The Great Red Scare in World War One Alaska: Elite Panic, Government Hysteria, Suppression of Civil Liberties, Union-Breaking, and Germanophobia, 1915-1920

This new study interprets on of the least known fronts of the First World War—the Alaska Territory. Because of its vast size and small population Alaska was governed and ruled by overlapping military (mostly naval)and civilian authorities all of whom waged a successful bloody war against—mostly US citizens. Levi describes the unions, German workers and merchants and socialist associations that were suppressed and demonized between 1915 and 1920. The grip of so-called nativist authorities also extended to stealing land from Indians and Eskimos, false imprisonment, strike and union breaking. It is an extraordinary historical record and one that Levi characterizes as springing from genuine elite panic at the changes that unions, socialists, and civil libertarians threatened to bring to the goldfields, lumbering towns and fishing fleets of the territory. Truly a civil war within a world war as one contemporary described it.