Great Steel Strike Crushed Using Red Scare Propaganda, Palmer Raids

On September 22, 1919, the American Federation of Labor launched a massive strike against the U.S. steel industry after 98 percent of workers voted to walk out, shutting down half the industry including mills in Pueblo, Chicago, Wheeling, Johnstown, Cleveland, Lackawanna, and Youngstown. The AFL had formed a coalition of 24 unions to organize United States Steel Corporation and demand basic rights after World War I, during which union membership had grown rapidly. Steel company owners, led by U.S. Steel president Elbert H. Gary, immediately weaponized the post-war Red Scare to turn public opinion against workers, labeling the strike as Bolshevik subversion despite strikers seeking only fair wages and working conditions.

The federal government transformed labor organizing into a national security threat, with Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer conducting “red raids” among steelworkers, locking up and deporting immigrant workers without due process. In August 1919, Palmer had established the antiradical General Intelligence Division under young J. Edgar Hoover, who assembled an elaborate card index of radical organizations and leaders. From November 1919 through January 1920, Palmer and Hoover organized mass arrests in raids on union halls, bookstores, and ethnic clubs, arresting over 6,000 people and deporting nearly 600, including prominent leftist leaders. Newspapers branded the strike as “foreign-fired Bolshevism,” exploiting the fact that many strikers were immigrants, while police violence included pitched battles and bombings.

The strike collapsed on January 8, 1920, after 109 days, representing a crushing defeat for organized labor that prevented union organizing in the steel sector for 15 years. Professional historians now recognize the Palmer Raids as unconstitutional, aggressive, and abusive mass arrests and deportations of political enemies that violated civil liberties and human rights. The strike established the template for corporate-state collaboration to destroy labor movements: combine Red Scare propaganda, federal law enforcement persecution, deportation of immigrant workers, and media manipulation to criminalize workers’ collective bargaining efforts. This fusion of corporate power, government surveillance, and propaganda warfare against labor organizing became a defining feature of American capitalism’s resistance to democratic worker control.