Origins of the Red Scare essays

Origins of the Red Scare essays In the first part of his book "American Anti-Communism", M. J. Heale writes "the fraternal egalitarianism of the American republican heritage with its insistence that rights and opportunities were available to all, enabled collectivist doctrines to be repudiated as un-American." What Heale means by this is that the American society was built upon the idea of equality of man, which at the time meant white male landowners. These wealthy landowners would become the middle and upper class of American society. They created their society on the basis of improving their own lives and did not really consider the ideas of those who could not vote, those that did not own land. These upper and middle class members of America became the ones who would later become fearful of the possibility of a revolution. To them, a revolution would undermine their efforts to advance their own lives and stature in society. Since most immigrants were poor and therefore entered the lower working class, any idea, which would elevate these workers to the same level as their employers at the employers' expense, was viewed as a threat. "In the nineteenth century there were men of Anglo-Saxon stock who came to regard the American mission as their particular inheritance and who feared the subversive effects of immigration and the alien political ideas that were thereby introduced." (Heale, p. 127) In the minds of the middle and upper class, the idea of revolution was associated less with liberty and more with the selfish demands of labor. No place was more evident of this than in Chicago in the mid-1800s. Chicago was the fastest growing major American city in the 1800s. This growth not only attracted immigrants, but also European radicals. In 1886, Chicago was the site of major labor tension over an eight-hour workday. On May 1st some 40,000 workers walked off the job and followed Albert P. Parsons through the center of the city. When police violence o...