In the days before the April debut of the movie Bolshevism on Trial its promoters sent a flyer to the magazine Moving Picture World outlining a plan for movie houses to make the film an unforgettable sensation. Run an extra show every night and arrange a special showing for schoolchildren, the flyer said. But most important of all, do this: Secretly, on the night before the opening, hang red flags all over town. On lampposts. Over balconies. From windows. Hire soldiers or actors dressed like soldiers to march into town the next day with great fanfare to tear down the red flags. In the midst of the mayhem, send the staff out of the theater with a “flaming handbill” to distribute to a confused crowd now hopefully swarming on the streets. Bolshevism on Trial is not an argument for anarchy, the circular should say, but rather a strong statement against it. Be sure to have the plan and the leaflets ready for the grand opening of the movie or the scheme might fizzle, so warned the promoters. By doing this, “you will not only clean up but will profit by future business.”
Mayhem, conflict, fear, disgust, shock. Any one of them could draw attention to the film and bring in the crowds. It had worked in 1915 for D. W. Griffith’s controversial The Birth of a Nation. Why not in 1919 for Bolshevism on Trial? There were a few similarities between the two films. Both, for example, were adaptations of books by the same author, Thomas Dixon, best known for his 1905 book The Clansman, which was the basis for The Birth of a Nation. Bolshevism on Trial was adapted from Dixon’s 1909 book Comrades.
Having bought more than five million copies of his numerous books, most Americans knew who Dixon was. His novels as well as his plays typically explored the social issues of the day, especially the color line, and through his plots and characters he offered his own solutions to some of America’s deepest problems. A preacher and a lawyer, as well as a writer, Dixon railed against racial equality, which he believed would lead to miscegenation and sin. Women’s suffrage, he believed, would destroy the family and socialism was simply evil. Dixon’s views were exactly opposite those of his contemporary Upton Sinclair, who, in his newest book, Jimmie Higgins, released in April 1919, protested U.S. intervention in Russia. In fact, Dixon appeared to be in the business of boosting the platforms of hate-mongers, racists, and war hawks. His books, as well as the films that adapted them, were vicious attacks against the “other” in America: groups and individuals who racially or politically were outside mainstream white America. His book The Fall of a Nation denounced pacifists just as The Clansman attacked blacks and Comrades vilified socialists.
The Birth of a Nation and Bolshevism on Trial both had anti-radical themes. In the first, the radicals were overzealous, lascivious politicians favoring race equality. And in Bolshevism on Trial they were maniacal, lying socialists and communists aiming to deprive Americans of their freedoms. In the plots of the two films there were also some interesting parallels. In both, a brutish, lascivious man stalks and entraps an innocent woman. This happens twice, in fact, in The Birth of a Nation, in which the two iniquitous men are black and the two victimized women are white. In Bolshevism on Trial the aggressor is labeled a socialist who, using high ideals and seductive world visions, lures a wealthy socialite trying to reform capitalism into his scheme for a new world and then deceives her. The distressed damsels in both films are depicted as trying to escape from tragic fates: interracial marriage in The Birth of a Nation and socialism in Bolshevism on Trial. The heroes in both films come in the form of an organized, unstoppable invasion of white men—in white uniforms (U.S. Navy) in Bolshevism on Trial and in white sheets (the Klan) in The Birth of a Nation. They are too late in The Birth of a Nation, for one of the women is so frightened of a black man who tells her of his wish to marry her that she jumps off a cliff and dies. The second woman threatened with miscegenation is rescued by hundreds of Klansmen on their glorious white steeds at the end of the film. Bolshevism on Trial ends similarly.
Bolshevism on Trial begins with a scene where Norman Bradshaw, a captain in the Great War, is showing his father, a wealthy industrialist, a newspaper story with the headline “Society Girl Joins Reds.” Barbara Alden, the society girl, is also Norman’s favorite girl. And so he decides to attend a “Reds meeting” where she lectures on the virtues of world socialism. Norman, hoping to impress Barbara, goes to the meeting with news of his promotion to president of a new company. But instead he is swayed by her speech, which begins: “I have come tonight to tell you how to make the world better as there must be a way so that hardships and poverty shall disappear.”
