks launched a surprise attack in St. Petersburg.

BEN WHISENHUNT: They go to basically two or three sites, where the provisional government– where they had offices, where they held power in the city itself. And then overnight, he and his what are known as Red Guards were able to seize control of these three buildings.

BRIAN: And that was it– at least that night.

JOANNE: Wait. That was it?

BRIAN: Essentially, yes. This was the first step in what would become a new revolutionary state, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

BEN WHISENHUNT: Later in Soviet filmmaking, they will actually depict this as a great and heroic evening, where there were barricades and there were fires and people were shooting at each other. But for the most part, that didn’t really happen that way. There is some gunfire.

There are some people who do die here and there. But as far as having some sort of front inside the city between one faction and another, it didn’t really happen on the moment of the revolutionary evening. I think Lenin himself actually was disappointed that it wasn’t more born in blood.

BRIAN: John Reed was in the crowd, rushing from one building to the next. In the process, Reed became a true believer in the Bolshevik Revolution.

BEN WHISENHUNT: He had dabbled with socialist politics before that, but he wasn’t a very committed person to much of anything. But once he reached Russia in 1917, he seemed to find his calling in some sense.

BRIAN: Reed later wrote–

JOHN REED: Vast Russia was in a state of solution. Old Russia was no more. Human society flowed molten in primal heat, and from the tossing sea of flame was emerging the class struggle, stark and pitiless. And the fragile, slowly cooling crust of new planets.

BEN WHISENHUNT: Reed bought into and believed in the idea that the Russian Revolution was not simply a political revolution, that it replaced one government with another, and that part of the ideology that will develop in the Soviet Union and that Reed really believed in was a kind of almost remaking of society.

NATHAN: And Reed was determined to promote the revolutionary cause. He returned to the US with a briefcase full of notes and turned them into a book. Ten Days that Shook the World was published in 1919. Reed gave Americans a sympathetic account of this distant revolution.

He wrote in the book’s preface, “In the struggle, my sympathies were not neutral.” Still, he tried to describe what he saw as accurately as possible. Lenin, who Reed met while he was in Russia, liked the book so much that he even wrote an introduction.

VLADIMIR LENIN: With the greatest interest and with never slackening attention, I read John Reed’s book, Ten Days that Shook the World. Unreservedly do I recommend it to the workers of the world. Here is a book which I should like to see published in millions of copies and translated into all languages. It gives a truthful and most vivid exposition of the events so significant to the comprehension of what really is a proletarian revolution, and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

BRIAN: The proletariat is the Marxist term for the working class. Whisenhunt says, the reception to Reed’s book was a bit more mixed in the United States.

BEN WHISENHUNT: Well, it was sort of a love-hate sort of situation. It was very widely viewed. It sold very well. He went on a speaking tour before and after the book was published in the United States, and he did this several times, as other authors of books that had been involved in the Russian Revolution. And one thing to note about that time period, of course, is in the United States, is that knowledge of Russia was very thin.

And so for him to go out and to give these sort of tours and give these speeches was really talking to people who only knew things in a very sort of fragmentary way. And that might be through a couple of newspaper articles or that sort of thing. But it really was not a very well educated population on Russia at the time.

BRIAN: When I was a freshman in college, everybody had to take expository writing, and I took a course on the Russian Revolution. And this is the book we read. Do you think that the book did have an impact on American attitudes towards the Russian Revolution?

BEN WHISENHUNT: I think so. I think that people who were more moderate to liberal-minded at the time could find some sympathy for what had happened in the Russian Revolution, and in reading the book. For the people who had already aligned their minds against what had happened in Russia, and the creation of the new Soviet Union, they saw him just simply as basically a traitor.

BRIAN: Ben, I understand that John Reed is one of three Americans buried in the Kremlin wall today. What’s up with that?

BEN WHISENHUNT: Right. So in a short time after the revolution, he was very popular in Russia itself. He will be idolized by the Soviet government mainly because he was an unrelenting supporter of the revolution and the aftermath, but also because the Soviets liked the idea of having Americans endorse their revolution. And so his legacy will be very much shaped not by his widow, Louise Bryant, who actually did not want him buried in the Kremlin wall.

It will be very much shaped by the Soviets. John Reed becomes sort of this poster boy in some ways for what American socialism or American Bolshevism could and should look like. There are even John Reed clubs that emerged in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and ’30s, but they also have them in Europe and the United States as well.

BRIAN: If we step back from the moment, and you know, with the advantage of hindsight, we can see that for much of the 20th century, the Soviet Union was United States’ ideological foil. Do you think that’s something that we can find in Ten Days that Shook the World itself? Does Reed’s work foreshadow that? Or what does it tell us about the kind of relationship that will emerge between the United States and the Soviet Union?

