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The largest and most important revolutionary socialist organization in US history, the Communist Party USA was always a minority influence. It reached considerable size and influence, however, during the Great Depression and World War II years when it followed the more open line associated with the term “Popular Front.” In these years communists were much more flexible in their strategies and relations with other groups, though the party remained a hierarchical vanguard organization. It grew from a largely isolated sect dominated by unskilled and unemployed immigrant men in the 1920s to a socially diverse movement of nearly 100,000 based heavily on American born men and women from the working and professional classes by the late 1930s and during World War II, exerting considerable influence in the labor movement and American cultural life. In these years, the Communist Party helped to build the industrial union movement, advanced the cause of African American civil rights, and laid the foundation for the postwar feminist movement. But the party was always prone to abrupt changes in line and vulnerable to attack as a sinister outside force because of its close adherence to Soviet policies and goals. Several factors contributed to its catastrophic decline in the 1950s: the increasingly antagonistic Cold War struggle between the Soviet Union and the United States; an unprecedented attack from employers and government at various levels—criminal cases and imprisonment, deportation, and blacklisting; and within the party itself, a turn back toward a more dogmatic version of Marxism-Leninism and a heightened atmosphere of factional conflict and purges.

The first Red Scare, which occurred in 1919–1920, emerged out of longer clashes in the United States over the processes of industrialization, immigration, and urbanization as well as escalating conflict over the development of a labor movement challenging elite control of the economy. More immediately, the suppression of dissent during World War I and shock over a revolution in Russia that energized anti-capitalist radicals spurred further confrontations during an ill-planned postwar demobilization of the armed forces and economy. A general strike in Seattle in February 1919 that grew out of wartime grievances among shipbuilders raised the specter of Bolshevik insurrection in the United States. National press attention fanned the flames and continued to do so throughout the year. In fact, 1919 became a record strike year. Massive coal and steel walkouts in the fall shook the industrial economy, while a work stoppage by Boston police became a national sensation and spread fears of a revolutionary breakdown in public order. Ultimately, however, much of the union militancy of the war era was crushed by the end of 1919 and the labor movement entered a period of retrenchment after 1922 that lasted until the 1930s. Fall 1919 witnessed the creation of two competing Communist parties in the United States after months of press focus on bombs, riots, and strikes. Federal anti-radical investigative operations, which had grown enormously during World War I and continued into 1919, peaked in the so-called “Palmer Raids” of November 1919 and January 1920, named for US Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, who authorized them. The excesses of the Department of Justice and the decline of labor militancy caused a shift in press and public attention in 1920, though another Red Scare would escalate after World War II, with important continuities between the two.

The Haymarket Riot and Conspiracy of 1886 is a landmark in American social and political history. On May 4, 1886, during an open-air meeting near Haymarket Square in Chicago, someone threw a dynamite bomb into a squad of police, sparking a riot that resulted in the deaths of seven police officers and at least four rioters. Eight anarchists were brought to trial. Though the bomb-thrower was never apprehended, the eight radical leaders were charged as accessories before the fact for conspiring to murder the police. After the longest criminal trial in Illinois history up to that time, seven men were convicted and condemned to death and one to a long prison term. After all appeals were exhausted, four were executed, one cheated the hangman with a jail cell suicide, and the death sentences of two others were commuted to life imprisonment (all three incarcerated men were later pardoned by Governor John Peter Altgeld in 1892). The Haymarket bombing and trial marked a pivotal moment in the history of American social movements. It sparked the nation’s first red scare whose fury disrupted even moderately leftist movements for a generation. It drove the nation’s labor unions onto a more conservative path than they had been heading before the bombing. The worldwide labor campaign for clemency for the convicted men became the foundation for the institution of International Workers’ Day on May 1, a holiday ironically observed in most countries except for the United States. It also began a tradition within the American left of memorializing the Haymarket defendants as the first martyrs to their cause.

