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[Teach]

“Make America safe for Americans. Why? Because there’s a bloody revolution still raging in Russia. And a panicky fear of alien doctrines spreads throughout the land. All aliens are suspect – innocent and guilty alike. Raids, arrests, riots. Civil liberties – so’s your old man. The republic is in danger; many seem to think. What to do? S.O.S. Ship or shoot! Some are shot and many are shipped. 2017, no. The following dialogue was taken from a documentary video (I showed it years ago as part of 16mm film). The program was called”: “The Jazz Age,” the 1920s. The program was produced in 1956. Fred Allen served as the narrator.

Some sixty years since that program was produced, its message and its dialogue, the fear of aliens – xenophobia – still rings true.

Almost one hundred years ago, we experienced in this country what were called “The Palmer Raids”. The “Palmer Raids” were a series of raids conducted by the United States Department of Justice to capture, arrest and deport suspected radical leftists, especially anarchists, from the United States.

The Palmer Raids were caused by the “Red Scare”. “The Red Scare” was the anti-radical and anti-immigrant hysteria that anarchists, socialists and communists were believed to be conspiring to start a workers revolution in America.

Attorney General Mitchell Palmer, assisted by J. Edgar Hoover, then a young lawyer, conducted a series of raids against groups suspected of communist sympathies. Groups such as The Union of Russian Workers and International Workers of the World (IWW) “Wobblies” were targeted.

Well, although many of the circumstances are different, the xenophobic attitudes of that era are not far removed from the current anti-immigrant attitudes of some members of American society

As they say, “What Goes Around, Comes Around.”