BEN WHISENHUNT: I think that he, like Lenin in some ways, in 1917 believed that there could be a good relationship between the two. He and Lenin talk about this. It’s not reflected so much in his book, but they talk about how the United States and the Soviet Union at that time don’t really have direct areas of conflict in the world, like trade and other sorts of things.

And so there’s no reason why they can’t be friendly, even though they appear to be ideologically at odds. But you have to remember at the time that being a socialist or a communist in the United States, up until about this moment, was not seen as to be a negative thing necessarily. Eugene V. Debs, who was a quite famous candidate for president–

BRIAN: And we might add a socialist candidate for president.

BEN WHISENHUNT: Yes, a socialist candidate. Ran in 1912 and got 6% or 7% of the vote and got over a million votes. And so I think the fear that’s generated is one that is quite distinctly intentional by a small group of people among the elite, because what they saw happen in Russia was the nobles and landowners and people with status lost what they had.

And I think that creates or generates a fear, not only in the United States, but sort of worldwide, that if you allow Bolshevism into your country, then you’re going to have chaos, and you’ll have a destruction of the system that exists.

BRIAN: Do you assign Ten Days that Shook the World in any of your classes?

BEN WHISENHUNT: I never have, actually. And the reason is, I’ve been teaching Russian history for 20 years at College of DuPage. And the reason that I don’t is that I think that it’s very difficult for students to read and understand in the historical sense what’s going on, because there are lots of names, lots of dates, lots of locations, and lots of acronyms, because the Soviets were in love with acronyms for everything.

But I think, though, that it’s something that is absolutely a valuable resource to give you a glimpse at that moment, because the question of the Soviet Union– in my lifetime, in the 20th century, growing up– was always cast in stone. So when I was in high school and college in the 1980s, there was no debate. It–

BRIAN: And where was this?

BEN WHISENHUNT: I finished high school in Nebraska.

BRIAN: Nebraska, OK.

BEN WHISENHUNT: And part of what got me interested in Russian studies was the fact that all of my classmates would sit and tell me that this is the evil empire, and this was the time of Reagan. And I can remember very distinctly as a sophomore in high school, listening to the wisdom of my 16-year-old classmates tell me that we needed to preemptively nuke all Russians because they were evil people.

And I thought, that can’t really be true. And so I think what we see now in the past 25 years, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, is a kind of unraveling of that mythology. So why are we so hardened against this country? What’s the point? And why were they so hardened against us? And I think, what we already have found and will continue to find is that there’s a great deal of diverse voices, from both the Soviet side, Russian side, and the American side, that the Cold War wasn’t necessarily as cold as we thought it was.

BRIAN: So do you think that Reed provides an insight at a particularly fluid moment in the relationship between these two nations?

BEN WHISENHUNT: I think the key thing that Reed provides for the readers of 1919, when they read his book, and still today, he provides a positive, detailed, credible, firsthand account by an accessible American, somebody who writes well, somebody who can explain things.

And the question I ask my students when I introduce it to them is, is what would make an American, Harvard-educated, from Oregon, not necessarily very ideological, what would make him observe these events and become such a true believer? And that’s true of other people at the time, too, other Americans who witnessed it. What makes it so attractive?

Why is this revolution so attractive to these people who have no stake in it? I mean, there’s no reason for him to care. He can go home and do something else. And so I think that that’s one of the things that I use, his work and others, to stress to my students is, is what makes these Americans jump in so far?

[SOLEMN MUSIC]

The Polar Bear Expedition

An estimated 4,500 Americans were sent to Russia to fight against the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War. But historian David Foglesong says these soldiers didn’t even know why they were there.

Music:

Red Blood Sun by Ketsa

Bolshevism; Civil War; Russian Revolution; Soviet Union; U.S.-Russia/Soviet Union relations

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

MALE SPEAKER: It was on 18 November that the snow came. In the morning, we woke to window ledges heaped white and snowflakes falling so whirling thick that it was impossible to see 10 feet ahead. The mud was gone. In a twinkling, the gloomy city became white, dazzling. In spite of revolution, all Russia plunging dizzily into the unknown and terrible future, joy swept the city with the coming of the snow.

BRIAN: That was an excerpt from Ten Days that Shook the World. John Reed died in Moscow in 1920 of typhus. He was a few days shy of his 33rd birthday.

NATHAN: Ben Whisenhunt is a historian at the College of DuPage. He is the co-editor of a forthcoming book series that highlights firsthand American accounts of the Bolshevik Revolution.

