ABSTRACT
Four months after the American Communist movement was organized, it was driven underground. In so short a period, not much could be expected from the two young parties. But their failure was due to sterility of policy as well as to shortage of time, and of the two the former was far more costly in the long run. The strike wave was one of the greatest in the history of American trade unionism. The steel strike alone involved 365,000 workers, and it broke out the very month the Communist parties were formed. Properly elected members of the New York State Assembly were expelled because they had run on the Socialist party ticket. For such excesses, during and after World War I, Frederick Lewis Allen charged: "It was an era of lawless and disorderly defense of law and order, of unconstitutional defense of the Constitution, of suspicion and civil conflict—in a very literal sense, a reign of terror."
