The Growth of American Power Through Cold and Hot Wars 329accompany the caravans of soldiers and sailors in police cars, watch the beat-
ings and jail the victims.”^ Finally, several days after the rampages began, the
Navy sent military police into East Los Angeles to stop the attacks, and the
city was declared off-limits to all servicemen. No sailors or soldiers were
arrested or punished after the assaults ended.
Political repression of so-called Radicals–Socialists, Communists, syndical-
ists, anarchists, and others whose political ideology strayed beyond the limits
of liberalism–which was common from the later 19th Century, grew. From
the anarchists hanged after Haymarket in the 1880s to the Reds rounded up
in the Palmer Raids after World War I to the state executions of Sacco and
Vanzetti in the 1920s, the American state had always acted swiftly and deci-
sively to eradicate “alien” and “subversive” ideologies. Such policies and
programs would intensify during World War II and attain a particular viru-
lence in the Cold War. The government attacks on labor, Blacks, Japanese-
Americans and “Zoot Suiters” were coordinated and effective during the war,
but they were still secondary to the systematic repression of “Reds” in the
World War II and then Cold War years. In the aftermath of the second world
war, an anti-communist obsession swept across the United States, limiting
American political culture and causing a marked decline in freedoms and lib-
erties. By simply calling someone a “radical” or, worse, a “Communist,” the
state could discredit or even imprison its political foes. Moreover, as a result
of the nature of such “red-baiting,” the government assumed vast new powers
to intervene in the daily lives of its citizens. It was, and remains, one of the
darkest periods in our national life.
Ironically, the rise in state repression and decline in civil liberties was
originally directed to some degree at the political right-wing. In the late
1930s, there were many groups in the United States considered pro-Nazi, such
as the German-American Bund, which claimed as many as 25,000 members
by 1938 [the U.S. Communist Party, by comparison, claimed about 100,000
members]. As a result, many liberals and others on the left supported the
1938 creation in the House of Representatives of a committee to investigate
“the extent, character and objects of un-American propaganda activities in the
U.S.” This investigative body, chaired by Texas representative Martin Dies and
known as the Dies Committee throughout the war [and later infamously
known as the House Committee on Un-American Activities, or HUAC], did
investigate pro-fascist groups like the Bund but focused its efforts on investi-