Led by the cunning agitator Herman Wolff, who, the audience soon learns, has a secret plan to spread Bolshevism worldwide, Barbara raises funds from her affluent acquaintances to buy Paradise Island off the coast of Florida. There they will create a collective colony—“a land of happiness and plenty,” she tells them. They balk at first and then Norman stands up and says he’s “in” and “it’s a plan worth trying.” Later that night, he asks for funds from his father, who is irate about his son’s “naïveté” and “idealism” and thus, at the moment of his son’s passionate departure, refuses to shake Norman’s hand. After Norman leaves, the father says, “He’ll get his island and a lesson along with it.”
When the throng of believers—men in coats and ties and women in silk dresses and floppy hats under lace parasols—arrives at their new island utopia, “every heart beat with high resolve,” as Dixon described the scene in Comrades. “The heaven of which they had dreamed was no longer a dream. They were walking its white, shining streets. Their souls were crying for joy in its dazzling court of honour. The old world, with its sin and shame, its crime and misery, its hunger and cold, its greed and lust, its cruelty and insanity, had passed away, and lo! All things were new. The very air was charged with faith and hope and love. A wave of religious ecstasy swept the crowd. They called each by their first names. Strong men embraced, crying ‘Comrade!’ through their tears.”
Norman, who hoists the red flag, is soon elected “Chief Comrade.” The first step is to find out what skills people have so that the work of organizing the colony can begin. Thus the “comrades” fill out forms about the jobs they want to do for the community. The majority say “assistant managers,” and the rest offer their skills as models, actresses, social chairmen, musicians, and sports coaches. But who will cook, clean, and sew? Who will plow fields, dig sewers, weave cloth? Norman asks. No one volunteers.
As if buried under the weight of their tasks, they lose their enthusiasm, sink into a state of constant dissatisfaction, and then begin to turn on one another. For example, there’s a strike in the kitchen where the workers complain that the others aren’t working hard enough. Soon Norman is ousted. Comrade Wolff assumes the top post—a move he had planned covertly—and immediately he creates a police force, bans marriage, and declares women and children the property of the State. He then orders Norman to be locked up. This awakens Barbara from her idealistic stupor and she sees the horrible error she has made. “These poor deluded people will starve and die as they are in Russia,” she says, with hands flung into the air in despair. At the same time, Wolff decides that because of his plan to take over the world and his new post as Chief Comrade, he needs a new, younger, prettier wife and so he chooses Barbara. “I will make you the consort of a great revolutionary leader…myself!” he tells her.
“But I have no interest in the Colony now—only to get away. You’ve broken my faith in human nature. I’d rather be dead than marry you,” says Barbara.
“You will NEVER leave the island except as my consort.”
Wolff then forces her to kiss him. Barbara struggles in vain to be free. Meanwhile, Norman’s father has used his considerable influence and money to commandeer an entire navy fleet to rescue both his son and Barbara. When the navy commander apprehends Wolff, the audience learns that Herman Wolff’s real name is Androvitch! “You have been under surveillance for more than a year,” the officer tells Wolff. The camera then pans to the flagpole, where Norman is lowering the Red flag. In the last scene he hoists the American flag and everyone cheers.
Bolshevism on Trial received excellent reviews. “Powerful, well-knit with indubitably true and biting satire,’ wrote Julian Johnson of Photoplay magazine. The film’s ad copy called it “the timeliest picture ever filmed” and with or without a sordid scheme for selling it, which only a few theaters employed, Bolshevism on Trial was a box office winner.
With this and other movies and books, Bolshevism was invading American culture. More than a political system that had been adopted by the largest nation in the world, more than a strange new idea moving like a pandemic through the neighborhoods of America’s immigrants and laboring class, Bolshevism was becoming a household word, a provocative catchall term that embraced everything mainstream America feared, including voices critical of the government. The American public was following the government’s lead in believing that fundamental social reforms were not the solution to social inequalities and political unrest. The best way to soften the jolting impact of life in the stormy aftermath of the first global war was to identify an enemy, shift the blame for social ills to the enemy, and then focus the nation’s resources on destroying the enemy—not to demobilize the bellicose war consciousness for the shift to peacetime, but to remobilize the public consciousness with a new war against a hidden enemy. Hence, Bolshevism was sweeping the nation like a hot wind. Whether a movie or book was for it or against it, the mere mention of it aroused curiosity and intrigue as well as hatred and fear. And hence it was marketable.