JOANNE: We were just talking about journalist John Reed. While he cheered on the overthrow of Russia’s provisional government, President Woodrow Wilson most certainly did not. To understand why, we have to go back to the spring of 1917.

BRIAN: Six weeks after Czar Nicholas II abdicated, President Woodrow Wilson persuaded Congress to enter World War I. President Wilson argued that the United States entry into the European war would make the world safe for democracy. And he pointed to the brand-new Russian democracy to bolster his argument.

DAVID FOGLESONG: The overthrow of the autocracy allowed Wilson to say that there were wonderful things happening in Russia. The naive Russian people in all of their majesty and might have risen up and overthrown the autocracy.

BRIAN: This is historian David Foglesong.

DAVID FOGLESONG: These czarist government, long as it stood– three centuries– long as it stood, was not really Russian. And those who know Russia best know that Russia has always been democratic at heart.

NATHAN: Or so President Wilson chose to believe. He was relieved when Russia’s provisional government continued to fight Germany in the war’s crucial Eastern Front.

JOANNE: The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, were staunchly opposed to Russia’s involvement in the war. Lenin denounced it as a war for imperialism and profit. One of the first things he did after seizing power was to withdraw from the war and negotiate a separate peace with Germany. Wilson was outraged and refused to recognize Russia’s new revolutionary government.

DAVID FOGLESONG: Part of the reasoning there was that, oh, the Bolsheviks are just a handful of conspirators. They have no social base. They’re going to be overthrown soon. They’re going to be out of government. Therefore, why should we establish diplomatic relations with the Bolsheviks? Instead, we’ll maintain our faith in a Russia that we want to see, a democratic Russia that is going to stay in the First World War.

JOANNE: The Wilson administration continued to support the provisional government, even after it had been overthrown. In 1918, Russia descended into a prolonged and bloody civil war. As World War I ground on, a number of countries, including Britain, France, and Japan, sent troops to support anti-Bolshevik forces in Russia.

BRIAN: Britain and France pressured the United States to do the same. They wanted American boots on the ground.

DAVID FOGLESONG: Finally, by June 1918, seven months more after the Bolshevik seizure of power, he finally agreed to send American forces into North Russia. A group of about 4,500 Americans from the Great Lakes region, they were called Detroit’s Own, the 339th Infantry Regiment.

BRIAN: How did they decide to pick people from Detroit? Just that it was cold?

DAVID FOGLESONG: Well, part of the reasoning seems to have been that there was a strong Slavic immigrant population in the Great Lakes region, in Detroit in particular, lots of Polish-Americans. And there was a sort of idea that, well, Poles, Czechs, Russians, they’re all Slavs. They would get along with one another better.

[LAUGHTER]

Yeah, it’s maybe not well-founded, but you know, it also applies to the expedition into Siberia, a completely separate expedition, where the idea was we would be in support of a Czechoslovakian legion that was there in Siberia. And the Czechs also would have a more brotherly relationship with the Russians, and that that would then facilitate a positive response to foreign intervention.

BRIAN: The operation, known as the Polar Bear Expedition, was a state secret. The soldiers didn’t even know that they were being sent to fight the Bolsheviks.

DAVID FOGLESONG: The Doughboys who were in the 339th Infantry Regiment thought they were going to France, to fight the Germans. In fact, they were on the Atlantic, on their way to France, when their ship was redirected. And they were outfitted in different gear, including different rifles, winter boots, to go up to the Arctic Circle, to the White Sea, and then enter Archangel.

BRIAN: Right. So since it was June or July, they must’ve been wondering about those Arctic boots to go to Paris.

DAVID FOGLESONG: Yeah. Well, yeah, one of the big tragedies is that they never really got a very clear explanation of why they were being diverted and being sent into northern Russia. And that contributed to severe problems in morale, especially after the First World War ended in November 1918. And they’re asking themselves, what are we doing here? We’re facing actual combat, not against Germans, but against a Red Army, against Bolsheviks.

And no one has given us a very clear, candid explanation of what we’re doing here. And part of the reason for that is that Wilson was reluctant to be fully honest and candid, either with the American people or with the United States Congress, about what he was attempting to do.

BRIAN: President Wilson hoped that the Americans’ involvement in Russia would be limited. The US soldiers were placed under British command.

DAVID FOGLESONG: American forces wound up being sent into combat up to about 200 miles south from Arkhangelsk, along the river and along the railroad lines leading down toward Moscow.

BRIAN: And just to be clear, they were fighting along with British troops?

DAVID FOGLESONG: British, French, some Russians, so-called White Russian, anti-Bolshevik forces who were mobilized there. Yes.

BRIAN: And did they take casualties? Did they engage with the Red Army?

