Welcome to North Carolina — not so fast, Comrade

“On a 1926 lecture tour, Lucia Ames Mead — the 70-year-old grande dame of peace activism — was ambushed in North Carolina by anti-radicals led by Margaret Overman Gregory, daughter of Senator Lee Overman, who had conducted the famous hearings in 1919 to expose the alleged crimes of Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution….

“Gregory, state DAR regent, warned that North Carolina was ‘the target of the most desperate efforts of the Soviet propagandists seeking the overthrow of the American government and planning for a Red Russian invasion of the South.’

“Gregory and her followers attended Mead’s appearances en masse and prevented her from delivering addresses in Charlotte and Salisbury….”

— From Battling Miss Bolsheviki: The Origins of Female Conservatism in the United States” by Kirsten Marie Delegard (2012)