Online censorship in the UK has led to far more arrests than the first Red Scare

Cancel Culture is happening on a historic scale, Part 4

AUTHOR’S NOTE: In our new book, “The Canceling of the American Mind,” my co-author Rikki Schlott and I make the argument that Cancel Culture is occurring on the scale of many of the worst “mass censorship” events in U.S. history. This series expands on that research from the Sedition Act of 1798 to 9/11.

Part 1 of this exploration of Cancel Culture used the response to speech after 9/11 to predict the campus climate after the October 7 attacks on Israel. Part 2 explored the Sedition Act of 1798 to illustrate that the number of victims isn’t enough to gauge the severity of a censorship crisis. Part 3 delved into the American Victorian era and why it’s the best analogue to modern Cancel Culture.

Today, we’ll examine the first Red Scare and the Palmer Raids which took place following World War I. Then, we’ll hop across the pond to the United Kingdom to compare the level of arrests in the U.K. for offensive speech on the internet to the arrests during first Red Scare (Spoiler: the numbers are worse than the two years of the first Red Scare).

Wartime censorship and the global context for the first Red Scare

If you’re wondering why we haven’t discussed censorship during the time of the Civil War, World War I, or World War II, it’s because there is no real comparison. As bad as things have been for free speech since 2014, no one is arguing that America has been in a situation as big or as bad as it was during those major wars. Conflicts of that scale are different beasts: The First Amendment was not yet strongly interpreted during any of America’s largest wars, and comparing wartime censorship to peacetime censorship in the era of a strong First Amendment simply wouldn’t make any sense.

Besides, there are plenty of egregiously censorial periods in American history that didn’t have a major war as an excuse.

It is difficult to conceive of the kind of fear that would lead us down this path without understanding the context of Russia in the early 20th century. The following extraordinarily condensed summary might provide the superficial level of understanding that most Americans would have had back then.

A number of factors led to the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II in March 1917, among them discontent among labor unions. A power struggle within the provisional government led to the far-left Bolshevik party (they’d rebrand as Communists in 1925) gaining control that November. A year later, the Red Terror began, where through a system of mass executions and mass deportations to regularly-liquidated gulags, anyone who expressed any opposition to Bolshevik rule was suppressed. 

If your reaction to this is, “Well, revolutions are often bloody,” you’re not entirely understanding what happened. The Red Terror was orchestrated by the “Cheka,” the predecessor to the KGB: It was bloody because it was meant to be bloody. The Cheka’s deputy chief, Martin Lastis, explained that determinations of guilt or innocence were unimportant:  “We are not fighting against single individuals… we are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class.” (At least he lived under his own rules. Lastis would later be arrested and executed as a counter-revolutionary: After Stalin’s death, he was “politically rehabilitated.” Say what you want about Lastis, but that’s commitment to the bit.)

Estimates suggest the early months of the Red Terror alone killed tens of thousands of people. Some estimates put the overall death toll of the Terror as high as 200,000, with others speculating it could be as high as 1.3 million. The Russian Civil War overall, which ended in 1923, is estimated to have claimed as many as 10 million lives.

With the memory of the Red Terror, some Americans began to fear the domestic threat of anarchy and communism. When World War I ended in 1918, those concerns exploded into a national panic — what is referred to now as the first Red Scare — which constitutes perhaps the biggest mass censorship incident in U.S. history.

The First Red Scare and the Palmer Raids, 1919-1920

Before we go further, it’s important to check our hindsight bias here. It’s easy to look back from our current position and say, “Those people were being silly and hysterical, but our fears today are actually serious and totally justify the censorship measures we’re considering.” But think about what it must have been like to have lived through the first World War — which at the time was also called “The Great War” because it was so bloody, devastating, and unprecedented. If you had lived through that and its fallout, you’d likely err on the side of panic too. 

