Category: Red Scares Before the Red Scare

• The "Vagrancy" Army

  This theory held that the growing number of "tramps" after the Panic of 1873 were not simply unemployed wanderers but a covert advance guard for revolutionary disorder, sometimes described as a communist scout network moving across the country. The theory emerged in the context of mass unemployment, the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, and a broader fear that mobility itself had become politically dangerous. Contemporary writing often blended tramps, strikers, outsiders, and radicals into a single threatening figure, creating the image of an organized vagrant army.