102 ChaPter 2
country. As with the Bolsheviks and Germany, the question of the League was
mishandled and Versailles in general was mostly a failure, one that would
become more apparent in the next two decades as another world war became
imminent. Wilson himself had already suffered a stroke, and his health would
worsen as the League fight went on. Though he wanted to run again for
president in 1920, the Democrats knew he could not handle the job and so
Wilson retired and died in early 1924, never knowing that, his stubbornness
aside, his ideas at Versailles were probably better than the ultimate outcomes
of the conference.Red Scares and Revolutions
The Great War and Versailles were bad memories in the U.S. already by 1919.
Americans were deeply disillusioned by their involvement in a huge foreign
war and the subsequent fight over the League of Nations, all of which seemed
to accomplish little. As the famed novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald later wrote,
society woke up to “find all wars fought, all gods dead, all faiths in man
shaken.” Inside the U.S., those responsible for the war went looking for scape-
goats—parties they could blame for the various tragedies of the era—and they
found Reds—traitors, socialists, communists, peace advocates, and others
whose patriotism could be questioned. Wilson’s demand for total loyalty
continued after the war and his Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, went
after Reds and other “troublemakers” with a vengeance. Palmer, hysterically,
alarmed Americans by telling them that radicals would “on a certain day...
rise up and destroy the government in one fell swoop.”
With Palmer’s preposterous warning in mind, in 1919, in Hammond,
Indiana, a man yelled “to hell with the United States” and at the trial for the
alleged shooter, the jury took a total of two minutes to come back with a
“not guilty” verdict. At a “Victory Loan Pageant” in Washington D.C., a
sailor fired three bullets into the back of a man who did not stand up for the
National Anthem and the crowd cheered him. In Connecticut, a salesman
received a six-month jail sentence for calling Vladimir Lenin “one of the
brainiest” world leaders. Such actions, fanaticism really, took place all over
the United States after the Great War. The Bolshevik Revolution had shaken
global politics and political leaders in the U.S. warned that there were citizens
who would try to bring Communism by revolution to America. There were,