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

The Great Red Scare in Alaska is not the story of a tempest in a teapot. It is a microcosm of the era. The same hysteria and paranoia that infected Alaska was rampant in the Lower 48 states. What makes Alaska's story so unusual was that the population was small which gives the historian the unusual opportunity to look at almost all of the legal cases rather than a statistical smattering. Truth is stranger than fiction and what happened in Alaska was mirrored across the country. Hysteria was a cloak for nefarious and illegal activities by the government that took decades to correct. The terrorism hysteria of today is nothing more than an extension of The Great Red Scare phenomenon only 90 years later.

"Levi's study shows the gritty reality of Alaska's misrule by state and corporate power during the war emergency and after. This terrible period foreshadows America's drift into permanent emergency paranoia."---Professor Heinz Noonan, Department of Economics University of Alaska

"Good book. Well researched. Well written. A glimpse of the past that might be confused with the present."---Richard Schanche, Alaska historian

"Every time I read a history book by Steve Levi I'm surprised to see how little has changed. This book is no exception. A very readable history---and I'm not an historian."---David Powers, folklorist.

Steven C Levi is an established Alaskan historian and writer. He lives in Anchorage and is the author of a number of studies including the standard history of the San Francisc Preparedness Day Bombing of 1916.