ABSTRACT
The most fearful textile confrontation erupted in Gastonia, North Carolina, and would display some of the recurring features of local red scares, including the targeting of radical 'outsiders' and the mobilization of a 'citizens committee'. Beginning in April 1929 business, civic, and law enforcement figures deployed the rhetoric of anti-Communism against a strike at the Loray Mill. In the generation after 1921 there was little in the way of federal governmental repression of the Communist movement, at least compared to the attempts made during the Red Scare itself and in the later McCarthy era. A number of New England states mobilized the National Guard. In Georgia Governor Eugene Talmadge declared martial law and interned strikers in a World War I prison camp. A Justice Department report in May 1941 observed that while many repressive bills had been introduced into the state legislatures in 1940, few had made it into law.
