Fear of “Bolshevism,” 1919
This cartoon from the Post Dispatch in Cleveland, Ohio, reflects nationwide panic over the general strike by 110 unions that paralyzed Seattle in February 1919. Opponents of radical labor unrest had a deeper fear: the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, resulting in creation of the USSR, had brought into existence the world’s first enduring communist state. By crushing unions in Seattle with a club of “Law and Order,” this image suggests that Uncle Sam could beat back the global communist threat. This aspect of the 1919 Red Scare prefigured, at an early date, the anxieties of the Cold War era. Ohio Historical Society.