The Red and Blue of Politics

Dashiell Hammett

Dashiell Hammett, the creator of Sam Spade and the Thin Man, was a giant among writers of hard-boiled crime fiction. In a 1929 novel, he included this exchange between his detective narrator and a bystander. They’re talking about a murder:

“Who shot him?" I asked.
The gray man scratched the back of his neck and said: “Somebody with a gun.”
I wanted information, not wit. I would have tried my luck with some other member of the crowd if the red tie hadn't interested me.
"Mean anything? Or just wearing it?”

The book is called Red Harvest. The red in the title refers to bloody gang warfare, but the red tie indicated that the informant was a union man. Why? And how did red, the color once identified with labor, socialism and communism, more recently become an emblem of the Republican Party?

It goes back at least to the French Revolution. As rioting heated up in Paris during the summer of 1791, authorities declared martial law. They signaled it by raising a red flag. The incident exploded into a massacre, the Revolution accelerated, and history went off the rails. Later, radical Jacobins expropriated the red flag as a symbol of the blood of the martyrs who had died for the Revolution. It came to represent the people’s martial law.

This was also the period when the terms left and right came to indicate radicals and conservatives — the Jacobins sat on the left side of the National Assembly chamber, the conservatives on the right. This terminology was revived in the twentieth century and is still in use to indicate the progressive left and the traditionalist right.

The red flag turned up again during an 1831strike by Welsh coal miners, its first use as a symbol of labor solidarity. As the nineteenth century progressed, it became firmly associated with radical labor and revolutionary movements, especially during the wave of rebellion that swept Europe in 1848.

Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, the red flag was adopted as the Soviet national emblem, with a hammer, sickle and star added in the corner to represent workers, farmers and the state. “Red” became firmly linked to international communism.

At the end of World War I, a “Red Scare” broke out in the United States. Fear of labor unions and communist influence reached a point of panic. Immigrants suspected of socialism were deported by the boatload, and the 1918 Sedition Act restricted free speech. This hysteria was still fresh when Hammett wrote his novel.

After Mao took his country down the communist path, the American government refused to recognize “Red China.” The Cold War with the Soviets fueled another wave of mania about the influence of “reds” and even “pinkos” in government and other institutions. Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy rode that wave to political prominence.

Senator Joseph McCarthy

Dashiell Hammett was himself labeled a “red” during the McCarthy fervor. In spite of serving in the U.S. Army in both world wars, he was sent to a federal penitentiary for refusing to name others accused of left-wing activity. He was then dragged before the House Un-American Activities Committee and blacklisted.

So, with the Red Army marching through Red Square, and the Red Guards waving Mao’s “Little Red Book,” and some conservatives vowing “better dead than red,” how did red become identified with Republicans?

In earlier days, if any color was associated with Republicans, it was blue. The party of Lincoln was the party of the Union during and after the Civil War. Union soldiers dressed in blue uniforms.

The switch goes back to the early 1970s when color television became popular in the U.S. In 1976, NBC jazzed up its election coverage with a lighted map that turned states that had been declared for Democrat Jimmy Carter red, and those won by Republican incumbent Jerry Ford blue. The choice of colors was arbitrary, other networks used different schemes and different colors. The hues changed from one election to the next. Until the year 2000.

The contest between Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush was extremely close and remained undecided for weeks after the voting. By general consensus, the assignment of red to Bush and blue to Gore became standard. The scheme was repeated by all the news networks in the elections that followed.

The symbolic colors, while convenient, have contributed to the polarization of the country. In fact, there are no “red states” or “blue states.” There are plenty of Republicans in New York and loads of Democrats in Texas. The assignment of colors to areas of the country creates more confusion than clarity, encourages division, and coarsens the fabric of our politics.

Perhaps members of the red and blue factions should follow the example of Hammett’s detective and the initially suspicious union man with the red tie:

He nodded at a restaurant door and asked: "Drink?"
“Only when I can get it.”
We spent the next two hours drinking whiskey and talking.

Please comment and share this post.