DAVID FOGLESONG: Yes, there was direct combat in the winter of 1918, 1919. And hundreds of members of the 339th Infantry Regiment were killed and wounded, some 500 total casualties in the campaign.

BRIAN: Perhaps we should point the finger at Congress. Were they asleep at the switch? Did they not know what was going on? Or did they just choose to look the other way?

DAVID FOGLESONG: Well, during the war against Germany, I think many members of Congress were reluctant to raise critical questions, because of the patriotic, wartime environment, in which the Wilson administration criminalized all kinds of dissent. So in that context, I think many members of Congress who may have had questions kept them to themselves until the war against Germany ended.

And then, December 1918, January 1919, members of Congress began to speak out. Foremost among them was Senator Hiram Johnson, a Republican from California, who demanded to know, what were American soldiers doing? Not only the Polar Bears in northern Russia, but also the other forces, actually a larger group in eastern Siberia.

And Johnson was responding in part to letters and questions arising from the mothers, fathers, brothers, wives of these soldiers who were serving there, who also had no clear idea why their sons and daughters and husbands were off in Russia after the ending of the First World War.

BRIAN: What kind of answers did they get from the Wilson administration?

DAVID FOGLESONG: I think the basic answer from the Wilson administration is, we were cooperating with the British and the French, and we had to maintain that cooperation. However, the pressure was intense enough in January and February of 1919 that the Wilson administration did decide by June 1919 to pull the American forces out from northern Russia.

BRIAN: And you believe that was directly in response to pressure from parents, families, congressional pressure, like Senator Johnson?

DAVID FOGLESONG: I do think it had a significant effect. In eastern Siberia, it didn’t have a significant effect, because the soldiers there in eastern Siberia wound up staying until April 1920. But part of the reason for that is that in eastern Siberia, they weren’t fighting directly against the Red Army.

BRIAN: Not that many Americans know about this episode. I wonder how many people in the Soviet Union knew about this.

DAVID FOGLESONG: Everyone in the Soviet Union knew about this, because this became a central part of Soviet propaganda about the history of Soviet relations with the West. When the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev came to the United States in 1959, he made a point in Hollywood of reminding Americans that your forces intervened on the side of the White Guards in the Russian Civil War, whereas we have never put forces on your soil.

So this is a central theme of Soviet propaganda, from the 1920s all the way through the Cold War. The foreign intervention in the Russian Civil War, being surrounded by hostile forces all around the periphery, that had a huge impact on Soviet perceptions and the notion that Russia, Soviet Russia, was a besieged fortress in a hostile, capitalist, imperialist world.

BRIAN: Yeah, the verb that springs to mind is encircled.

DAVID FOGLESONG: Yes, encircled, surrounded. They expected hostility from the capitalist world, but you know, before the fall of the czar, many leading Bolshevik leaders had been in the United States. And they knew that the United States had a democratic political structure. They thought of the United States as different from the other imperialist powers and didn’t expect the United States to be as hostile as it proved to be.

Especially it’s surprising because the United States refused to recognize the Soviet government all the way until 1933, long after the British and the French and the Italians and the Germans established diplomatic relations with the Soviets. So this was surprising to the Bolsheviks, the extent of American ideological antipathy to Bolshevism.

BRIAN: Are there any legacies domestically in the United States? Do we learn any lessons? Do we take away anything from this adventurism, if you will?

DAVID FOGLESONG: So in the United States, the big legacy with regard to undeclared war is that there are some key figures who are at the junior level in the United States government in 1917, 1918, 1919. Two men who would play an important role in the Cold War, that is John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State in the 1950s, Allen Dulles, Director of Central Intelligence in the 1950s.

Both of them observed that the Wilson administration did not have a free hand in how it wanted to intervene in the Russian Civil War, that it was necessary for it to intervene in more indirect and secretive ways, could not simply send in massive military forces because of concerns about public and congressional opinion.

And so therefore, Allen Dulles and John Foster Dulles realized that the United States as a democracy needed to have covert methods of intervention. And that’s a lesson that they would carry with them when they have their later, more prominent political careers in the 1950s.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

JOANNE: David Foglesong is a professor of history at Rutgers University. He’s author of America’s Secret War Against Bolshevism– US Intervention in the Russian Civil War, 1917 to 1920.

American Comrades

In 1918, Lenin wrote an open letter to American workers, asking for their support in the global proletariat revolution.

Music:

Peter Gray by Podington Bear
All The Pretty Horses by Podington Bear

Bolshevism; Civil War; Russian Revolution; Soviet Union; U.S.-Russia/Soviet Union relations

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

NATHAN: A final note. In 1930, veterans of the Polar Bear expedition were honored with a monument near Detroit, in Troy, Michigan. It’s a scowling polar bear made of white marble. The surviving Polar Bears held annual reunions at the monument through the early 1980s.

