The Red Scare, Sacco and Vanzetti, and Prohibition

In 1919 and 1920, the fear of foreign radicals reached a fever pitch in the so-called Red Scare. The Communist International, an organization established in the Soviet Union in 1919 to export revolution to the rest of the world, made Americans begin to see radicals everywhere.

Wilson's attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, established an antiradicalism division in the Department of Justice and assigned a young attorney, J. Edgar Hoover, to oversee its operation. Based on intelligence gathered by Hoover, Palmer in late 1919 and early 1920 raided the headquarters of suspected revolutionaries and subversives, most of whom were not U.S. citizens. The largest of these raids occurred on January 2, 1920, in which Palmer rounded up over six thousand radicals, searching homes and offices without warrants, holding persons without specific charges, and denying them access to legal counsel. Lacking the protection of U.S. citizenship, hundreds were deported from the country.

Other events in the 1920s kept alive the fear of foreign subversion and radicalism. For example, in May 1920 at the height of the Red Scare, Nicola Sacco, a shoemaker, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a fish peddler, were arrested for the robbery and murder of a shoe company paymaster in South Braintree, Massachusetts. Both were Italian aliens; both had evaded the draft and were self-proclaimed anarchists. Although the guilt of Sacco and Vanzetti is still hotly debated, there is little doubt that their fate symbolized the cultural conflict of the era. The unjust conduct of their trial was a source of international controversy for the next seven years, with Harvard Law School Professor Felix Frankfurter, among others, providing legal aid to the convicts. Their appeals exhausted, both men were executed in the electric chair on August 23, 1927.

Like the fate of Sacco and Vanzetti, national prohibition had great "symbolic" importance amid the cultural conflict of the era. ¹⁰ It was an extravagant appeal to legal

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authority and governmental machinery in the interests of cultural hegemony. Behind prohibition were old-line, rural, and Protestant Americans bent on imposing their cultural values on newly arrived immigrants, the working class, Catholics, and urbanites. The Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution went into effect on January 16, 1920. It did not forbid people from drinking, but prohibited the manufacture, transport, and sale of intoxicating liquor. In the intense anti-German hysteria of World War I, the fact that many breweries had German names (e.g., Pabst and Busch) contributed to the amendment drive.

The amendment was a classic example of the interaction of state and federal constitutional development. By 1919 two-thirds of the states had already passed bans on liquor, but the ultimate success of liquor restriction depended on national control through the federal government. Prohibitionists believed that the national government alone could bring order out of cultural diversity. Historically, the police powers had been reserved to the states, but the prohibition amendment intruded so fully on that established pattern that critics unsuccessfully urged the U.S. Supreme Court to declare it unconstitutional as a violation of the Tenth Amendment. Congress in the Progressive era had already asserted the concept of a federal police power, and the Supreme Court in Rhode Island v. Palmer ( 1920) upheld the amendment and the Volstead Act, which implemented the amendment, as fully encompassed by the emerging concept of the federal police powers.

The "noble experiment" of prohibition was at once evidence of the growing role of the federal government and of its limits as an agent of national social control. Prohibition was a costly failure, and the onset of the Depression hastened its repeal. With the economy faltering badly, a revitalized Democratic party, which depended on ethnic voters, embraced repeal. Furthermore, the federal government was simply unable to enforce the measure effectively. Proponents of repeal also argued that liquor production would provide new jobs, and on December 5, 1933 the Twenty-First Amendment, the only amendment ever to be directly ratified by popular conventions (which circumvented state legislatures apportioned in favor of rural areas), supplanted the Eighteenth.

Date: 2015-01-29; view: 733