Deportation as Diffusion: How America's Red Scare Transformed Global Radicalism

Kenyon W. Zimmer, University of Texas at Arlington

This paper draws on contemporary anthropological and sociological studies of deportees to reframe the history of America's post-World War I Red Scare and accompanying "Deportations Delirium." Tracing the global trajectories of the more than 1,000 political radicals deported from the United States between 1917 and 1924, it documents how many "repatriated" radicals—most of whom had acquired or evolved their political views in the United States—influenced labor and revolutionary movements abroad. Deportation supplied leaders and rank-and-file members to anarchist, syndicalist, Communist, and socialist movements in a long list of countries, including Russia, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Finland, Germany, Canada, Cuba, and Argentina, where they diffused and adapted "American" forms of radicalism, while expanding and strengthening transnational radical networks.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 204. Workers' Movements, Mass Migration, and the Globalization of Radical Ideas (1860s-1930s)