Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Email
Answers.com

Palmer Raids

 
US History Encyclopedia: Palmer Raids
Home > Library > History, Politics & Society > US History Encyclopedia

The Palmer Raids (1919–1920) involved mass arrests and deportation of radicals at the height of the post–World War I era red scare. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer encouraged the raids in the hope that they would advance his presidential ambitions. Ultimately, the extra-constitutional nature of this action destroyed Palmer's political career. He was viewed not as a savior but rather a threat to the civil rights and liberties of all Americans. J. Edgar Hoover, the chief of the Justice Department's Radical (later General Intelligence) Division who actually organized the raids, went on to a forty-eight-year career as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) (originally called the Bureau of Investigation). The other principal, Anthony Caminetti of the Department of Labor's Immigration Bureau, remained an obscure bureaucrat.

A wave of strikes, race riots, and anarchist bombings in eight cities provided the context for the Palmer Raids. One of those bombs partly destroyed the attorney general's own home in Washington, D.C. From February 1917 to November 1919, federal agents deported sixty aliens of some 600 arrested as Anarchists. More raids followed over the next two months, the most notable being the 249 persons, including Emma Goldman, deported on December 21 aboard a single "Red Ark," the Buford. The most ambitious raids occurred on January 2, 1920, with lesser efforts continuing over the next few days. In all, Hoover utilized 579 agents from the Bureau of Investigation and vigilantes from the recently disbanded American Protective League to orchestrate massive raids against communists in twenty-three states. At least 4,000 and perhaps as many as 6,000 persons from thirty-three cities were arrested. Most were Communist Party members or suspected members. About 300 were members of the Communist Labor Party. Among the abuses documented by the American Civil Liberties Union and such prominent attorneys as Zechariah Chafee Jr., Roscoe Pound, and Felix Frankfurter were abuses of due process, illegal search and seizure, and indiscriminate arrests, use of agents provocateurs, and torture.

Bibliography

Hoyt, Edwin P. The Palmer Raids, 1919–1920: An Attempt to Suppress Dissent. New York: Seabury Press, 1969.

Preston, William. Aliens and Dissenters: Federal Suppression of Radicals, 1903–1933. New York: Harper & Row, 1966.

Schmidt, Regin. Red Scare: FBI and the Origins of Anticommunism in the United States, 1919–1943. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press/University of Copenhagen, 2000.

Search unanswered questions...

Enter a question here...
Search: All sources Community Q&A Reference topics

Wikipedia: Palmer Raids
Top
Home > Library > Miscellaneous > Wikipedia
Alexander Mitchell Palmer

The Palmer Raids were a series of controversial raids by the United States Department of Justice and Immigration and Naturalization Service from 1919 to 1921 on suspected radical leftist citizens and immigrants in the United States, the legality of which is now in question. The raids are named for Alexander Mitchell Palmer, United States Attorney General under Woodrow Wilson.

Contents

Background

Labor and political tensions were already high before the beginning of World War I, with government repression of radical left-wing political groups beginning even before American entry into the war. But after a series of labor conflicts and violence - including bomb attacks of court buildings, police stations, churches, and homes of government officials attributed by the authorities to violent immigrant anarchist groups - the Department of Justice and its small Bureau of Investigation (BOI) (predecessor to the FBI) had begun to track their activities with the approval of President Woodrow Wilson.

In 1916, Wilson warned of:

Hyphenated Americans (who) have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life. Such creatures of passion, disloyalty and anarchy must be crushed out.[1]

(See the article Hyphenated American for an explanation of the concept.) The Bureau of Investigation significantly increased its workload on anarchist movements after 1917 when the Galleanists (followers of Luigi Galleani) and other radical groups commenced a new series of bomb attacks in several major American cities.[2][3][4][5] The Russian Revolution of 1917 was also a background factor: many anarchists believed that the worker's revolution there would quickly spread across Europe and the United States. This idea terrified many.

On June 15, 1917, Congress passed the Espionage Act. The law set punishments for actions interpreted as acts of interference in foreign policy and espionage - including many activities that would be seen by contemporary standards as dissent, such as the publication of magazines critical of the government. The act authorized stiff fines and prison terms of up to 20 years for anyone who obstructed the military draft or encouraged "disloyalty" against the U.S. government. After two anarchist radicals, Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, continued to advocate against conscription, Goldman's offices at Mother Earth were thoroughly searched, and volumes of files and detailed subscription lists from Mother Earth, along with Berkman's journal The Blast, were seized. As a Justice Department news release reported:

A wagon load of anarchist records and propaganda material was seized, and included in the lot is what is believed to be a complete registry of anarchy's friends in the United States. A splendidly kept card index was found, which the Federal agents believe will greatly simplify their task of identifying persons mentioned in the various record books and papers. The subscription lists of Mother Earth and The Blast, which contained around 10,000 names, were also seized.