JOANNE: We were just talking about the Wilson administration’s covert involvement in the Russian Civil War. In response, Lenin penned an open letter to American workers in August of 1918, around the same time that Wilson was sending troops into Russia.

NATHAN: In his note, Lenin critiqued Wilson’s choice to fight the Red Army, and the American war effort more broadly. But he also sought to remind America’s workers of the role they could play in the global proletariat revolution.

BRIAN: John Reed helped circulate the letter in the United States. It first appeared in socialist newspapers in New York and Boston in December 1918. Here’s some excerpts.

[PIANO MUSIC]

VLADIMIR LENIN: Comrades, a Russian Bolshevik who for many years lived in your country has offered to transmit these letters to you. I have grasped this opportunity joyfully for the revolutionary proletariat of America, insofar as it is the enemy of American imperialism is destined to perform an important task at this time.

The history of modern civilized America opens with one of those really revolutionary wars of liberation, of which there have been so few compared with the enormous number or wars, of conquest that were caused by the present imperialist war by squabbles among kings, landholders, and capitalists.

The best representatives of the American proletariat, those representatives who have repeatedly given expression to their full solidarity with us, the Bolsheviki, are the expression of this revolutionary tradition in the life of the American people. The American working class will not follow the lead of its bourgeoisie. It will go with us against the bourgeoisie.

We know that it may take a long time before help can come from you, comrades, American working men, for the development of the revolution in the different countries proceeds along various paths. How could it be otherwise?

We are in a beleaguered fortress so long as no other international socialist revolution comes to our assistance with its armies. While these armies exist, they are stronger than ours. They grow, they strive, they become more invincible the longer imperialism with its brutality continues. We are invincible, for invincible is the proletarian revolution.

BRIAN: That was Lenin’s letter to American workers. He wrote it in August 1918.

Red Raids

Historian Beverly Gage explains how fears of Bolshevism sparked the first ‘red scare’ in the United States, resulting in the deportation of hundreds of foreign workers back to Bolshevik Russia.

Music:

Forgiven Not Forgotten by Jahzzar

Bolshevism; First Red Scare; Russian Revolution; Soviet Union; U.S.-Russia/Soviet Union relations

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

JOANNE: Lenin believed that American workers would naturally support the cause of global proletariat revolution, but as we heard earlier, the US government viewed the Bolshevik Revolution with considerable alarm.

BEVERLY GAGE: A lot of the worry is that the kinds of things that the Bolsheviks are saying are going to be very, very appealing to workers, not only in the United States, but around the world.

BRIAN: This is a familiar voice to BackStory listeners, historian Beverly Gage. Gage says that by 1919, with the First World War safely behind them, US officials began to view the Bolsheviks as an internal ideological threat.

BEVERLY GAGE: It became clear that the Bolsheviks were there to stay, and it also became clear that the Bolshevik government was quite interested in exporting revolution.

BRIAN: What was going on here in the United States that might lead people to believe that, you know, this really might have international implications?

BEVERLY GAGE: 1919 was, even in the United States, a really dramatic year of social unrest. The year begins with the general strike in Seattle, so that is January of 1919. It’s something that’s really never happened before in American history, that all the working people in the city came together to basically shut down that city for five days.

BRIAN: Wow, yeah.

BEVERLY GAGE: And that was really the opening event of a year that turned out to be one of the most dramatic years in American labor history, so about 25% of the working people in the United States went out on strike. It was a dramatic, dramatic year.

NATHAN: Wilson administration officials looked on these strikes with deep suspicion, and many suspected they were provoked by foreign radicals. That’s certainly how the newly appointed US Attorney General, Mitchell Palmer, viewed the labor unrest. And he made it his mission to crack down on political radicals of every stripe.

BEVERLY GAGE: I think when Palmer came to power as Attorney General in early 1919, he had a basic anti-radicalism, right? He certainly thought the communists, revolutionaries of various stripes were a danger to the country. A couple of pretty significant bombings happened in late April, early May of 1919, and then again in June of 1919, his own house is bombed.

BRIAN: Yeah, well, that will get your attention when your own house is bombed.

BEVERLY GAGE: Exactly. He was at home, and all of a sudden, the front of his house blew up. And one of the bombers died on his front lawn. There are very gruesome descriptions of this bomber having been blown apart and his scalp on Palmer’s roof.

BRIAN: So was this what we would call today a suicide bombing? Or just a bombing gone wrong?