In April, Bolshevism on Trial was a popular movie and Ten Days That Shook the World became a successful book. John Reed’s masterpiece of narrative journalism brought the Bolshevik Revolution to the reader with the intensity of a motion picture. Reed had witnessed what he believed to be a moment of destiny and he delivered every sight, sound, and smell of it to his readers. The American public nearly inhaled it, buying up thousands of copies in its first weeks after publication. So compelling was Reed’s writing, so sharp were his observations, so passionate was his involvement in the story that his book cut through prejudices and differences, appealing to critics, to the ordinary reader, to those who saw the workers’ state of Bolshevik Russia as a new way to run the world as well as to those who deeply feared it. Reaching out to what he hoped would be a more tolerant future, Reed wrote in his preface, “No matter what one thinks of Bolshevism, it is undeniable that the Russian Revolution is one of the great events of human history and the rise of the Bolsheviki a phenomenon of world-wide importance. In the struggle my sympathies were not neutral. But in telling the story of those great days I have tried to see events with the eye of a conscientious reporter, interested in setting down the truth.”
Although the wave of books about the “Bolshevist menace” wouldn’t crest until the following year, there would be more movies on the topic throughout 1919. Coming in early May was The New Moon, featuring the popular Norma Talmadge, who plays a Russian princess forced to separate from her fiancé, a Russian prince, during a Red Army attack on her palace. To save their lives, he impersonates a Red and she pretends to be a peasant. They are both caught, which is especially problematic for the princess because in the movie all women between twenty-three and thirty-two are property of the State. A nefarious Soviet leader wants her for his own but she refuses to be his. The prince rescues her and the Soviet leader commits suicide. Although not as popular as Bolshevism on Trial, The New Moon was successful enough to encourage more: Red Viper, The Right to Happiness, and even a heavy-handed comedy, Bullin’ the Bullsheviki.
Such movies may have communicated the image the government itself wanted to project but the government was clearly not on board for the promotional tactic of make-believe riots in front of movie theaters. When the April column about promoting Bolshevism on Trial reached Secretary of Labor William Wilson, he was alarmed. The April 15 issue of Moving Picture World with its promotional suggestions had not escaped the scrutiny of the post office censors. The day after receiving it, the secretary told the press that never in his life had he seen such dangerous advice. “This publication proposes by deceptive methods of advertising to stir every community in the United States into riotous demonstrations for the purpose of making profits for the moving picture business and the owners of this particular photoplay.” He also said he was appealing to Attorney General Palmer to take action “against moving pictures treating of Bolshevism and Socialism,” although apparently the attorney general ignored the suggestion.
Secretary Wilson was jittery, and so were others in Washington. The passionate mix of the paranoia of Red baiters and the patriotism of returning soldiers made the threat of riots against pacifists, socialists, Bolshevists, Russian immigrants, and anyone else who seemed to represent the new enemy, all too possible. By April, the kindling was piled high on both sides. A make-believe riot, as Secretary Wilson feared, could be the spark.
Ironically, the government supplied some of that kindling with the help of the widely publicized testimonies at the Overman Committee hearings and the committee’s inflammatory 1,200-page report that described Bolshevism as a “reign of terror” and warned of an imminent Bolshevist attempt to take over America. The Seattle mayor’s nationwide speaking tour highlighting his bravery in the face of frightful revolution, meaning the Seattle general strike, added to the intensity of the times as did the rising number of labor strikes—more proof of the infiltration of Bolshevists—with 175 in March, 248 in April, 388 in May. And New York’s highly publicized Lusk Committee, created in response to the dangers revealed by the Overman witnesses, contributed to the mood. There were also leaks to the press about imminent revolution, in letters and memos from Seattle Minute Men, former Bureau of Investigation agents, and American Protective League members. The movement to take over America was “well-financed and surprisingly well-organized” on the West Coast, wrote one former bureau agent who advocated “immediate action to curb the extreme radicals.” A member of the Seattle Minute Men who said he had infiltrated the enemy forces called the Seattle strike “a revolution instigated and brought about by IWW’s having joined hands with the bolsjeviki and all forms of radicals and having all become bed-fellows.” After the revolution, the Bolsheviki would seize all land, factories, banks, media, private residences, and churches. And just as in Bolshevism on Trial, everyone would have to do some sort of basic labor, no matter what their station in life. There would be no more smooth hands.