The first Red Scare, after World War I, and the Red Scare that followed World War II, both impacted American women in remarkably similar ways. Many women found their lives hemmed in by antifeminism and the conservative gender ideology that underwrote anticommunist national identity in 1919, and then again in the late 1940s. This cultural nationalism tied traditional gender norms to the defense of American values and ideals, positioning the family as a bulwark against communism while making women’s performance of gender roles symbolic of national health or sickness. Within this gendered nationalism, the first Red Scare offered opportunities for conservative women to join the antiradical cause as protectors of the home. These same antiradicals maligned radical and progressive women for their feminism and their social activism. The second Red Scare played out in similar fashion. Anticommunism provided a safe platform for conservative women to engage in political activism in defense of the family, and in turn, they participated in broader efforts that attacked and weakened civil rights claims and the social justice efforts of women on the left. In each Red Scare the symbols and rhetoric of anticommunism prioritized women’s relationship to the family, positioning them either as bastions of American virtue or as fundamental threats to the social and political order. Gender proved critical to the construction of patriotism and national identity.

The “Great Railroad Strike,” the first and largest nationwide series of labor uprisings in the United States’ history, occurred in July and August 1877. Backdropped by the Long Depression emanating from the Panic of 1873, the collapse of federal Reconstruction in the South, and the cooperation and consolidation among owners of major industries, what became known as the “Great Strike” or the “Great Upheaval” was in fact a sequence of dozens of simultaneous and overlapping strike actions in which some 500,000 workers across various industries walked off their jobs. Many couched their struggle in a language of freedom centered on economic independence, appealing to other workers and the public through the ideology of labor republicanism. In addition to general strikes in some cities, labor actions shut down the nation’s most valuable and important industry, the railroads. At the same time, cross-class urban crowds protested urban and industrial conditions, skirmished with soldiers, and destroyed corporate property. Strike conduct was specific to trunk line and locale. Local political, ethnic, cultural, and kinship networks impacted worker action, as did the newspaper media. Likewise, civic responses to the strikes varied widely and were both shaped by, and helped shape, municipal and regional politics. Community, cross-trade, and cross-class support proved critical in places where the strikes were most far-reaching. The roots of the 1877 strikes lay in cumulative antagonism between railroad workers and owners. In an era when workplace accidents killed tens of thousands of workers and maimed hundreds of thousands more every year, railroad companies refused to equip workplaces with readily available safety devices. Employee grievances also included long and irregular working hours, low pay, and the absence of collective bargaining rights. However, the strikes themselves and the accompanying crowd actions that began on July 16 were instigated by workers on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in response to a series of wage reductions. A wave of stoppages and protests quickly spread outward along the rail lines to Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Chicago, Kansas City, and San Francisco, transforming from a railway strike to a more general labor and urban uprising. The episode reached its most radical zenith in St. Louis, where the shutdown of nearly all of the city’s industry, largely coordinated by the Workingmen’s Party of the United States, made it the first truly general strike in U.S. history. Workers outside the railyards and non-wage workers also participated in urban uprisings and the destruction of railroad property. Cities saw violent clashes between crowds and private police forces and militias, National Guard units, and federal soldiers. In all, over one hundred men, women, and children were killed in the violence. The strikes had profound implications in the areas of labor management, civil–military relations, and popular attitudes regarding capitalism, socialism, and labor organization. The quelling of the strikes led to new approaches in how city and state governments handled civil unrest. In particular, the strikes expanded ownership’s labor management instruments and practices, as governments proved willing to deploy the military against workers during labor disputes on a major scale, expediting the rise of the “robber baron.” These repressive measures were augmented by popular anticommunist hysteria—the first of several major “red scares” throughout U.S. history. Whereas many workers viewed the walkouts as prefiguring a “second American Revolution” or a culminating “emancipation of labor,” building on the implicit promises of the Civil War, business elites and political authorities were frightened as perhaps no time in U.S. history. Economic crisis and scarcity fears enabled politicians and sensationalist newspapermen to create and exploit popular fears of foreign-born radicalism. Apprehensions concerning labor organization, tinged with xenophobia, permeated the upper and middle classes, furthering a sea change in national political priorities. Meanwhile, although organized labor, limited to “skilled” rail workers, had been in decline throughout the 1870s, the Great Strike’s lack of coordination alerted many workers to the need for expanded cooperation in the form of unionization. Occurring at the tail end of Reconstruction, the Great Railroad Strike helped shift the center of political gravity in the nation from questions of political rights in the post-emancipation South to those of capital and labor in the industrial North. Most historians view the Great Strike as a watershed event. As a cultural transit from Reconstruction to the Gilded Age, 1877 forced the “labor question” into the nation’s popular consciousness.