BEVERLY GAGE: It was not supposed to be a suicide bombing, and it seems pretty clear that these bombings were carried out by a group of Italian anarchists, so actually not Bolsheviks at all, and people who have very little to do with anything in the Russian Revolution or the American Communist Party, aside from a kind of general revolutionary sentiment.

BRIAN: I certainly understand Palmer taking his house being bombed personally, but why would he go after Bolsheviks in response to an anarchist bombing?

BEVERLY GAGE: He was the Attorney General, so he’s under lots of pressure, and he starts looking around for what to do. And I think the larger sense is that there is this kind of sweeping revolutionary left that is somehow dangerous. You know, the federal government is not making a lot of distinctions at this point between who’s in the Communist Labor Party versus the Communist Party versus being an anarchist versus being a militant syndicalist. It was sort of all one big stew of militant revolutionary sentiment and action.

BRIAN: Palmer was in a tight spot. It was public pressure to act, yet legally, he couldn’t just round up American workers with radical political beliefs, even if he wanted to. What he could do was deport foreign radicals, who seemed to be stirring up these strikes and bombings. He began to assemble a list of names with help from a zealous young Justice Department official, a guy named J. Edgar Hoover.

BEVERLY GAGE: On November 7, they launched the first big deportation race.

BRIAN: And is that date a coincidence?

BEVERLY GAGE: It is not a coincidence. So they plan that first raid for the second anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, and they specifically target a group that is allied with Russia, a fairly obscure radical group called the Union of Russian Workers. They conduct raids in several cities at once, round up several hundred people, and ultimately deport 249 people out of New York in December of 1919, back to, quote unquote, “Bolshevik Russia” where they belong.

It was a very dramatic deportation. It was widely celebrated. They were sent on this old army transport ship that became dubbed the Soviet Ark, and the people on board were a lot of members of the Union of Russian Workers and also quite significantly the two most famous anarchists in the United States, both of whom had been born in Russia, Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. That’s how they’re sent back. And then they’re sent into a country that is really in deep chaos, so we know very little about what happened to most of those people.

BRIAN: Can you take us inside that raid? I mean, what did it look like? What did it feel like?

BEVERLY GAGE: It was pretty chaotic. It was pretty violent. So the federal government is coordinating all of this, and this was one of J. Edgar Hoover’s first significant jobs. But the federal government had pretty limited capacities at that point, so they’re working with local police departments. They’re working with sometimes even deputized volunteers to kind of rush into these meetings, mostly in meeting halls, because everybody’s there, celebrating the Bolshevik Revolution.

BRIAN: And that’s what communists do, right? They meet.

BEVERLY GAGE: Exactly. They meet. They meet in meeting halls. So yes, so they go in. They arrest lots of people. Some people they have warrants for, some people they don’t have warrants for. People who resist are often met with a great deal of violence. There are stories of people being pushed down stairs and clubbed over the head. But it is really quite a mass raid, relatively indiscriminate, quite violent in some cases.

BRIAN: Now there’s a second raid in 1920. Was that more of the same?

BEVERLY GAGE: It once again targets groups associated with Bolshevism, associated with revolutionary Russia. There are a couple of pieces that are really important and different though. So one is that they arrest a lot more people. It’s somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 people, so really quite indiscriminate–

BRIAN: Hold on, hold on. 6,000 and 10,000 people?

BEVERLY GAGE: That’s right. Some, again, some people with specific warrants. In other cases, they just took in everyone who was in the meeting hall, plus their spouses, plus anyone who happened to be at the Russian language class down the hall. And so–

BRIAN: Basically everybody eating borscht.

BEVERLY GAGE: Exactly. If you looked suspicious, you were probably getting arrested. It turns out that a bunch of the people arrested were actually American citizens as well, so that posed some serious problems. And as it turned out, because the scale was different, also I think because people were having a little bit of self-searching about whether this was really how America wanted to be conducting itself, there’s also a pretty big public backlash to this second round of raids. The first ones were hugely popular. The Justice Department assumed bigger and better would be even more popular, but as it turns out, that’s not what happened.

BRIAN: Now the fear of Bolshevism in the United States waxed and waned, I suppose. Most of our listeners would identify the high point of concern about communism as being McCarthyism in the ’50s. Could you sketch for us some of that waxing and waning in the 1920s and some of the reasons for that?

BEVERLY GAGE: Yeah, I think 1919 was a year of intense fear about Bolshevism, and that continued into 1920. And this took all sorts of forms, so we talked about what the federal government did. There are all sorts of other things happening, cultural screeds being written, warnings that the Bolsheviks– this is one of my favorites– that the Bolsheviks wanted to nationalize women, and they were going to become government property to be parceled out.