At the same time, whistleblowers began to leak information about the inner workings of the government’s tactics for surveillance and repression. One former member of the Seattle Minute Men, for example, spoke to a reporter for the New York Tribune about the group’s elaborate spy network based on wartime Germany’s domestic espionage system. Spies had infiltrated all meetings leading to the strike and had, in fact, planted a man on the inside of the main committee writing the constitution—a man who added wording that weakened the group’s position. The Nation magazine, in its commentary about the Tribune article, drew even more attention to the hypocrisy: “If the government were not so busy at its own game of spying and Bolshevik-baiting we might suggest that this is one article of German make that might well be subject to permanent embargo. Used as a weapon of domestic terrorism it is bound to create an atmosphere of warfare and a bitter clash of loyalties in our own country, making enemies of mere dissenters.”
The American Freedom Congress, the Workers Amnesty League, the National League for Release of Political Prisoners, and the American Freedom Convention, among numerous other groups, were crying out for amnesty for the hundreds of people in jail for opposing the war—whose release at this time was truly frightening to those who saw them as criminals and believed that, if released, such individuals would strengthen the forces of revolution.
The popularity of Eugene Debs, to whom President Wilson refused amnesty, was growing, despite and perhaps because of his new address, at the West Virginia penitentiary. Now truly a martyr to the cause of worldwide socialism and a working-class idol more than ever, Debs began his ten-year sentence on April 11. With a somber elegance of spirit and the appealing dignity that won him his following, he told the press, “During my incarceration my comrades will be true.”
Adding to the irony, hypocrisy, confusion, and intensity of America’s preoccupations with Bolshevism was corporate America’s point of view that a new young nation such as Soviet Russia was a treasure trove of untapped markets. In a 1918 book about conditions in Russia, one New York journalist wrote that Russia was American capital’s “greatest market in the future.” And despite the rabid depictions of barbaric Bolsheviks that graced the nation’s front pages, U.S. businessmen were bravely walking where few Americans dared to step—to the offices of the Soviet Bureau in New York City to meet with Soviet representatives and talk about trade.
The Soviet Bureau was Russia’s unofficial embassy in the United States—unofficial because the State Department had not formally recognized the new Russian government. The unofficial Soviet ambassador was Ludwig C. A. K. Martens, whom Lenin appointed in early January 1919 to establish ties with American businesses. Martens also hoped to purchase much needed railroad supplies, medicine, shoes, clothing, food, and agricultural machinery for the new Bolshevik Russia. By April 1, he had a permanent staff of thirty with ten temporary assistants working in furnished offices at the World Tower Building at 110 West 40th Street in Manhattan. Among the directors of the bureau’s departments were Russian immigrants who had graduated from Harvard, earned doctorates from Columbia, taught at the University of Chicago and at Princeton, and founded companies in the United States. The director of finances was a medical doctor, Julius Hammer, who also ran a successful pharmaceutical firm, Allied Drug and Chemical Company, and would soon be a member of the new Communist Party of America.
Exactly where Martens got his funding was a matter of intrigue. Especially curious was the Bureau of Investigation, which assigned agents to spy on the Soviet Bureau from the moment Martens announced his intentions in early January. One BI theory for the source of the funding was that it came from uncut diamonds smuggled into the United States. Such a possibility led to a customs shakedown of seamen aboard the USS Stockholm, during which one sailor bolted and was later caught and searched. In his trousers he had concealed envelopes, one of which contained $50,000 worth of diamonds. It was addressed to Martens. Another theory was that the wealthy Dr. Hammer was the major backer.
April was a busy month for the Soviet Bureau, which sent out informational letters to five thousand firms and press kits to more than two hundred trade papers. Martens’s staff exchanged letters and conducted interviews with eager representatives of major U.S. companies, including Ford Motor Company, the meatpacking firms Armour and Swift, Marathon Tire and Rubber and Old Reliable Motor Truck, among others. The representative from Carolina Junk and Hide ended a letter to the bureau saying: “Assuring you of my deepest sympathy for bleeding Russia as well as bleeding humanity everywhere, and hoping that there are brighter days in store for the human race in every land in the near future, I remain faithfully yours.”
