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This chapter focuses on how the Palmer Raids of the winter of 1919–20 were the most draconian single instance of federal repression in the United States' peacetime history. Nothing in the McCarthy era can compare to the mass arrests and beatings, arbitrary incarcerations, and summary deportations that took place in dozens of cities across the nation. Capping off a year of industrial crisis, foreign insecurity, and political conflict, they helped solidify the divisions of the war years, institutionalizing them in an underground communist movement on one side and new patriotic organizations on the other. Given the power of the repressive politics that arised between 1917 and 1920, it is a surprising and problematic fact that the national Republican administrations of the 1920s saw no new countersubversive policies developed.

In December 1919 the U.S. government, in the wake of the famed mail bombings (including to Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer) and the earlier Seattle General Strike, took a dramatic step. As a part of the broader anti-radical campaign under the Espionage and Sedition Acts, 249 known leftists and many Russians swept up in the famed Palmer Raids - specifically socialists and anarchists - boarded the Buford and set sail for Europe. Among the passengers were notable radicals like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. This work by the Departments of Justice and Labor stands is an important, though underexplored, physical act and moment that institutionalized the first American “Red Scare,” and revealed the broader tensions surrounding “loyalty,” the immigrant population, and anti-radicalism.

The war's impact on free speech at home, along with Attorney General Mitchell Palmer's brutal raids on suspected radicals, intensified Mencken's belief in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. But with America at war, the New York Evening Mail closed to him, and The Smart Set in peril, Mencken took on a neutral subject that would forever after identify him as a uniquely American voice: a study of The American Language. Simultaneously, he launched Prejudices, a series of essays attacking the Genteel Tradition in literature and intellectual cowardice. After the war, he returned to the Baltimore Sun, his books were widely embraced, and he became hailed as an important new critic. In 1919, Mencken came to the realization that he lived not in a literary age, but a fiercely political age.

This chapter examines the rise of Jacob Spolansky as part of a class of professional spies fostered by the growth of anticommunism during the First World War and the Red Scare. Spolansky was a migrant from Ukraine who arrived in the United States around 1910 and was recruited into the US Army's Military Intelligence Division as well as the Bureau of Investigation. During a thirty-year career, Spolansky rotated in and out of government and corporate service and spied on and infiltrated radical and labor organizations. He used legislative committees, business associations, and media outlets to engender support for harsh measures to deal with political and industrial radicals. His career highlights included coordinating the Palmer Raids in Chicago, arresting several Communist Party leaders in Michigan in 1922, and formulating Michigan's 1931 “Spolansky Act.” This chapter first considers Spolansky's early life and how he became a spy active both in law enforcement and political and industrial counterespionage before discussing his career highlights, his later years, and his legacy as a professional spy and anticommunist.

The United States and the United Kingdom have rich histories of panic and overreaching responses to events that appear to threaten national security. Both countries have a habit of giving the executive non-reviewable extrajudicial discretion to address perceived emergencies. Historical US examples are the Alien and Sedition Acts (1798), the Palmer Raids (1919-1920), Japanese-American World War II internments, and the Alien Registration Act of 1940(Smith Act). The UK revived executive detentions in 1915 with Regulation 14b of the Defence of the Realm Act 1914, Regulation18B of the Emergency Powers Act 1939, and the Prevention of Terrorism Act 1974. Post 9/11, the US implemented the USA PATRIOT Act and the UK implemented the Anti-Terrorism Crime and Security Act 2001. Typically these responses involve preventive detention, focus on aliens, guilt by association, and use of administrative rather than criminal procedures. This chapter discusses the emergency legislation and historical court decisions including Korematzu v United States and Liversidge v Anderson.