Red Scare

<div> <div> <p><i>Red Scare</i> was first published in 1955. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.</p> <p>Few periods in American history have been so dramatic so fraught with mystery or so bristling with fear and hysteria as were the days of the great Red Scare that followed World War I. For sheer excitement it would be difficult to find a more absorbing tale than the one told here. The famous Palmer raids of that era are still remembered as one of the most fantastic miscarriages of justice ever perpetrated upon the nation. The violent labor strife still makes those who lived through it shudder as they recall the Seattle general strike and Boston police strike the great coal and steel strikes and the bomb plots shootings and riots that accompanied these conflicts. But exciting as the story may be it has far greater significance than merely that of a lively tale. For just as American was swept by a wave of unreasoning fear and was swayed by sensational propaganda in those days so are we being tormented by similar tensions in the present climate of the cold war.</p> <p>The objective analysis of the great Red Scare which Mr. Murray provides should go a long way toward helping us to avert some of the tragic consequences that the nation suffered a generation ago before hysteria and fear had finally run their course. The author traces the roots of the phenomenon relates the outstanding events of the Scare and evaluates the significant effects of the hysteria upon subsequent American life.</p> </div> </div>