Return to First Page ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY, Volume 37 (Autumn 1978)

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desired.(28) Not only were the dirty bolsheviki nationalizing Russian women but their comrades in the United States were blowing the hands off the maid of former Senator Thomas Hardwick of Georgia. The bolsheviks were also supporting anarchist revolts all over the world from Europe to Buenos Aires, Argentina.(29)

Arkansas newspapers provided the normal political cartoons common to the Red Scare. One cartoon, entitled "Amateur Night," depicted a bearded bolshevik on a stage labeled "Europe" and under attack from the audience. As the "amateur" was pounded with bricks and garbage the proverbial stage hook reached out to pull him from view. Another cartoon, "Out of the Ashes of Empires," was filled with smoldering rubbish and demolished public buildings. Russia, Austria, and Germany were written in the ruins. A torch-bearing, unkempt, bearded, savage looking spectre, labeled "Bolshevism" looked down on the ruins as he emerged out of the smoky mist with his raised torch in one hand and a smoking pistol in the other.(30) Undoubtedly, the newspapers, at least, were a proper medium for transmitting the Red Scare to Arkansas.

The editorial page did reflect some evidence of anti-radicalism in support of the headlines and cartoons. There were some virulently anti-Red editorials. The Arkansas Gazette, for instance, was particularly in tune with the times. To the editors of the Gazette, bolshevism meant "barbarous murder, gross immorality, unbridled looting and chaos generally." According to one unsigned editorial in the Gazette (and presumably the position of the paper), the rise of the bolsheviks was a last attempt of the international brigands, the Germans, to return to the path of conquest and glory.(31) One Arkansas citizen, writing to the editor of the Harrisburg Modern News, denounced bolshevism in the most eloquent of terms in June 1919. In the writer's opinion it was the duty of all citizens to slay the "jackals" as they emerged to feed on the kill of the "War Monsters."

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28 "Lurid Picture of Atrocities in Russia Recounted by Mrs. Pankhurst," Arkansas Gazette, Mar. 23, 1919, p. 14.

29 Ibid., Apr. 30, p. 1; Texarkana Four States Press, Jan. 13, 1919, p. 1.

30 Pine Bluff Daily Graphic, May 30, 1919, p.1; Arkansas Gazette, Dec. 14, 1918, p.6.

31 Arkansas Gazette, Dec. 28, 1918, p. 6, Mar. 26, 1919, p. 6.