Bolshevik bogies: red scares in Britain, 1919-24

Abstract

ABSTRACT The establishment of an anti-socialist hegemony has been widely accepted as the pivot of the Conservative Party’s electoral dominance in the interwar period. Anti-communism as a component of anti-socialist discourse, though commonly alluded to, has not received systematic attention, and is known above all for its appearance during the 1924 election campaign by way of the Zinoviev letter. This article offers the first comprehensive account of British political anti-communism in the early 1920s and reinterprets its significance and reach by demonstrating the vast extent to which it saturated Conservative propaganda between 1919 and 1924, as well as the range of social groups it sought to appeal to by these methods. It explores the origins and development of political anti-communism from the ‘first red scare’ in 1919-21 to the infamous 1924 campaign, punctuated by a series of ‘little red scares’ by which the fear of communism was perpetuated among key demographics. The 1924 election, rather than being seen chiefly as a triumph of ‘progressive’ Baldwinite Conservatism, must be understood in this context of a developed and pervasive anti-communist discourse that could be effectively deployed to engender a red scare under certain conditions, which the first Labour government was not the first to provide.