Russia was this land of free love. Right, so there were all sorts of things, atheism. You get a huge cultural pushback, but the idea that revolution was going to sweep the world, including the United States, that seems a lot less likely by 1920 than it did in 1919. It’s hard for us to remember this, I think, but it seemed like a real possibility.

BRIAN: Well, nonetheless, if you look back at this particular moment, whether it’s 1919 or 1920, what are the lasting legacies of that, Bev?

BEVERLY GAGE: Certainly the idea that it is within the purview of the federal government and of federal intelligence agencies to keep track of people’s opinions, to watch revolutionary movements, to conduct all sorts of legal and deportation proceedings. That premise, that this is something that the federal government does and has a right to do, lasts and is really significantly shaped by that moment.

I think the idea of Bolshevism as a threat and of the American left being somehow tied up with this foreign government, that’s a really significant shift. And then you look at a figure like J. Edgar Hoover, and this is his founding moment. This is the moment that his ideas about communism are shaped.

It’s the moment that he learns how to do all sorts of things, conduct surveillance, conduct raids. And it’s also a moment that he learns what not to do, like maybe mass raids aren’t a great idea, and we should do a lot of this much more secretly. And he, of course, goes on to be the most significant anti-communist in American history.

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JOANNE: Beverly Gage is a historian at Yale University and the author of The Day Wall Street Exploded, A Story of America in Its First Age of Terror. She’s completing a biography of former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.

Russian to Conclusions

Brian, Joanne, and Nathan discuss how fears of communism and other supposedly dangerous foreign ideologies have been used to discredit domestic political movements, from union organizing, to the civil rights movement.

Bolshevism; Russian Revolution; Soviet Union; U.S.-Russia/Soviet Union relations; fearmongering; political repression; radicalism

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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BRIAN: Joanne, Nathan, what strikes me, looking back on the past 100 years, is the way in which this idea that was connected with the Bolshevik Revolution was used in so many different ways to, in essence, disparage all kinds of very legitimate protests and, in fact, quests for basic American rights, the quest by African-Americans to be full citizens, the quest by organized labor to have the right to organize collectively. Please tell me this wasn’t the first time that foreign ideology was seen as threatening.

JOANNE: Of course, what immediately strikes me as something that’s parallel partly in its power is the impact of the French Revolution and the ideology that was fueling the French Revolution. Liberty, equality, fraternity, those ideas are threatening.

John Adams, who’s president, he actually referred to terrorism. We’re talking 1798, maybe 1797, that he’s pointing at that and saying, this is terrorism. We were blockading the doors. We didn’t know what these scary ideas were going to get the people to do. It’s not a word you expect to hear in the 18th century.

BRIAN: Yeah, and I suppose that legislation labeled alien and sedition suggested a certain degree of un-Americanness as well.

JOANNE: Right, so then you end up with this repressive legislation, the Alien Act, which basically wants French nationals to register, to show where they are, so that they could be kept track of. The Sedition Act, which is a way of basically clamping down on the press if it seems to be stating seditious ideas about the government. You get repressive legislation that is posed as being something that’s for the safety of the nation in the face of terrorism.

BRIAN: Well, fortunately, ideology does not rear its un-American head again until the 1950s, right, Nathan?

[LAUGHTER]

NATHAN: I mean, revolutions are funny, funny things, because there’s always this concern among those who are currently in power that whatever revolution that they see happening just off the national stage might wind up on their shores. I mean, they were looking with terror down in the Caribbean, right? The Haitian revolution kicks up in the 1790s, really in the founding of Haiti in 1804. I mean, you won’t find an un-nervous planter anywhere in the Americas.

BRIAN: And, Nathan, just to be clear, these planters weren’t worried about the new republic of Haiti attacking them. They were worried about these ideas–

JOANNE: Scary ideas.

BRIAN: –being embedded in their own enslaved people, right?

NATHAN: Oh, no, absolutely. I mean, it was undeniable that for Haiti to overthrow the French, which at the time was considered to be one of the world’s great empires, that it could possibly happen in the United States, that African-Americans could rise up on the plantations of the South and topple the country. I mean, that was a genuine concern for people, because it was unimaginable, frankly, prior to the 1790s that you could have an independent black republic or a slave revolution of that size and consequence.

JOANNE: And there were slave revolts.

NATHAN: Right.

JOANNE: 1800, 1802–

NATHAN: Absolutely.

JOANNE: I mean, there was an actual impact.

NATHAN: That’s right. But the other thing about this is even before the Russian Revolution happens, there are ideas that are circulating in the United States. You think about a socialist labor activist like Eugene Debs, who was able to be a pretty prominent American figure through the late 19th century, founding the International Workers of the World movement and really helping to pull together a labor sentiment that many considered to be totally American.

