Changes

The unrest did not last. May Day 1920 passed without incident. With his credibility damaged, Palmer saw his presidential aspirations erode. [[Warren G. Harding]], running for President against Democrat James Cox, said that “too much has been said about Bolshevism in America.” <ref>Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht, ''America’s Reign of Terror: World War I, the Red Scare, and the Palmer Raids'' (New York: Random House, 1971), 108.</ref> The [[Wilson administration]], leaderless following Wilson's stroke on October 2, 1919, had become undisciplined and erratic. Such intervals would recur, with both parties involved, but now a sense of civic order returned. Theodore Draper observed,

The unrest did not last. May Day 1920 passed without incident. With his credibility damaged, Palmer saw his presidential aspirations erode. [[Warren G. Harding]], running for President against Democrat James Cox, said that “too much has been said about Bolshevism in America.” <ref>Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht, ''America’s Reign of Terror: World War I, the Red Scare, and the Palmer Raids'' (New York: Random House, 1971), 108.</ref> The [[Wilson administration]], leaderless following Wilson's stroke on October 2, 1919, had become undisciplined and erratic. Such intervals would recur, with both parties involved, but now a sense of civic order returned. Theodore Draper observed,

{{Cquote|Ironically, the Palmer raids came as a blessing in disguise to the foreign-language federations. More than ever they were able to imagine themselves Russian Bolsheviks in America. Had not the Russian Revolution been forced to work illegally almost to the very eve of the seizure of power? Was there any fundamental difference between Palmer’s prisons and the Czar’s dungeons, the Bureau of Immigration’s deportations and the [[Ochrana]]’s exiledom in Siberia? If the Russian road to the revolution was right, then the postwar repression in the United States merely offered additional proof that the American revolution was really approaching. The underground character of the movement became the supreme test of its revolutionary integrity. A truly revolutionary organization by definition had to suffer repression, as in Czarist Russia. The Russia hypnosis made a necessity into a virtue.<ref>Theodore Draper, The Roots of American Communism (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, Inc. 1957), 67.</ref>}}

{{Cquote|Ironically, the Palmer raids came as a blessing in disguise to the foreign-language federations. More than ever they were able to imagine themselves Russian Bolsheviks in America. Had not the Russian Revolution been forced to work illegally almost to the very eve of the seizure of power? Was there any fundamental difference between Palmer’s prisons and the Czar’s dungeons, the Bureau of Immigration’s deportations and the [[Ochrana]]’s exiledom in Siberia?<ref>The Ochrana were the Czarist secret police, the forerunner of the Soviet ''Cheka'' and [[KGB]]. Many Ochrana officers in fact survived and held their positions in the new Soviet police state.</ref>  If the Russian road to the revolution was right, then the postwar repression in the United States merely offered additional proof that the American revolution was really approaching. The underground character of the movement became the supreme test of its revolutionary integrity. A truly revolutionary organization by definition had to suffer repression, as in Czarist Russia. The Russia hypnosis made a necessity into a virtue.<ref>Theodore Draper, The Roots of American Communism (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, Inc. 1957), 67.</ref>}}

And now the new rulers of Russia turned their acolytes into agents. Klehr, Haynes, and Firsov write:

And now the new rulers of Russia turned their acolytes into agents. Klehr, Haynes, and Firsov write: