An American History

770 ★ CHAPTER 19 Safe for Democracy: The United States and WWI

of 1918, they had won an eight- hour

day. Employers’ anti- union activities

resumed following the armistice that

ended the fighting. “For why this war?”

asked one Polish immigrant steel-

worker at a union meeting. “For why we

buy Liberty bonds? For the mills? No,

for freedom and America— for every-

body. No more [work like a] horse and

wagon. For eight- hour day.”

In response to the strike, steel

magnates launched a concerted

counter attack. Employers appealed

to anti- immigrant sentiment among

native- born workers, many of whom

returned to work, and conducted a pro-

paganda campaign that associated the

strikers with the IWW, communism,

and disloyalty. “Americanism vs. Alien-

ism” was the issue of the strike, declared

the New York Tribune. With middle- class

opinion having turned against the labor

movement and the police in Pittsburgh

assaulting workers on the streets, the

strike collapsed in early 1920.

The Red Scare

Many Progressives hoped to see the wartime apparatus of economic planning

continue after 1918. The Wilson administration, however, quickly disman-

tled the agencies that had established controls over industrial production and

the labor market, although during the 1930s they would serve as models for

some policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Wartime repression of dis-

sent, however, continued. It reached its peak with the Red Scare of 1919–1920,

a short- lived but intense period of political intolerance inspired by the post-

war strike wave and the social tensions and fears generated by the Russian

Revolution.

Convinced that episodes like the steel strike were part of a worldwide

communist conspiracy, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer in Novem-

ber 1919 and January 1920 dispatched federal agents to raid the offices of

radical and labor organizations throughout the country. They carried search

warrants so broad that they reminded those with a sense of history of the

An advertisement placed by a steel company in a
Pittsburgh newspaper announces, in several lan-
guages, that the steel strike of 1919 “has failed.”
The use of the figure of Uncle Sam illustrates
how the companies clothed their anti- union
stance in the language of patriotism.