Radicalism in the United States since 1945 has been varied, complex, and often fragmented, making it difficult to analyze as a coherent movement. Communist and pro-Soviet organizations remained active after World War II, but a proliferation of noncommunist groups in the 1940s and 1950s, formed by those disillusioned by Marxist theory or the Soviet Union, began to chart a new course for the American Left. Eschewing much of the previous focus on labor, the proletariat, and Marxist doctrine, American postwar radical organizations realigned around humanist values, moral action, democracy, and even religion, with tenuous connections to Marxism, if any. The parameters of postwar radical moral theory were not always clearly defined, and questions of strategy and vision caused frequent divisions among activists. Nonetheless, claims of individual dignity and freedom continued to frame left radicalism into the late 20th century, emphasizing identity politics, community-building initiatives, and cultural expression in the streets of U.S. cities and the halls of academia. The presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders in 2016 helped revitalize leftist rhetoric on the national stage with its calls for racial and economic equality on moral terms.

Since the 1880s, the US government has deported more than 55 million immigrants, the majority of whom came from Latin-American countries. But the history of immigrant deportations from the United States dates back further, as both colonial and state governments practiced expulsions. Many expulsions were not based on immigrant status, but rather integration or membership in a town or state. Citizens from the United States, for example, found themselves expelled from Massachusetts between the 1840s and 1870s under laws that targeted the migrant poor. In the 1880s, US federal authorities constructed the nation’s first deportation policy, building off earlier state expulsion policies. Early federal deportation policy reflected the racism and nativism of the era. In an expression of anti-Chinese racism, one of the very first deportation provisions passed by the federal government targeted Chinese immigrants. Other early federal deportation provisions included ones aimed at idiots, prostitutes, alcoholics, and public charges. The earliest federal deportation policy was narrow in scope, at least initially, in part because the laws held primarily that only people who entered the country in violation of an immigrant exclusion were deportable, and there were time limits that protected most long-term immigrants from deportation. Beginning in the second decade of the 20th century, lawmakers slowly expanded deportation policy to make actions on US soil deportable offenses or for what has been called “post-entry infractions.” The newly created post-entry infractions included a small number of crimes and provisions that targeted political radicals. After the 1920s, immigration authorities focused their enforcement actions more on Mexican immigrants than on any other group under an expanding deportation policy. They did so on racial grounds, for racist reasons. The numbers of Mexicans deported increased with each passing decade, eventually reaching as many as a million people a year. Almost all immigrant deportations from the United States—more than 48 million—have taken place since 1965. In that year, the federal government entered the business of mass and constant deportations. As deportations multiplied, the proportion of Latin-American countries other than Mexico that received deported people also escalated. Although the majority of deportations in US history have been carried out for entering or remaining in the country in violation of immigration law, major anti-crime campaigns in the last forty years have resulted in a growing number of deportations for post-entry infractions.

The US government’s perception of and response to international terrorism has undergone momentous shifts since first focusing on the issue in the early 20th century. The global rise of anarchist and communist violence provided the impetus for the first major US government programs aimed at combating international terrorism: restrictive immigration policies targeting perceived radicals. By the 1920s, the State Department emerged as the primary government agency crafting US responses to international terrorism, generally combating communist terrorism through diplomacy and information-sharing partnerships with foreign governments. The 1979 Iranian hostage crisis marked the beginning of two key shifts in US antiterrorism policy: a heightened focus on combating Islamist terrorism and a willingness to deploy military force to this end. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, led US officials to conceptualize international terrorism as a high-level national security problem, leading to US military invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, a broader use of special forces, and unprecedented intelligence-gathering operations.

Until World War II, American universities were widely regarded as good but not great centers of research and learning. This changed completely in the press of wartime, when the federal government pumped billions into military research, anchored by the development of the atomic bomb and radar, and into the education of returning veterans under the GI Bill of 1944. The abandonment of decentralized federal–academic relations marked the single most important development in the history of the modern American university. While it is true that the government had helped to coordinate and fund the university system prior to the war—most notably the country’s network of public land-grant colleges and universities—government involvement after the war became much more hands-on, eventually leading to direct financial support to and legislative interventions on behalf of core institutional activities, not only the public land grants but the nation’s mix of private institutions as well. However, the reliance on public subsidies and legislative and judicial interventions of one kind or another ended up being a double-edged sword: state action made possible the expansion in research and in student access that became the hallmarks of the post-1945 American university; but it also created a rising tide of expectations for continued support that has proven challenging in fiscally stringent times and in the face of ongoing political fights over the government’s proper role in supporting the sector.