Congress also passed a series of immigration, anti-anarchist, and sedition acts (including the Sedition Act of 1918 and the Anarchist Exclusion Act) that sought to either criminalize or punish (through deportation) advocacy of the violent overthrow of the government or desertion from the armed forces, defiance of the draft, or membership in anarchist or revolutionary organizations.

In 1919, the U.S. House of Representatives refused to seat Socialist representative Victor L. Berger from Wisconsin because of his socialism, German ancestry, and anti-war views.

On June 2, 1919, several bombs were detonated by Galleanist anarchists in eight American cities, including one in Washington, D.C., that damaged the home of newly appointed Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. The same bomb detonated near Franklin Roosevelt who lived across the street and was walking home with his wife. Palmer was badly shaken up (the bomber, Carlo Valdonoci, was killed by the bomb, which exploded prematurely).[6] All of the bombs were delivered with a flyer reading:

War, Class war, and you were the first to wage it under the cover of the powerful institutions you call order, in the darkness of your laws. There will have to be bloodshed; we will not dodge; there will have to be murder: we will kill, because it is necessary; there will have to be destruction; we will destroy to rid the world of your tyrannical institutions.[7]

Palmer, twice the intended victim of assassination, had a personal as well as public motivation to win the battle against the radical left and those preaching violence.[8] After his close calls at the hands of the Galleanists, he appears to have grouped all those identified with the radical left as enemies of the United States. He stated his belief that Communism was "eating its way into the homes of the American workman," and that socialists were responsible for most of the country's social problems.

Calls from a less-than-impartial press and a worried public quickly escalated for the federal government to take action against those perpetrating the violence. Pressure to take action intensified after anarchists, communists and other radical groups called on draft-age males to refuse conscription and/or registration for the army, and for troops already serving to desert the armed forces. President Wilson ordered Attorney General Palmer to take action.

At the time, Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and Luigi Galleani were in the forefront of the anti-conscription movement. Valdonoci, the Palmer house bomber, was later identified as a militant follower of Luigi Galleani. Attorney General Palmer requested and received a massive supplementary increase in Congressional appropriations in order to put a stop to the violence. Palmer then ordered the Department of Justice and the Bureau of Investigation to prepare for what would become known as the Palmer Raids.

Raids

In 1919, J. Edgar Hoover was put in charge of a new division of the Justice Department's Bureau of Investigation, the General Intelligence Division. By October 1919, Hoover's division had collected 150,000 names in a rapidly expanding index. Using this information, starting on November 7, 1919, BOI agents, together with local police, orchestrated a series of well-publicized and violent raids against suspected "radicals" and foreigners, using the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918. Palmer and his agents were accused of using torture and other illegal methods of obtaining intelligence,[9] including informers and wiretaps[citation needed].

Victor L. Berger was sentenced to 20 years in prison on a charge of sedition, although the Supreme Court of the United States later overturned that conviction. The radical anarchist Luigi Galleani and eight of his Galleanist adherents were deported in June 1919 under the provisons of the Anarchist Exclusion Act, three weeks after the June 2 wave of bombings. Although authorities did not have enough evidence to arrest Galleani for the bombings, they could deport him because he was a resident alien who had overtly encouraged the violent overthrow of the government, was a known associate of Carlo Valdonoci and had authored an explicit how-to bomb making manual titled La Salute é in Voi (The Health is Within You), used by other Galleanists to construct some of their package bombs.

In December 1919, Palmer's agents gathered 249 citizens and immigrants of Russian origin, including well-known radical leaders such as Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, and placed them on a ship bound for the Soviet Union (The Buford, called the Soviet Ark by the press). In January 1920, another 6,000 were arrested, mostly members of the Industrial Workers of the World union, a legal labor association. During one of the raids, more than 4,000 individuals were rounded up in a single night. By January 1920, Palmer and the Department of Justice had organized the largest mass arrests in U.S. history, rounding up at least 10,000 individuals.

Louis Freeland Post, then Assistant Secretary of Labor,[10] cancelled more than 2000 of these warrants as being illegal.[11] Of the many thousands arrested, 556 people were eventually deported under the 1918 Anarchist Act.[12]

For most of 1919 and early 1920, much of the public sided with Palmer, but this soon changed. Palmer announced that an attempted Communist revolution was certain to take place in the U.S. on May 1, 1920 (May Day). No such revolution took place on May 1, leading to criticism of Palmer.[13] However, on September 16 of that year the Wall Street bombing by Galleanist anarchists killed thirty-eight persons and wounded 400; it was the deadliest bombing attack to date in the United States.

