It started with a few packages. In April 1919, a postal clerk in New York City discovered something terrifying: thirty-six bombs, all addressed to prominent Americans like John D. Rockefeller and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. They were wrapped in bright brown paper and timed to arrive right around May Day. It was a mess. People were already on edge because the world seemed to be falling apart. World War I had just ended, the Spanish Flu was killing millions, and over in Russia, the Bolsheviks had actually succeeded in toppling the Tsar.
American leaders looked at the chaos and got scared. Really scared. They didn't see these bombs as the work of a few lone radicals; they saw them as the opening shots of a full-blown communist revolution on U.S. soil. This was the birth of the First Red Scare.
Honestly, most people today mix up this era with the McCarthyism of the 1950s. They shouldn't. While Joe McCarthy was all about blacklists and Senate hearings, the First Red Scare was much more violent, chaotic, and driven by a genuine fear that the entire government might collapse by Tuesday. It was a period defined by massive strikes, race riots, and a Department of Justice that basically decided the Bill of Rights was optional.
The Perfect Storm of 1919
You can’t understand the First Red Scare without looking at the 1917 Russian Revolution. When Vladimir Lenin and his buddies took over, they didn't just want to change Russia. They wanted a global uprising. They formed the Comintern in 1919 specifically to spread communism everywhere. To a shopkeeper in Ohio or a senator in D.C., this wasn't some abstract political theory. It felt like a viral infection.
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Then came the labor unrest.
In 1919, more than 4 million American workers went on strike. That is a staggering number. In Seattle, a general strike shut down the entire city for five days. Imagine everything—stores, lights, transport—just stopping. The Mayor of Seattle, Ole Hanson, didn't think it was about wages. He claimed it was an attempt to start a "Soviet" in Washington state. Then the steelworkers walked out. Then the Boston police went on strike.
Think about that for a second. The police. In Boston.
When the cops walked off the job, looting broke out. Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge eventually fired them all, famously saying there’s "no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time." It made him a national hero and eventually landed him the presidency. But the fear remained. If the guys with the badges were flirting with radicalism, who could you trust?
A. Mitchell Palmer and the Power of Paranoia
The face of this era was Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. He had a personal stake in the game. In June 1919, a bomb blew up the front of his house in Washington, D.C. It was so powerful it blew out the windows of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s house across the street. The bomber, an Italian anarchist named Carlo Valdinoci, actually blew himself up in the process. Parts of him were found on the Palmer doorstep.
Palmer wasn't a guy who took things lightly. He used the incident to secure more funding from Congress and created a new division within the Bureau of Investigation (the precursor to the FBI). To lead it, he picked a 24-year-old law school graduate who was obsessed with filing systems and radical movements: J. Edgar Hoover.
Hoover started building files. Lots of them. He tracked everyone from famous activists like Emma Goldman to random neighborhood organizers. This wasn't just about communism anymore. It was about anyone who looked "un-American."
The Palmer Raids and the "Soviet Ark"
The climax of the First Red Scare came in late 1919 and early 1920 with the Palmer Raids. Federal agents burst into homes, meeting halls, and pool rooms without warrants. They arrested thousands of people, mostly immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. They didn't care much about due process.
Basically, if you spoke Russian or Italian and were in the wrong place at the wrong time, you were going to jail.
In December 1919, the government loaded 249 "undesirables" onto a ship called the Buford, nicknamed the "Soviet Ark," and deported them to Russia. Emma Goldman was on that ship. The public cheered. The New York Times and other major papers generally supported the raids, reflecting a national mood that favored order over liberty.
Why the Panic Faded as Fast as it Started
By May 1920, the First Red Scare started to look a bit silly. Palmer had predicted a massive, bloody uprising on May Day. He warned the nation to be ready for coordinated bombings and assassinations.
The day came. And... nothing happened.
The sun rose, people went to work, and the revolution stayed in Europe. Palmer looked like the boy who cried wolf. At the same time, prominent lawyers like Felix Frankfurter (who later became a Supreme Court Justice) started pointing out that the Department of Justice was breaking the law to "enforce" the law. They published a report titled Report on the Illegal Practices of the United States Department of Justice, which detailed the beatings and illegal detentions of the raids.
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Public opinion shifted. People were tired of the intensity. The war was over, the flu was receding, and they just wanted to buy a Ford Model T and listen to jazz. The "Return to Normalcy" promised by Warren G. Harding in the 1920 election was exactly what the country wanted.
The Lasting Damage of the Scare
Even though the acute panic ended, it left deep scars on the American psyche. It led directly to the National Origins Act of 1924, which severely restricted immigration from any country that looked "suspicious"—basically anywhere except Northern and Western Europe. It also solidified the power of J. Edgar Hoover, who would stay at the head of the FBI for the next 48 years, using the same surveillance tactics he perfected in 1919.
It’s also where we get the Sacco and Vanzetti trial. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were two Italian anarchists accused of a robbery and murder in Massachusetts. Despite very thin evidence and a worldwide protest movement, they were executed in 1927. Most historians agree they were convicted more for their radical beliefs and immigrant status than for the crime itself.
That’s the legacy of the First Red Scare. It wasn't just a "phase." It changed how we handle dissent and how we view the "outsider."
Actionable Insights: Lessons from 1919
Understanding the First Red Scare isn't just for history buffs. It offers a blueprint for how societies react when they feel their core identity is under threat. If you want to dive deeper or see how these patterns repeat, here is what you should do:
1. Study the Alien and Sedition Acts
Compare the 1919 crackdown with the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. You'll notice that the U.S. tends to pass restrictive speech laws during times of "undeclared" war or international tension. Seeing the pattern makes modern headlines much easier to parse.
2. Audit your sources on "Radicalism"
The 1919 press was largely a megaphone for Palmer's Department of Justice. When researching historical or modern social movements, look for primary sources from the participants themselves—like Emma Goldman's Living My Life—to see the human side that the headlines ignored.
3. Visit the National Archives or Digital Collections
The Library of Congress has digitised thousands of newspapers from 1919. Search for terms like "Red Menace" or "Bolshevism" in papers from different regions. You'll see that the panic wasn't uniform; rural papers often had a very different "flavor" of fear than big-city journals.
4. Recognize the "Safety vs. Liberty" Cycle
Whenever a major technological or social shift happens (like the 1919 labor boom or the rise of the internet), there is an almost immediate legislative attempt to "secure" the nation. Recognizing this cycle helps you stay objective when new "panics" arise in the media today.
The First Red Scare proves that fear is a powerful political tool, but it’s also a volatile one. It can justify almost anything in the short term, but it usually leaves a trail of constitutional wreckage that takes decades to clean up.