How did the people of America react to the prospects of a Bolshevik-style revolution on our soil?
In United States, well, there had been a socialist movement led by Eugene Debs, who by 1917 was in jail. He’d been imprisoned by Woodrow Wilson for making an antiwar speech and this movement which had at one point got him more than a million and a half votes in a presidential socialist campaign – it was not very many, but it wasn’t bad for the time. There wasn’t universal franchise quite then, either. His votes were very heavily concentrated among largely Jewish immigrants from the Russian empire, who brought a lot of the socialist ideology with them and were based very heavily in New York, Chicago, and sort of prairie-populist, agrarian-socialist types in the countryside. Because of the overwhelmingly foreign-born nature of the left, and the Marxist worker’s movement, it was very easy for the American establishment to represent the Bolshevik challenge as something imported and un-American and to deal with it, to a very good extent, by rounding up and deporting a lot of these character
