American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [181]
The ‘Reds’ at Ellis Island
Are happy as can be
For Comrade Post at Washington Is setting them all free.
The anger toward Post extended to Congress. Six months earlier it had been Fred Howe who was being grilled for his sympathy toward radicals. Now it was Post’s turn. In May 1920, the House Rules Committee began impeachment hearings against him. By then, the Red Scare had petered out almost as quickly as it had begun. When Palmer’s dire warnings of a May Day revolution failed to come true, the public lost interest in the crusade. Congress quietly dropped its proceedings against Post.
At the height of the Red Scare, between November 1919 and May 1920, warrants were issued for 6,350 aliens suspected of radical activity, leading to around 3,000 arrests. Of that number, only 762 were ordered deported and only 271 were actually deported, including the 249 who left on the Buford. In the year after May 1920, an additional 510 alien radicals were deported.
The roundup and deportation of alien radicals were merely a continuation of longstanding immigration policy. For years, immigrants safely landed in the United States were at risk of deportation if they were subsequently found to qualify under one of the categories of exclusion. Between 1910 and 1918, almost twenty-five thousand immigrants already residing in the United States found themselves rounded up by authorities and deported back to their homelands for various reasons. After World War I, the government focused its attention more closely on radical aliens, but the mechanism it used was largely the same as had been used to deport immigrants before the war.
While the deportation process that characterized the Red Scare had long been part of the immigration law and would be used for decades more to come, the emotions that fueled this particular spasm of antiradical sentiment quickly died out. In hindsight, this period was a disjointed blip, a hiccup of tension and conflict. To the American mind of 1919 and 1920, however, the world seemed ablaze with danger.
A global flu outbreak had erupted before the armistice and continued into 1919. The worldwide death toll has been estimated at anywhere from 20 million to as high as 100 million. Many in the United States referred to it as the Spanish flu, reinforcing the alien nature of the disease and the danger of foreign entanglements. Some one-quarter of all Americans came down with the flu, and 675,000 died in less than one year, including Randolph Bourne, who passed away in December 1918. To many Americans, war and pestilence seemed their grim reward for becoming a world power.
During 1919, Americans were on edge. Some 4 million workers across the country went out on nearly 2,600 strikes. Steelworkers, miners, even Boston policemen walked out on their jobs during that tumultuous year. The American Communist Party was formed that year. And it was not just the United States that was in turmoil: following the lead of the Russian Bolsheviks, Communist uprisings occurred in Bavaria and Hungary.
The Great War turned the world upside down and dashed the optimism of a generation. Modern civilizations tore each other up on the battlefield as new technologies like airplanes, machine guns, and poison gas made the traditional destruction of war that much worse. The number of military dead was staggering: around 2 million Germans and Russians each, and around 1 million English, Austrians, and French each, not to mention the wounded, maimed, or shell-shocked. In a little over one year of war, America lost more than 115,000 men, with more than 200,000 wounded.
When the war ended, people on both sides of the Atlantic began to ask why and received few answers. The victorious Allies carved up the map and took their war booty, while Woodrow Wilson’s romantic vision of a League of Nations that would end war forever would have to function without the participation of the United States, when the Senate failed to ratify the