“We Were in Full Communism”: Solidarity and Resistance Among Incarcerated Radicals During the First Red Scare, 1917–24

During the First Red Scare, authorities incarcerated thousands of leftist labor organizers and political radicals in America’s jails, prisons, immigration detention centers, and military internment camps. This presentation builds upon Christina Heatherton’s insight that these sites of incarceration inadvertently became state-created “convergence spaces” that “threw together prisoners of different races, ethnicities, nationalities, political orientations, and ideologies.” Behind bars and barbed wire, Socialists, anarchists, Communists, and members of the anti-capitalist Industrial Workers of the World from a dizzying array of ethnic and national backgrounds worked together to resist their conditions of confinement and even, on occasion, to escape it. The practices of solidarity and mutual aid that they adapted and invented included presenting prison classes and performances, producing underground newspapers, smuggling correspondence and literature, conducting hunger strikes, and directly confronting armed guards or organizing escape attempts. Immigrant radicals deported at the height of the Red Scare even continued these practices aboard the ships that carried them across the Atlantic—with surprising success. Together, these practices sustained radical movements and their adherents through the fiercest period of political repression in American history.