"**I hope to get to work on this now, but slowly. Thanks for your notes. Timeline? I don't think it needs to be much longer than the listing Red Summer chronology, but we'll see.  

 **Your comment about Red Summer of 1919 suggests I need to make something clear. The Red Scare does not mean ""reds did something that scared people."" It's more like this: something happens and the (over)reaction is to yell ""Reds! Revolution!"" even when that hardly makes sense. For example, a perfectly ordinary strike in the steel industry is met with phony charges that it's financed by Moscow. Some anarchists can't even get their mail bombs delivered to their targets, but it's time for panic. In the case of the race riots, the main explanation for the violence, despite all evidence to the contrary, was that Reds were spreading propaganda in the black community. So the Red Scare is mostly about overheated rhetoric and exaggerated response to events. As it says in the Red Summer of 1919 entry: ""In mid-summer, in the middle of the Chicago riots, a ""federal official"" told the New York Times that the violence resulted from 'an agitation, which involves the I.W.W., Bolshevism and the worst features of other extreme radical movements.'""  

 And it all dies down when the reverse occurs on May Day 1920. The Attorney General predicts an attempted revolution on that day and nothing happens. He looks pretty ridiculous for crying Wolf! and the panic starts to wind down from there.  

    

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