Fred Siegel’s The Revolt Against the Masses
“The Red Scare intensified in June of 1919 when Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer was nearly killed by a terrorist bomb planted in his Georgetown home. Bombs went off in seven other cities that same night. The bombers were probably, notes historian Beverly Gage, from the Galleanisti group of Italian anarchists that included the as yet unknown Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. But the attacks were attributed to their conceptual cousins, the Russian Bolsheviki. The attacks reignited the intense nationalism of the war years and stoked a renewed hysteria. Palmer, who subsequently claimed to have a list of 60,000 subversives, engaged in a series of warrantless raids aimed at capturing the mostly immigrant “red radicals,” some of whom were jailed of shipped back to Russia. In the process, Palmer, with no reproach from Wilson, widely trampled on civil liberties and harassed the innocent as well as the likely guilty.” ─ The Revolt Against the Masses, copyright © 2013 by Fred Siegel, Encounter Books, Page 36.
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“H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw were among the liberal icons who petitioned for Sacco and Vanzetti’s release. One of the rare liberal dissenters from what soon became quasi-religious dogma was the revered Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who had been saved by postal inspectors from a bomb mailed to him [by the accused]. When liberals implored him to throw his judicial weight into halting the impending executions, Holmes commented tartly: “My prejudices are against the convictions … they are stronger still against the run of shriekers. The lovers of justice have emphasized their love by blowing up a building or two.” As for the intellectuals, their case “wasn’t a matter of reason but simply shrieking because the world is not the world they want ─ a trouble most of us feel in some way. The intellectuals, he concluded, “seem to have gotten hysterical and to have lost their sense of proportion.” ─ The Revolt Against the Masses, copyright © 2013 by Fred Siegel, Encounter Books, Page 60.
