Red

The particular association of the color red with Communism can be dated to 1848, often called the Year of Revolutions. Describing these momentous and violent events, the Illustrated London News commented: “The ‘Red Republicans’ have justified their name; they have filled the streets of Paris with blood…. The Working classes or ‘Red Republicans’ were imbued with the doctrine of Communism” (January 7, 1848). Because communism has never posed a serious political threat in Britain, the term has never gained major currency in English political parlance, certainly not as a term of abuse. However, both red and pink in the symbolic sense of radical have often surfaced in political discussion, as is seen in this ironic passage by Thomas de Quincey a decade prior to 1848: “Amusing it is to look back on any political work of Mr. Shepherd’s … and to know that the pale pink of his radicalism was then accounted deep, deep scarlet” ( Tait’s Magazine , July 2, 1837). The political definition of red in the Oxford English Dictionary is extremely broad: “a radical, republican or anarchist,” but is supported by very few quotations, the first from Alfred Lord Tennyson in 1864: “Blues and Reds they talk’d of” ( Blue being the symbolic color of the English Conservative Party). A character in Mrs. Humphry Ward’s novel David Grieve (1894) explains: “My father was a Red—an anarchist” (II, 349). After the Russian Revolution (often referred to as “Red October”) the term tended to be used in Britain of the militant Bolshevik party, and subsequently of an extreme socialist, usually with a sense of irony.

However, in the United States, during the period of the Cold War, the anti-Communist witch-hunt aggravated by McCarthyism became so intense that the term acquired its greatest force in formulations like the “red scare,” “reds under the bed,” and the nuclear disarmament slogan “Better Red than Dead.” Hugh Rawson notes that in this paranoid period “the associations of red in the United States were so pejorative that some people strove to avoid it even in nonpolitical contexts” (1991, 325). Unlike communist , which has retained a hostile but generalized currency, red is becoming obsolete.