On April 24 and 25, at the Sixth National Foreign Trade Convention in Chicago, two of Martens’s directors set up temporary headquarters at the Hotel LaSalle and met with representatives of at least two dozen companies, including International Harvester; Marshall Field; Sears, Roebuck; and Calumet Baking Powder. And they arranged future meetings with some of Chicago’s most prominent bankers and manufacturers, some of whom, by the end of the convention, had urged the two Russians to set up a branch of the Soviet Bureau in Chicago. Intelligence reports would later show that at least nine hundred American companies expressed interest in speaking with the bureau in the spring of 1919 and more than seven hundred offered to do business with it. Ford’s representative sent out a press release that April saying that the company “considers their tractors suitable for Russian conditions, and that they are anxious to do business with Soviet Russia,” and to “trade with [the Bolsheviks] on a regular basis.” Soon Ford would sell 238 touring cars to Russia through an agent in Martens’s office. In the years ahead Ford would conduct its business with the Bolsheviks through the Allied American Corporation of New York, a company established by Julius Hammer and his sons. By mid-May, the bureau would secure $300 million worth of contracts with U.S. companies. And according to Scotland Yard investigators at the time, by May, investment banking houses, including Morgan Guaranty Trust Company, were not only working with the Soviet Bureau but helping to fund it.
Throughout the spring, Martens continued his campaign for recognition by the State Department without success. Then at the end of April something happened that would make it nearly impossible for the government to recognize the new Russian regime, something that would raise the nation’s level of intolerance higher than the box office totals of every anti-Bolshevik movie that year, something in New York, something frightening for both sides of the Bolshevism debate.
On April 30, at the New York City post office, Charles Kaplan, a night clerk, completed his shift in the parcel division. It was 2 A.M. and Kaplan, as usual, descended the grand stairs to Eighth Avenue, crossed the street to Penn Station, and took the subway north to his home in Harlem. On the seat next to him that morning was a copy of the April 29 New York Times, which caught his eye when he saw the word “Mail” in a headline. The story was about a bomb exploding at the Atlanta home of former U.S. senator Thomas W. Hardwick. The senator’s maid had answered the front door, accepted the package, and was holding it when it exploded. She lost both hands. The parcel was described as small—about seven inches long, three inches wide, two inches deep—and was wrapped in light brown paper with a return address for Gimbel Brothers in New York. An almost identical package, with a bomb inside, had been found that same day at the Seattle post office, the article said. This one was addressed to Ole Hanson, Seattle’s mayor. As the train pulled into the 110th Street station, Kaplan suddenly bolted out of his seat, ran up the stairs, out of the subway station, across the street, and down the stairs to the downtown subway platform, nearly holding his breath for all of the six minutes he had to wait for the next train back to Penn Station. Every second seemed like a day for the man who had just recalled that three days before he had lined up a dozen or more small brown-paper parcels on the insufficient postage shelf—all with the Gimbel Brothers return address.
The next morning, May 1, Kaplan found his own name prominently featured in the New York Times. The Harlem postal clerk had potentially saved the lives of the sixteen intended recipients of the packages, each of which did indeed contain a wooden tube filled with an acid detonator and a high explosive. That day, after the government sent an alert to all post offices nationwide, eighteen more Gimbel’s packages were discovered containing eighteen more bombs. The targets included Senator Lee Overman; Postmaster General Burleson; Attorney General Palmer; Anthony Caminetti, the commissioner general of immigration; Secretary of Labor Wilson; Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.; John D. Rockefeller; and J. P. Morgan.
The total number of targets was now thirty-six. There were no suspects, but the image of the suspects was already painted for all Americans to behold: a band of murderous Bolsheviks. Headlines sizzled with the news that “Reds Planned May Day Murders.” The “enmity of the radicals,” the New York Times said, was to blame. Some newspapers cautioned people to call their local bomb squads before opening any box received in the mail. Others warned of the encroaching evil of anarchy. Still others urged the government to hang every bomb maker and deport every anarchist.