Understanding history is about putting yourself into the shoes of people back then, not just playing Monday morning quarterback from the comfort of modernity. And by all accounts, the climate after World War I ended was very tense. Labor movements were rising everywhere — strikes in Spain, the Canadian Labo(u)r Revolt, the Tragic Week in Argentina, the Brazil Strike Movement, and more. The struggle between capitalism and communism was so intense that, for some people, a “third way” — fascism — seemed attractive. Just after the fall of the Russian empire, the Great War would end the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires, leaving new states without infrastructure or markets to support themselves.

The trouble in the U.S. began in January 1919, when more than 35,000 Seattle shipyard workers went on strike and an additional 25,000 Seattle workers joined in solidarity. Two army battalions set up camp just outside the city, and the mayor threatened martial law. “Any man who attempts to take over control of municipal government functions here will be shot on sight,” he declared.

Over the course of that year, there were 3,600 labor strikes involving a reported four million workers, including over 350,000 steel workers and 400,000 miners — a scale that had never previously been seen in the United States (for more on this, check out Christopher M. Finan’s book, “From the Palmer Raids to the Patriot Act: A History of the Fight for Free Speech in America”).

Fears only escalated from here. Labor strikes spread to cities across the nation, deep into the spring. Riots broke out during Bolshevist protests in New York, Boston, and Cleveland (another great book on this topic is “Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime: From the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism” by Geoffrey R. Stone). Through all of this, fear of Bolshevism was reaching a fever pitch. 

And then came the bombs.

Thirty-six mail bombs were delivered on May Day to the homes of American leaders, including Supreme Court justices, important businessmen, cabinet members, and politicians. Some of the bombs injured and even killed several people. Then, eight additional, larger bombings occurred in cities across the country. 

Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, whose D.C. home was destroyed by one of the bombs, vowed revenge. With the help of up-and-coming FBI agent J. Edgar Hoover, Palmer orchestrated a series of raids against suspected Bolshevik sympathizers — launching what would later be called the Palmer Raids, wherein the government arrested 4,000 to 5,000 suspected political radicals and deported 800 to 900.  In many cases, suspects were arrested for speech or association with communist or anarchist groups that would be fully protected under the First Amendment today, but it would not be until 1925, in Gitlow v. New York, that the First Amendment began having any teeth at all and decades before it would be strongly interpreted to protect membership in subversive organizations. 

We simply don’t realize how good we truly have it these days, but we don’t need to go back in time for an example. All it takes is a quick hop across the pond.

The threat of arrest in the United Kingdom today

Thanks to our First Amendment, American victims of Cancel Culture are shielded from being arrested for their speech — but that’s not the case everywhere. In Britain, the story is quite different. During the age of Cancel Culture there, the number of speech-related arrests in Britain have reached astounding numbers.

In 2003, the United Kingdom passed the Communications Act, Section 127 of which targets speech that “cause[s] annoyance, inconvenience, or needless anxiety to another” online, as well as posts that are “grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene, or menacing manner.”

In practice, that provision has resulted in a startling number of arrests: 6,150 from just 2015 and 2016. That far outstrips the number of arrests in the first Red Scare — in a country that has roughly half as many people as the United States did in 1920. This works out to roughly nine people a day arrested “for posting allegedly offensive messages online.”

Worse yet, British police track “non-crime hate incidents.” In essence, this means anyone who takes offense to someone’s speech about a protected characteristic can report the speaker to the police. Horrifyingly, guidance for police states that “the victim does not have to justify or provide evidence of their belief, and police officers and staff should not directly challenge this perception.”

From 2014 to 2019, almost 120,000 such incidents were cataloged across the U.K.

We should all be hugely grateful that our First Amendment protects us from that fate here — but let’s not forget that many people argue America should follow the lead of Europe in terms of speech codes. This must not happen, and the fallout in Britain is a perfect cautionary tale as to why.

Next up will likely be the final installment in this series: a more in-depth look at the Second Red Scare (a.k.a. McCarthyism) both on and off campus, and how it compares to Cancel Culture today.

SHOT FOR THE ROAD

FIRE Senior Fellow Jacob Mchangama explains how free speech was absolutely vital for northern abolitionists, and how southern states responded, predictably, with censorship: