Mr. Chairman, the spectre of Bolshevism is haunting the world. Everybody – statesman, businessman, preacher, plutocrat, newspaper editor – keeps on warning the world that it is about to be destroyed by Bolshevism . . . But the worst of it is that every movement, every new idea, every new suggestion, every new thought that is advanced, is immediately denounced as Bolshevism. It is not necessary to argue anymore with a man who advances a new idea; it is enough to say, “That is Bolshevism”.
Representative Meyer London, Speaking on the floor of the U. S. Congress, February 11, 1919.
Louis Freeland Post
“AT PRESENT there are signs of an overthrow of our Government as a free government,” Louis Freeland Post, the Assistant U. S. Secretary of Labor, wrote in his diary on New Year’s Day, 1920. “It is going on under cover of a vigorous ‘drive’ against ‘anarchists,’ an ‘anarchist’ being almost anybody who objects to government of the people by Tories and for financial interests . . .”
Seventy-one years old, small and sturdily built, with an unruly black beard and shaggy head of hair, Louis F. Post was a man whose boundless energy and inquiring mind belied his age. During his remarkably varied career, he had been in turn a lawyer, journalist, teacher, lecturer, essayist, historian and politician. A nonconformist in politics and former advocate of the single tax and other reformist movements, Post was a fighting liberal, an inveterate champion of progressive causes.
Attorney General Mitchell Palmer
Panic and hysteria had no appeal for the elderly Assistant Secretary of Labor. As far as Post was concerned, Attorney General Palmer’s crusade to rid America of “Reds” was a “despotic and sordid process.”
Suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, Post found himself in a position to do something about it . . .
In March, John W. Abercrombie, the Solicitor for the Department of Labor who had been serving as the Acting Secretary during Secretary L. B. Wilson’s illness, announced he was taking a leave of absence.
Overnight, Post assumed the authority of Secretary of Labor.
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THE postwar wave of reaction in the United States cost the American people many of their most cherished democratic rights. It fomented nationwide intolerance, hysteria, hatred and fear. Thousands of innocent persons had been arrested, jailed and tortured. Scores had died in labor struggles, lynchings and race riots. Never before had terror and repression been so widespread in the nation. What were the causes behind this “foulest page in American history?”
FRAGMENTS: a memoir by Sam Dolgoff. Personal recollections drawn from a lifetime of struggle in the cause of anarchism. Now available as a Kindle (eBook) at €3,21; £2.58; $4.13
SAM DOLGOFF, retired house painter, editor and translator of Bakunin on Anarchy, The Cuban Revolution: A Critical Perspective, The Anarchist Collectives: Workers’ Self-management in the Spanish Revolution (1936-1939), was 83 years old when he completed this Memoir. He started out in life, more than half a century earlier, as a working hobo on the railroads and waterfronts, in lumber camps, canneries, and steel mills of the United States. Caught up early in ideas of radical social change, he moved from reformist socialism to anarchism, publishing his first piece, a criticism of Gandhi, in the anarchist journal Road to Freedom. As a member of the IWW he became a strong propagandist for libertarian labor movements—incidentally teaching himself to read six different languages—lecturing across America in union halls, civic centers and colleges. Under the pen name Sam Weiner, he published innumerable articles in labor and anarchist periodicals, many of which he helped to found and edit.
Fragments: a memoir, Sam Dolgoff, ISBN 978-0-946222-04-9. First published (one edition, now long o/p) 1986 by Refract Publications (formerly Cienfuegos Press Ltd), Cambridge. This Kindle eBook published 2012 by ChristieBooks. (€3,21; £2.58; $4.13) UK ; US/Canada/India and RoW ; España ; France ; Germany ; Italy