ABSTRACT
In the decade following the November 1918 armistice, sharp changes in eco nomic conditions, prevailing political attitudes, and government policies would hamper the growth of unions, steer popular tastes away from direct examination of labor issues, and seriously weaken the political power base of American radicalism. Fear-driven reactions to the Russian Bolshevik Revolu tion produced a xenophobic national program that checked immigration1 and equated labor activism with violent aggression by foreign elements. A period of corporate prosperity encouraged the proliferation of bourgeois or “middle class”2 values in American culture, further marginalizing the con cerns of the working class and exposing the error of prewar predictions of immanent socialist revolution. Continuing a process that had begun with the onset of the European conflict, the optimism of the prewar generation of radicals gradually collapsed, affecting every facet of revolutionary political activity and injecting a sense of futility into the American socialist and com munist movements. By the mid-1920s, the influence of the IWW on Ameri can soil had been all but eradicated, the communist party had been driven underground, scores of leading anarchists had been deported, and union membership had shrunk by more than 20 percent from its wartime peak of almost 5 million. While later historians would challenge Walter Rideouts assertion that in the mid-twenties “there remained, to be sure, little that could still be considered a radical movement”3 (108), it is undeniable that the postwar decade had debilitating effects on the American left.
