"Innumerable patriotic societies had sprung up, each with its executive secretary, and executive secretaries must live, and therefore must conjure up new and ever greater menaces. Innumerable other gentleman now discovered that they could defeat whatever they wanted to defeat my tarring it conspicuously with the Bolshevist brush. Big-navy men, believers in compulsory military service, drys, anti-cigarette campaigners, anti-evolution Fundamentalists, defenders of the moral order, book sensors, Jew-haters, Negro-haters, landlords, manufacturers, utility executives, upholders of every sort of cause, good, bad, and indifferent, all wrapped themselves in Old Glory and the mantle of the Founding Fathers and allied their opponents with Lenin…A cloud of suspicion hung in the air, and intolerance became an American virtue."
Regarding the fear of Communism in America following the 1917 Russian Revolution
From Frederick Lewis Allen’s Only Yesterday, published 1931
No comments:
Post a Comment