Red Scare

The Red Scare is the novel’s name for a climate in which labor organizing and radical dissent are treated as threats to be suppressed in the name of patriotism. It becomes visible not only in raids and arrests but in the everyday machinery surrounding them: hired deputies at mill gates, police preventing workers from assembling, federal agents recording speeches, and private citizens left to weigh political commitment against bail, trial, and possible imprisonment. Across strikes, public meetings, and the timber towns of the Pacific Northwest, the narrative shows anti-radical repression as a contest over who may speak, organize, and claim the country’s democratic promises.

From wartime patriotism to anti-radical repression

The political atmosphere hardens after the war. The narrative describes being a red in the summer of 1919 as more dangerous than being a German enemy or a pacifist in the summer of 1917. That comparison makes the shift plain: the enemy now invoked is internal, and the label of radicalism can attach to workers seeking better conditions as readily as to political revolutionaries. The language of preserving American institutions gives this campaign a patriotic cover, even as its methods deny working people the rights those institutions are said to protect.

The lumber industry makes the material conflict behind that rhetoric especially clear. Loggers, shingleweavers, and sawmill workers are presented as the timber empire’s exploited labor force. Organizers from the Industrial Workers of the World call for industrial democracy, real wages instead of company scrip, decent drying space for wet clothes, an eight-hour day, clean bunkhouses, and wholesome food. These are specific demands about pay, time, shelter, and bodily welfare. Yet the timber owners and mill interests characterize their opponents as reds and organize resistance through the Employers Association and the Legion of Loyal Loggers. The novel thus places radicalism’s demonization beside the workers’ concrete grievances, exposing how a political label can displace discussion of working conditions.

The stakes are amplified by the industry’s wartime profits. While the timber interests claim patriotic credit for winning the war, lumber prices have risen from sixteen dollars to 116 dollars per thousand feet, with the government paying as much as 1,200 dollars per thousand for spruce in some cases. The same business forces that benefit from wartime demand present labor organizing as a danger to national institutions. The contrast gives the Red Scare a material dimension: patriotic language shields economic power while workers seeking a share of the industry’s gains are cast as enemies.

Strikes, assembly, and police power

A New Jersey textile strike shows repression operating at the level of an ordinary public meeting. At the mills, policemen stand outside while armed special deputies occupy the space behind the wire-mesh gates. Because the mill-owning town offers no hall for the strikers to use, the meeting is held in a neighboring town. There, mounted police keep people from entering a hall that is said to be full, although Ben Compton observes that it holds no more than forty people. The crowd includes thousands of men, women, and children; the restriction on assembly affects an entire community, not just its speakers.

When Compton addresses the waiting crowd from a lamppost, police drag him away and take him in a patrol wagon. The crowd begins to withdraw under the mounted officers’ pressure. Webb Cruthers then climbs onto a hydrant and protests that the strikers had a permit and had hired the hall. The sequence turns a dispute over access into a demonstration of force: a legal meeting is blocked, its speaker is arrested, and the crowd is pressed away from the building. The episode makes the political process visible in physical terms—organization gathers people, while police power controls where they may gather and whether their voices can carry.

The response continues on the picket line. Before dawn, strikers arrive in inadequate clothing, and police have already begun breaking up the line. Some workers sing Solidarity Forever; others jeer at strikebreakers. When the crowd suddenly scatters, a young woman falls in the street. The accompanying young woman steps toward her, but a policeman kicks the fallen striker in the face. She attacks the officer and is struck from behind, then pushed into a police wagon. The sight of the injured woman remains before her as the wagon fills with other detainees. Here repression is not an abstract policy: it is an assault on a body, followed by the removal of a witness who tries to intervene.

Surveillance, arrest, and the cost of dissent

The Empire Casino meeting in The Bronx places political surveillance inside a gathering intended to express solidarity with Russia’s workers. Federal agents sit in the front row with a stenographer, while police close the doors after the first couple of hundred people have entered and break up the crowd outside. Soldiers and sailors in uniform enter the gallery in small groups. The meeting proceeds under observation, with the state’s presence made visible to speakers and audience alike.

Ben Compton speaks against a war he describes as serving bankers and munitions makers rather than working people. He adapts his remarks because federal sympathizers are listening, but the meeting is still broken up: soldiers and sailors begin driving people from their seats, police converge on the speakers, and Ben is arrested. Men of conscription age must show their registration cards before leaving. Political assembly and military administration meet in the same room; even departure from the meeting is subject to inspection.

Afterward, an official offers to quash the charges if Ben agrees to report for military training. Ben refuses to abandon his opposition to capitalist war, and the offer does not resolve his case. He is released on fifteen thousand dollars bail after Morris Stein promises that he will not agitate until trial. The Steins do not tell Ben who supplied the bail. His freedom therefore remains conditional and opaque: he is outside jail, but cannot resume the political activity that brought him there.

The delay of the appeal extends that pressure into domestic life. Ben studies law again, and Morris Stein brings him lawbooks, arguing that the war will soon end and the Red Scare subside; he promises to take Ben into his law practice if Ben passes the bar and restores his citizenship. This proposed future offers shelter and a profession, but it depends on Ben’s continued absence from the movement. He sleeps poorly, feels physically unwell, and experiences Fanya Stein’s attentions as suffocating. One night he tries to leave, insisting that he must return to the movement even if arrest follows. Repression has not simply removed him from public action; it has made safety itself feel like a form of confinement.

The timber towns and the threat of mob violence

In Centralia, Washington, anti-radical intimidation is organized through local business and veterans’ associations. The Employers Association and the Legion of Loyal Loggers make it worthwhile for groups of ex-soldiers to raid Industrial Workers of the World halls, assault organizers, and burn political literature. On Memorial Day 1918, American Legion members led by people from the Chamber of Commerce wreck the union hall, beat those inside, jail some, and dump others beyond the county line. They burn papers and pamphlets, while the hall’s fittings are auctioned for the Red Cross. The ironic destination of the proceeds sharpens the novel’s contrast between respectable patriotic charity and violence against workers.

The union hires another hall and continues to grow. Before Armistice Day, 1919, rumors spread that it will be raided. The Citizens Protective League’s business leaders select Warren O. Grimm, a former officer in the American force in Siberia, to lead their 100 percent forces against the union. Their intimidation begins with the beating and abandonment of a blind newsdealer. The loggers, meanwhile, consult counsel and decide they may defend themselves and their hall if it is attacked. The buildup shows both the persistence of organizing and the increasingly direct threat surrounding it.

On Armistice Day, the town’s parade passes the union hall without stopping, briefly easing the loggers’ fears. On its return, however, it halts in front of the building; a whistle and a shouted call precede a rush toward the hall. Rifle shots follow, and Grimm and another ex-soldier are hit. The crowd reforms and charges again. Inside, the attackers find unarmed men hiding in an old icebox and a uniformed boy with his arms over his head. The scene’s reversal is stark: a parade marking the end of war becomes the setting for an armed assault on a labor hall. In the Red Scare’s name, the language of national loyalty and the instruments of public celebration converge with organized violence against dissent.