But there were some jagged-edged pieces that didn’t fit so well into the picture: for example, why would a radical target Senator Hardwick, who was a solid supporter of Robert M. LaFollette, the Progressive senator from Wisconsin? Hardwick belonged to a newly formed group called the Committee of Forty-eight, which stood for civil rights for women and blacks, was pro-labor and antitrust, and advocated nationalization of railroads, public utilities, and natural resources. Among its members were the editor of The New Republic, Herbert Croly; Ohio State University historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr.; and Frederic Howe, the commissioner of immigration at Ellis Island. Howe, also a target for the bomb packages, had nearly resigned from his post over the mistreatment of immigrants at Ellis Island and suggestions of a government policy of mass deportations. Several radical publications noted that there were people not targeted who would in fact be higher priorities for radicals. “They were addressed to all the people that a most ignorant and superficial outsider might think would be chosen by revolutionaries as the ones to get rid of,” wrote the editors of The Liberator, considered to be a radical magazine. Hardwick was “nearly a radical himself,” the editors said.
But hysteria, like a heavy fog, was blocking any vision of the truth. And so it was that two days after the opening of Bolshevism on Trial, the real riots began. On May Day, socialists, anarchists, labor leaders, and union workers paraded through the streets of several U.S. cities in celebration of workers’ rights and in memory of those who had sacrificed their lives to improve conditions for the nation’s working class. May Day, an American labor holiday, had been celebrated throughout the United States since the 1890s. But in 1919 in Boston, New York, and Cleveland, bands of vigilantes tried to stop the celebration. And riots ensued. In Boston, one union sponsored a May Day parade, during which bands of vigilantes attacked them and then moved on to the Boston Socialist Party headquarters. In New York, dozens of World War I soldiers raided the Russian People’s House, gathered magazines and books, and set them on fire while forcing the immigrants meeting there to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” In another part of town, hundreds of civilians crashed a reception of seven hundred guests at a socialist newspaper, smashed the furniture, and forced the attendees onto the street, beating seventeen with clubs. But Cleveland got the worst of it. On Superior and Euclid Avenues, fighting broke out between Red haters and socialists; citizens threw furniture out of the windows of the Socialist Party headquarters onto the sidewalks of Prospect Avenue; and ex-soldiers drove a tank into a parade of socialists at Cleveland Public Square. One person died and forty were injured in Cleveland that day. The radical press in Cleveland accused the Loyal American League of provoking the riots to make the radicals look bad. The Loyal American League said they were only defending “the Stars and Stripes.”
The next day most of the nation’s newspapers blamed the violence in all three cities on the “bomb-throwing radicals.” Free speech was on the list of culprits. And editorial pages sizzled with pleas to the government to stop the madness before it got worse, even at the risk of violating the Bill of Rights. “Free speech has been carried to the point where it is an unrestrained menace,” wrote the Tribune of Salt Lake City.
New York’s Lusk Committee stepped up its schedule of investigations of radical organizations and called upon its “secret service force” to “sift the chaff from the wheat,” as Senator Lusk put it. The committee decided also to come up with a plan to do something soon to show the world that it was not going to allow New York to surrender to the radical dreams of revolutionaries—something like a sensational raid on a radical organization. And how about the Soviet Bureau? The search warrant for such a raid could condemn the bureau for distributing subversive literature nationwide. And that became the plan.
The American Protective League, the Loyal American League, and other such groups raised their own pitch in an already screaming campaign to persuade Attorney General Palmer to reconnect government agencies with the battalions of volunteer spies on whom the government had relied during the war. One St. Louis APL veteran wrote to Palmer, “It has struck me from what I read in the papers in connection with these bomb fiends, Bolsheviki, IWW’s and other fiends, who do not seem to want to conform to our government or any other organized government or respect our glorious ‘Stars and Stripes,’ that it might not be a bad, in fact might be a splendid idea to revive the ‘American Protective League’ to assist and help in running down these opponents of our government and institutions, and individuals who seem to prefer some kind of a rag, red or black, in place of ‘Old Glory.’”
Thus far, Palmer had resisted. “It is encouraging to note that the Department of Justice has at least refused to cooperate with private organizations for espionage, and Attorney General Palmer deserves thanks for his statement that such espionage is ‘entirely at variance with our theories of government,’” wrote The Nation in its April issue.
But it was now May, and America was off-balance and edgy, far more than at any time since the Armistice. On May 5, for example, at a Chicago amphitheater, a man was shot when he did not stand and remove his hat in response to a band playing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” And when he fell, the crowd, which had gathered for a victory loan fund-raiser, clapped and cheered. The seeds of hysteria were sprouting. Any opportunist could now reap the harvest.