Thorstein Veblen:
"The Red Terror. At Last It Has Come to America"
THE OLD ORDER AND THE NEW

The Dial. A Fortnightly (New York)
Vol. LXVII (July 12 to November 29, 1919)

No. 798, September, 6, 1919, pp. 205-206.
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[205]
AT LAST THE RED TERROR HAS COME TO AMERICA.

It is running wild among the guardians of Business as Usual; official, semi-
official, and quasi-official; courts, camps, and churches; legislative, 
judiciary, and executive. It is true, the common run of American humanity 
continue to be singularly immune and apathetic, but the Terror is already 
consuming the tissues of many substantial citizens in a shockingly public 
manner. The Guardians of the Vested Interests are panic-stricken, all and 
several, certified and subsidiary and surreptitious. The commercialized 
newspapers all see Red. So do the official and quasi-official conspiracies, such 
as the Lusk Commission, the Union League Club, the Security League, and the 
Civic Federation, as well as the Publicity Police, the Workday Politicians, the 
Clerics of the Philistine Confession, and the Wild Asses of the Devil generally.

Driven by their own Red fancy, these many Guardians have been banding together 
to molest such of their neighbors as do not see Red; and with the aid or 
connivance of panic-stricken officials, the conspirators have been going in for 
inquisitorial raids, to find evidence of undue sanity - among the sober 
population. All persons who refuse to be stampeded by the Red alarm are open to 
suspicion unless they are visibly identified with the Vested Interests and any 
person who falls under the suspicion of the official and quasi-official 
alarmists is, in effect, assumed to be guilty of sedition. Acute paranoia 
persecutoria is coming to be rated the chief of the civic virtues.

Already the confederated paranoiacs have assembled much curious evidence of 
undue sanity among the vulgar. An extract from an exhibit of such evidence a 
letter presumed to show seditiously excessive sanity is here reproduced:

... the thing that seems to excite the Chester authorities mainly is that the 
second speaker at the meeting ... advocated the pardon of all political 
prisoners, including Eugene Debs. The District Attorney said that Mr. Debs was a 
"stinking, flea-bitten, rotten skunk." ... I asked him what the possible charge 
[against the defendants] could be and he said that they would try to hold them 
[64 men] for treason against the state. They seem to have a law in Philadelphia 
establishing a state treason against the commonwealth of Pennsylvania. He looked 
up the law in my presence and read it and then agreed with me that the law would 
not apply. Then he said that the next thing they could hold them for would be 
the section of inciting to riot. But it developed that that constituted only 
misdemeanor and that the utmost could be a fine not exceeding $100. I asked him 
whether he thought $5,000 was the right sort of bail. He said that the g---- d--
-- Poles and Russians had money to burn.  ... Before I left Chester he told me 
that he thought that ... any lawyer who would act for these men would be a 
disgrace in the community. ... I told him that the information [in regard to the 
legal fee] had been sent in by a Quaker and then I struck the wrong key. He then 
called the Quakers all kinds of names, the main adjective being "stinking."

Another letter reporting the hearings of this case says:

The attorney from Philadelphia who acted as local counsel challenged the Judge 
to point to one decision in the courts of Pennsylvania under which the 
defendants could be held, whereupon the Judge sarcastically remarked, "I am much 
afraid that your industry has not been rewarded. If you will only look into a 
case decided in the year 1787, about the time when the Constitution was to be 
adopted, you will find a precedent under which I can hold these defendants." 
This case, it developed, was the famous liberty pole case. The Judge said that 
at the time of the adoption of the Constitution "there were some misguided 
individuals who under the leadership of Thomas Jefferson protested against the 
Constitution because it gave the federal government too much power." But the 
Judge mentioned that the fact that the Constitution was afterwards adopted 
showed that these individuals were wrong and mistaken. During the protest raised 
by "these so-called "misled individuals" they erected what was known then as 
liberty poles ... A man was arrested for being present at the erection of such a 
liberty pole, although he did not take part in it, and he was convicted by the 
local court in Philadelphia; the Judge finished, "and that is the law [206] in 
this state and it is a good law and I am going to hold these defendants for 
unlawful assembly under five thousand dollars bail for action of grand jury."

It is alleged by the terrorized Guardians that the letters which are here quoted 
go to show that certain persons have interested themselves in procuring counsel 
for certain impecunious workmen of foreign extraction who were to have been 
convicted out of hand on a footless charge of rioting; all of which is taken as 
presumptive evidence of a seditious degree of sobriety. These particular 
exhibits may perhaps lay bare the Red state of mind of the Guardians in a more 
picturesque fashion than the common run of these uncanny keepsakes of the 
demented which they have been assembling in the course of these raids; but 
incredibly foolish as this particular episode is, it is after all no more than a 
fair indication of the pitch to which official hysteria has already risen. The 
volume of evidence of this character assembled by the Red alarmists is already 
fantastically large; and they are busily accumulating more of the same kind, by 
fair means and foul.
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