BRIAN: So, Nathan, was there something different about some of the ideas that Debs embraced, for instance, now being represented in a country the size of Russia?

NATHAN: It is true that to see a revolution happen and take over a country is a very different thing from having a socialist simply pounding his fist from the stage, as was often the case with Eugene Debs. And not to make light of the socialist movement, right? It was extraordinarily important, but the idea of a revolution is a very different thing. And I’ll say this as well.

What it does is it provides a profound justification for the law enforcement apparatus in this country to begin then basically using concerns about communism and socialism for any manner of discrediting of various movements.

One very concrete example– in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921, there was yet another conflict between blacks and whites. You had the Red Summer of 1919, where there were a lot of race riots. And in this case, in 1921, in Tulsa, you had a number of whites who were working class, who were very concerned about African-American affluence and basically attacked a black financial district and burned down a number of homes and businesses.

Some 300 African-Americans were killed, thousands more driven away. And the response from the FBI and a young agent by the name of J. Edgar Hoover was to begin hunting for communists, folks from the outside, foreign interlocutors who were stirring things up in the city and providing a black eye for the nation, really for all the world to see.

BRIAN: And, Nathan, I’m old enough to remember from the 1960s that term, outside agitators.

NATHAN: Right.

BRIAN: It was used by people like Sheriff Bull Connor in Birmingham, Alabama, to disparage peaceful civil rights demonstrations, and it was used by conservative white mayors in the urban North to claim that these riots, or what many other people call rebellions, couldn’t possibly happen with cities exploding in the North in the late 1960s without the presence of these outside agitators, who came in to stir things up.

NATHAN: Right.

JOANNE: And you know, what’s dangerously ingenious about that sort of outsiders coming in way of looking at things is that on the one hand, you can be repressive in response to that. But you can totally frame it as though you’re being American and unifying, right? So it’s ingenious and dangerous for that very reason, just as a way of framing things.

BRIAN: So, Joanne, Nathan, help me out with something. I think you guys know that I listen to a lot of conservative talk radio. And what I hear is an absolute conflation between communism and un-Americanism. I take your point, Nathan. It wasn’t always that way, but when did it change? And why has it become so pro forma?

We don’t have a Soviet Union anymore. We’re doing this show because it’s the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, but that revolution lasted– I don’t know– let’s call it 70, 80 years. It’s history. Why this conflation of communism and un-Americanism?

NATHAN: Well, my sense, Brian, is that if you look at what the argument against socialism meant, it really was an effort to fight any form of government regulation or seeming, quote unquote, “intervention” in the marketplace. So landlords, bankers, people in the medical fields of various kinds, there was always this concern about dreaded socialism creeping in and regulating the way that the folks made their money.

So you could see how a term like socialism and communism can very easily collapse into this soup that we can invoke almost around anything.

JOANNE: I think it’s a pretty bland soup at the moment, though, because I think it’s been drained of so much of the meaning. I mean, I honestly think that right now, commie is just a word that means– as Brian just suggested– un-American, and that there’s not a lot of depth there. People don’t really know what that means. It just means un-American.

There was a radio program that I heard in which someone was talking about being in an argument with someone who called him a commie. And when he responded and said, well, actually, yeah, I guess I kind of am a communist, the argument stopped because the person who threw the insult, he didn’t know what it meant. It was just a word. You know? So I think that’s what it’s boiled down to at this point.

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BRIAN: That’s going to do it for today, but you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode, or ask us your burning history questions. You’ll find us at backstoryradio.org, or send an email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter at BackStory Radio. And feel free to review the new show in the iTunes Store. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

JOANNE: This episode of BackStory was produced by Brigid McCarthy, Nina Earnest, Emily Gadek and Ramona Martinez. Jamal Millner is our technical director, Diana Williams is our digital editor, and Joey Thompson is our researcher. Additional help came from Robin [? Blue, ?] Emma Gregg, [? Angelique ?] [INAUDIBLE], Sequoia Carrillo, Courtney [? Spanya, ?] and [? Aaron ?] [INAUDIBLE]. Our theme song was written by Nick Thorburn. Other music in this episode came from [INAUDIBLE], Podington Bear, and Jahzazar.

BRIAN: Special thanks this week to Yuri Urbanovich and [? Sergey ?] [? Gordayev. ?] And thanks as always to the Johns Hopkins University Studio in Baltimore.

NATHAN: BackStory is produced at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. We’re a proud member of the Panoply Podcast Network. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Provost Office at the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

JOANNE: Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia and the Dorothy Compton Professor at the Miller Center of Public Affairs. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Panoply.