First Red Scare

The First Red Scare appears in the novel as a historical precedent, named in the account of Burton K. Wheeler’s early political career. Its importance lies less in a detailed recounting of the period than in the warning carried by its reference: civil liberties can become vulnerable amid political fear, a danger the novel revisits through its imagined American crisis of 1942.

Historical Reference

Wheeler’s biography places his opposition to human-rights violations during the postwar Red Scare before his failed 1920 campaign for governor of Montana. He was elected to the United States Senate in 1922, with strong support from farmers and labor. The sequence sets an earlier record of political conflict beside the career of a figure who later becomes central to the novel’s crisis, without treating the two periods as identical.

A Precedent for Political Conflict

The later narrative shows opposition moving beyond ordinary political channels. After Walter Winchell begins his campaign, crowds gather to hear him denounce the threat of fascism; in Boston, a hostile gathering escalates into a mob attack. In Newark, concern about further violence prompts civic leaders to organize with city and state authorities, while Longy Zwillman separately arranges a volunteer corps, the Provisional Jewish Police. These episodes trace how public mobilization and community self-protection develop as confidence in official protection weakens.

Emergency Rule and Civil Liberties

The novel’s 1942 crisis proceeds further: after Charles A. Lindbergh disappears, Burton K. Wheeler announces martial law, and the government cites an alleged conspiracy to justify arrests. The claims surrounding the crisis include a fabricated account that the kidnapped Lindbergh child was held in Poland and a further accusation that Jewish people were responsible for the riots. These allegations recast victims as conspirators while giving force to an expanding crackdown.

Historical Resonance

The First Red Scare reference and the later events occupy distinct moments in the book’s history. The earlier period is compressed into Wheeler’s opposition to abuses; the imagined 1942 crisis is shown through campaigns, street violence, emergency measures, and resistance to them. Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s radio address calls for detainees’ rights to be restored and for the government to return to constitutional procedures. In this structure, the brief reference to the past sharpens the stakes of the later narrative: the defense of civil liberties is a recurring political question, not a guarantee secured once and for all.