Intolerance is not new in the world nor is it new in this “land of the free and the home of the brave.” Right after the War to end all wars (1919: 100-years ago) a group of super-patriots came into being. Their mission, as they saw it, was to protect America. President Woodrow Wilson lay ill in the White House, totally out of touch with the affairs of the nation. Nature abhors a vacuum. Somebody had to fill the “empty spaces” and keep America safe. One of these was the Attorney General of the United States, A. Mitchell Palmer, sometimes called the “Fighting Quaker.” His task, as he saw it, was to rescue the Constitution.
Mr. Palmer announced that the “Reds” (communists) proposed to take away everything from real Americans. They plan to take your farms. They intend to own your savings account. He distributed this propaganda to the press, included pictures of “horrid-looking Bolsheviks with bristling beards, and asked if such as these should rule over America.” The “Big Red Scare” was taken up by other politicians (and fanatics) until “College graduates were calling for the dismissal of professors suspected of radicalism; school-teachers were being made to sign oaths of allegiance; business men with un-orthodox political or economic ideas were learning to hold their tongues if they wanted to hold their jobs.” It was all propaganda, it was twisted truth, and some of it downright falsehood—but such propaganda continued long enough and loud enough can create hysteria.
Everyone became a super-patriot. All kinds of patriotic societies were organized and each conjured up new and ever greater menaces (mostly imagined) against the real Americans. Among these were the believers in compulsory military service, the anti-evolution Fundamentalists, book censors, Jew-haters, Negro-haters, “upholders of every kind of cause,” and all of them wrapped themselves in Old Glory.
Intolerance of one group inevitably leads to the intolerance of others. It began with the Big Red Scare, but once Americans were scared—and that scare continually fed by the super-patriots—the resulting fear took on many forms. Any group or element in society that seemed a threat to the so-called real American group—the white Protestants—was deemed alien or “un-American.”
The “gospel of white supremacy” was proclaimed. “The dark-skinned races constituted a worse threat to Western civilization than the Bolshiviks.” The super-patriots called for an “undiluted Americanism.” Even the Jews were seen as “plotting the subjugation of the whole world” and made responsible for “every American affliction.”
Does history repeat itself?
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