ABSTRACT
The story of security eclipsing liberty does not end with the statutory provisions of the 1917 and 1918 Espionage and Sedition Acts. For one, there were the many peacetime sedition laws (that failed to pass)—no less than seventy!—introduced in the 1919-1920 congressional session. We will presently learn how state lawmakers and local patriots likewise pressed for post-war anti-subversion statutes, and how self-appointed private monitors continued to contrive possibilities of social revolution. However remote the danger, governmental actions as well as private vigilantism persisted into the post-war years. In short, the wartime syndrome continued, from campaigns for local laws to restrict radicalism, to the efforts of local offshoots of national organizations like the National Security League, the American Defense Society, and the Daughters of the America Revolution (DAR), whose leaders assailed “disloyal” teachers and whose members “took a firm and active stance against all forms of attack ... against our national society.” Veterans organizations, such as the American Legion, founded in 1919, held Americanization campaigns. Detroit’s Legionnaire post, for example, bragged that it had “one thousand Bolshevik Bouncers” at the end of the war, a boast joined by super patriots and red hunters everywhere. Emphatic popular approval greeted these activities, methods, and measures, since public unease persisted long after the 1917 Armistice. It was easily redirected from Germany to the newly formed Soviet Union and then swept from Moscow to Hungary, Austria, Bulgaria, and Italy, nations in which workers seized factories and revolutionary actions had occurred. The growth of radicalism and revolutionary sentiments touching much of the Europe re-energized America’s anti-radical forces—as well as America’s radicals and, to reiterate, Socialist Party’s membership jumped by a third in the year following mid-summer 1918.
