America's Red Scares: Palmer Raids, the Smith Act and the Venona Cables

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The first Red Scare, roughly 1917 to 1920, grew from the Russian Revolution and a wave of more than 3,600 strikes in 1919, including a walkout by the Boston Police Department. That April, authorities intercepted 36 mail bombs addressed to targets including J.P. Morgan Jr., John D. Rockefeller and Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, and in June eight bombs exploded in eight cities, one wrecking the front of Palmer's house. The Palmer Raids that followed jailed thousands without warrants under the Espionage and Sedition Acts, and 249 Russian immigrants were deported on a ship the press called the Soviet Ark. Palmer's predicted May Day 1920 uprising never came, and a report by twelve lawyers including Felix Frankfurter documented the abuses.

The Communist Party USA grew to about 50,000 members by 1939, then reversed its positions in step with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and Hitler's 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union. The Smith Act of 1940 made advocating overthrow a crime. After the Soviet atomic test, Mao's victory and the Korean War, the Hiss and Rosenberg cases, Truman's loyalty boards, HUAC and Joseph McCarthy drove the second Red Scare until the televised Army-McCarthy hearings and his Senate censure in 1954. Yates v. United States later separated abstract advocacy from preparation for violence.

• The Cincinnati Reds temporarily renamed themselves the Redlegs in the 1950s to avoid the word red.
• Schenck v. United States in 1919 produced Holmes's false cry of fire in a theater and the clear and present danger test.
• An unsolved September 1920 bombing on Wall Street killed 38 people.
• Fewer than 600 deportations from the Palmer era were substantiated by evidence of wrongdoing.
• Venona cables declassified in 1995 showed more than 300 Americans had spied for the Soviets, secrets kept for decades to protect the codebreaking.