On May 28, 1920, the American Civil Liberties Union published a report entitled Report of the Illegal Practices of the United States Department of Justice which carefully documented unlawful Departmental authorization of the arrests of suspected radicals, illegal entrapment by agent provocateurs and unlawful incommunicado detention. The report was signed by prominent lawyers and law professors, including Felix Frankfurter, Roscoe Pound and Ernst Freund. Palmer was called before the House Rules Committee and strongly defended his actions and that of his department, saying "I apologize for nothing that the Department of Justice has done in this matter. I glory in it."[14][15]

In June 1920, Judge George Anderson effectively ended the raids when he ordered the discharge of twenty aliens, and denounced Department of Justice actions. The discovery of trumped-up charges and the Daugherty-Burns scandal turned public opinion against further large-scale arrests and searches, though subsequent bomb attacks and public clamor to punish the radicals believed responsible did not subside.[16][17] Palmer, once seen as a likely presidential candidate, lost the nomination.[14] For their part, the Galleanists continued their violent bombing campaign, which would last another twelve years.[18]

See also

References

  1. ^ Kennedy, David M. Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), pg 24. ISBN 0195032098
  2. ^ Avrich, Paul, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background, Princeton University Press (1991)
  3. ^ Avrich, Paul, Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America, Princeton: Princeton University Press (1996)
  4. ^ Davis, Mike, Buda's Wagon: A Brief History Of The Car Bomb, United Kingdom: Verso Press (2007)
  5. ^ McCormick, Charles H., Hopeless Cases: The Hunt for the Red Scare Terrorist Bombers, University Press of America (2005), ISBN 0761831339, 9780761831334
  6. ^ Avrich, Paul, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background, Princeton University Press, 1991 ISBN 0691026041
  7. ^ Avrich, Paul, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background, Princeton University Press, 1991
  8. ^ Avrich, Paul, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background, Princeton University Press, 1991
  9. ^ Besthorn, Fred H. (2008). "Post 9-11 Terror Hysteria: Social Work Practice and The US Patriot Act". Advances in Social Work (iupui.edu) 9 (No 1): 19,20. https://journals.iupui.edu/index.php/advancesinsocialwork/article/viewFile/169/146. Retrieved 2009-09-21. 
  10. ^ Louis F. Post
  11. ^ Louis F. Post; Biography
  12. ^ Flaherty, Thomas H. (1992). Manias and Delusions (2nd ed.). Alexandria, Virginia: Time-Life Books. p. 50. ISBN 0-8094-7731-9. 
  13. ^ Murray, Robert K. (1955). The Red Scare. Westport: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 0313226733. 
  14. ^ a b Stone, Geoffrey R. (2004). Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime From the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism. New York: Norton. pp. 225–26. ISBN 978-0393058802. 
  15. ^ Irons, Peter (1999). A People's History of the Supreme Court. New York: Viking Penguin. pp. 283. ISBN 978-0670870066. 
  16. ^ Morris, Norval; David J. Rothman (1995). The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 358. ISBN 9780195118148. 
  17. ^ New York Times, Detectives Guard Wall Street Against New Bomb Outrage, 19 December 1921
  18. ^ Avrich, Paul, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background, Princeton University Press (1991), p. 213

Bibliography

  • Avrich, Paul, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background, Princeton University Press, 1991
  • Manning, Lona, 9/16/20: Terrorists Bomb Wall Street, Crime Magazine, January 15, 2006
  • David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980)

External Sources

Further reading

  • Avrich, Paul, Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America, Princeton: Princeton University Press (1996)
  • Manning, Lona, 9/16/20: Terrorists Bomb Wall Street, Crime Magazine, January 15, 2006
  • Hill, Robert A. Compiler and Editor, The FBI's RACON: Racial Conditions in the United States during World War I. Ithaca, N. Y.: Northeastern University Press (May 1, 1995). ISBN 1-55553-227-6.
  • Kornweibel, Theodore, Jr. "Investigate Everything": Federal Efforts to Compel Black Loyalty During World War I. 416 pages. Indiana University Press (May 1, 2002). ISBN 0-253-34009-8.
  • Kornweibel, Theodore, Jr. Seeing Red: Federal Campaigns Against Black Militancy, 1919-1925 Blacks in the Diaspora Series. 248 pages. Indiana University Press (December 1, 1999). ISBN 0-253-21354-1.
  • McCormick, Charles H., Hopeless Cases: The Hunt for the Red Scare Terrorist Bombers, University Press of America (2005), ISBN 0761831339, 9780761831334

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

 
 

 

Copyrights:

US History Encyclopedia. © 2006 through a partnership of Answers Corporation. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Palmer Raids".  Read more