ABSTRACT
The broad American response to the first Russian Revolution in March was enthusiastic, with President Wilson speaking of "the wonderful and heartening things that have been happening within the last few weeks in Russia," a country that "was known by those who knew it best to have been always in fact democratic at heart." The Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia—unsettling enough to most Americans—was followed by copycat efforts in Germany, Hungary, Austria, Bulgaria and Finland in 1919. These events abroad were the critical background to the development in the United States of the wave of government and vigilante repression that would become known as the "Big Red Scare." However, although the red scare was cast in political terms, its true origins were economic. For the two years prior to US entry into the First World War, the national economy had been booming due largely to increased sales of American goods to the European belligerents.
