The Palmer Raids
After World War I, the U.S. Justice Department violated civil liberties by seizing “dangerous subversives” as part of what became known as the “Red Scare.”
Tension pervaded America after the war ended in 1918. The transition from a wartime to a peacetime economy caused rampant unemployment, with veterans returning from Europe finding that they no longer had jobs. The economic distress sparked a rise in political radicalism, particularly among immigrants and foreigners. The growing number of anarchists, socialists, and Communists in America inevitably led to increased violence.
U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer
In the spring of 1919, radicals terrorized prominent Americans such as J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer by sending them bombs through the mail. None of the intended targets was injured, but one explosion killed a deliveryman and another blew the hands off a senator’s maid. All but two of the saboteurs were apprehended. Violence also erupted on May Day (May 1, the international workers’ holiday) when radicals clashed with citizens and police in Cleveland, killing two and injuring 40.
During the war, President Woodrow Wilson had tried turning public opinion against foreigners and radicals who refused to conform to American ideals by declaring that they “poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life… Such creatures of passion, disloyalty, and anarchy must be crushed out.” To the Wilson administration, the rise of postwar violence indicated a growing radical conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government.
Attorney General Palmer requested appropriations to investigate suspected subversives, warning Congress that radicals would “on a certain day… rise up and destroy the government at one fell swoop.” Congress approved $100,000. Palmer then created a new General Intelligence Division within the Bureau of Investigation, forerunner to the FBI. The Division was headed by 24-year-old J. Edgar Hoover, who was tasked with investigating radical groups and identifying their members.
Hoover collected 45,000 files on so-called radicals on index cards. According to Ronald Kessler in The Bureau:
“Hoover made no distinction between criminal conduct and beliefs… Hoover recommended that a German who had engaged in a conversation with a Negro in which he indulged in pro-German utterances and in derogatory remarks regarding the United States government be jailed. The man, who had been in the United States for thirty years, was imprisoned.”
On the 2nd anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution (November 7), federal agents teamed with local police to raid chapters of the “Russian Workers.” Over 2,000 people were arrested in 12 cities. Many were held for deportation without regard for due process of law. Several suspects testified that they had been threatened or beaten, and it was reported that some were “badly beaten.” Of the 650 people arrested in New York City, only 43 were deported.
In January 1920, Palmer authorized warrantless raids on private homes and organization headquarters in 33 cities. Over 4,000 people were arrested this time, including hundreds in New England without probable cause and 300 in Detroit held for a week.
Eventually, 556 “dangerous subversives” were deported, including prominent radicals “Red” Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. However, most arrests led to no charges or trials, and Hoover admitted to “clear cases of brutality.” U.S. attorney Francis Fisher Kane resigned in protest, writing to Palmer and President Wilson:
“It seems to me that the policy of raids against large numbers of individuals is generally unwise and very apt to result in injustice. People not really guilty are likely to be arrested and railroaded through their hearings… We appear to be attempting to repress a political party… By such methods we drive underground and make dangerous what was not dangerous before.”
When May Day 1920 came and went without the violence that Palmer had predicted, his raids seemed even more unnecessary. The ACLU published a report documenting numerous violations of constitutional rights by agents and police during the raids. A federal judge ordered the release of detained aliens and declared that “a mob is a mob, whether made up of Government officials acting under instructions from the Department of Justice, or of criminals and loafers and the vicious classes.”
The raids initially seemed to diffuse the ”Red Scare” in the U.S., but they really just drove the Communist movement underground, where it would resurface a decade later. The raids also helped turn the public against any person or group considered “anti-American,” which enabled the growing attitude of intolerance that pervaded the 1920s.
Sources:
An Almanac of American History edited by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (Greenwich, CT: Barnes & Noble Books, Inc., 1993)
Don’t Know Much About History by Kenneth C. Davis (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2003)
A Patriot’s History of the United States by Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2004)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Raids
