"The Booty of the Plundered Churches of Paris"

Since it's May Day—and since I've accumulated all sorts of interesting old conspiracy rants while writing my book about political paranoia — I thought I'd post an artifact from America's first red scare. Not the McCarthy era, not the Palmer raids, not even the strikes of the 1880s that made May Day a labor festival in the first place, but the alarmed reaction to the Paris Commune of 1871. Here's a paragraph published by the New York Herald on January 18, 1874, as part of an article headlined "The Communists of New York—Their Secret Meetings and Movements":