The Rhyme of History

Only Yesterday (1919), writes Frederick Lewis Allen, there was the Big Red Scare conspiracy.  Every labor movement was suspected of communist influence (the Bolshevist).  The New York World reported  that there was “no Bolshevist menace in the United States and no I.W.W. (Industrial Workers of the World) menace that an ordinarily capable police force is not competent to deal with.”  Yet this (“fake news?”) did not deter the craziness that enveloped the nation.  That craziness was promoted and nurtured by A. Mitchell Palmer, Attorney General of the United States, (who enjoyed being called “The Fighting Quaker”).  He rounded up so-called Communist leaders (foreigners who did not look like “Americans”) for deportation to Russia and carried out other raids which “set a new record in American history for executive transgression of individual constitutional rights.”

Attorney General Palmer’s propaganda against the so-called “borers from within” (terrorists) worked.  Many Americans (without any substantial evidence) began to fear and to hate.  “I believe we should place them all (whoever the enemy should happen to be) on a ship of stone, with sails of lead, and that their first stopping-place should be hell,” became the raucous chorus among the “super-patriots.” These super-patriots set up all kinds of patriotic societies to further the hysteria, “all wrapped themselves in Old Glory and the mantle of the Founding Fathers.”  In order to keep their organizations alive they conjured up new and ever greater menaces threatening the safety of Americans.  University professors were blacklisted if they spoke in opposition to these ludicrous conspiracies, school teachers were made to sign oaths of allegiance, opposing political or economic ideas were considered treasonous.  The intolerance took many forms—including anti-Negro, Jew, and Roman Catholic feelings, and feelings toward all other groups which to the then dominant American group—the white Protestants—seemed alien or “un-American.” This all happened Only Yesterday—here—in the United States of America.

A few days ago I used a popular aphorism, “History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes.”  The maxim is often attributed to Mark Twain, but, as a columnist of the New York Times wrote, “I’ve found no compelling evidence that he (Twain) ever uttered this nifty aphorism.  No matter—the line is too good to resist.”  It is too good to resist—and—it is also too true to ignore.