President Woodrow Wilson's World War I pledge to make the world safe for democracy was severely compromised on the home front by the red scare of 1919–1920. With its xenophobia, attacks on labor, radical witch hunts, and insistence on one hundred percent Americanism, the red scare had deep roots in the American past, but it also triggered a growing American paranoia about an increasingly dangerous and chaotic world.

World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution

Many factors precipitated this first red scare: World War I had called for a peremptory patriotism that brooked no dissent. Former journalist George Creel, who headed President Wilson's committee on public safety, reinforced this demand for total loyalty, and the 1918 Sedition Act made it a crime to criticize by speech or in writing the government or the Constitution. Also significant was the successful Russian Revolution, and its leaders' subsequent withdrawal of Russia...