Palmer Raids

When Palmer replied to the Senate's questions of October 17, he reported that his department had amassed 60,000 names with great effort. Required by the statutes to work through the Department of Labor, they had arrested 250 dangerous radicals in the November 7 raids. He proposed a new Anti-Sedition Law to enhance his authority to prosecute anarchists.

Raids and arrests in January 1920

Men arrested in raids awaiting deportation hearings on Ellis Island, January 13, 1920

Cartoon by Archibald B. Chapin on the South Bend News-Times – November 8, 1919

Inasmuch as Attorney General Palmer struggled with exhaustion and devoted all his energies to the United Mine Workers coal strike in November and December 1919, Hoover organized the next raids. He successfully persuaded the Department of Labor to ease its insistence on promptly alerting those arrested of their right to an attorney. Instead, Labor issued instructions that its representatives could wait until after the case against the defendant was established, "in order to protect government interests." Less openly, Hoover decided to interpret Labor's agreement to act against the Communist Party to include a different organization, the Communist Labor Party. Finally, despite the fact that Secretary of Labor William B. Wilson insisted that more than membership in an organization was required for a warrant, Hoover worked with more compliant Labor officials and overwhelmed Labor staff to get the warrants he wanted. Justice Department officials, including Palmer and Hoover, later claimed ignorance of such details.

The Justice Department launched a series of raids on January 2, 1920, with follow up operations over the next few days. Smaller raids extended over the next 6 weeks. At least 3000 were arrested, and many others were held for various lengths of time. The entire enterprise replicated the November action on a larger scale, including arrests and seizures without search warrants, as well as detention in overcrowded and unsanitary holding facilities. Hoover later admitted "clear cases of brutality." The raids covered more than 30 cities and towns in 23 states, but those west of the Mississippi and south of the Ohio were "publicity gestures" designed to make the effort appear nationwide in scope. Because the raids targeted entire organizations, agents arrested everyone found in organization meeting halls, not only arresting non-radical organization members but also visitors who did not belong to a target organization, and sometimes American citizens not eligible for arrest and deportation.

The Department of Justice at one point claimed to have taken possession of several bombs, but after a few iron balls were displayed to the press they were never mentioned again. All the raids netted a total of just four ordinary pistols.

While most press coverage continued to be positive, with criticism only from leftist publications like The Nation and The New Republic, one attorney raised the first noteworthy protest. Francis Fisher Kane, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, resigned in protest. In his letter of resignation to the President and the Attorney General he wrote: "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." Palmer replied that he could not use individual arrests to treat an "epidemic" and asserted his own fidelity to constitutional principles. He added: "The Government should encourage free political thinking and political action, but it certainly has the right for its own preservation to discourage and prevent the use of force and violence to accomplish that which ought to be accomplished, if at all, by parliamentary or political methods." The Washington Post endorsed Palmer's claim for urgency over legal process: "There is no time to waste on hairsplitting over infringement of liberty."

Aftermath

In a few weeks, after changes in personnel at the Department of Labor, Palmer faced a new and very independent-minded Acting Secretary of Labor in Assistant Secretary of Labor Louis Freeland Post, who canceled more than 2,000 warrants as being illegal. the 10,000 arrested, 3,500 were held by authorities in detention; 556 resident aliens were eventually deported under the Immigration Act of 1918.

At a Cabinet meeting in April 1920, Palmer called on Secretary of Labor William B. Wilson to fire Post, but Wilson defended him. The President listened to his feuding department heads and offered no comment about Post, but he ended the meeting by telling Palmer that he should "not let this country see red." Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, who made notes of the conversation, thought the Attorney General had merited the President's "admonition", because Palmer "was seeing red behind every bush and every demand for an increase in wages."

Palmer's supporters in Congress responded with an attempt to impeach Louis Post or, failing that, to censure him. The drive against Post began to lose energy when Attorney General Palmer's forecast of an attempted radical uprising on May Day 1920 failed to occur. Then, in testimony before the House Rules Committee on May 7–8, Post proved "a convincing speaker with a caustic tongue"< and defended himself so successfully that Congressman Edward W. Pou, a Democrat presumed to be an enthusiastic supporter of Palmer, congratulated him: "I feel that you have followed your sense of duty absolutely."

On May 28, 1920, the nascent American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which was founded in response to the raids, published its Report Upon the Illegal Practices of the United States Department of Justice, which carefully documented unlawful activities in arresting suspected radicals, illegal entrapment by agents provocateur, and unlawful incommunicado detention. Such prominent lawyers and law professors as Felix Frankfurter, Roscoe Pound and Ernst Freund signed it. Harvard Professor Zechariah Chafee criticized the raids and attempts at deportations and the lack of legal process in his 1920 volume Freedom of Speech. He wrote: "That a Quaker should employ prison and exile to counteract evil-thinking is one of the saddest ironies of our time." The Rules Committee gave Palmer a hearing in June, where he attacked Post and other critics whose "tender solicitude for social revolution and perverted sympathy for the criminal anarchists...set at large among the people the very public enemies whom it was the desire and intention of the Congress to be rid of." The press saw the dispute as evidence of the Wilson administration's ineffectiveness and division as it approached its final months.

In June 1920, a decision by Massachusetts District Court Judge George W. Anderson ordered the discharge of 17 arrested aliens and denounced the Department of Justice's actions. He wrote 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." His decision effectively prevented any renewal of the raids.

Palmer, once seen as a likely presidential candidate, lost his bid to win the Democratic nomination for president later in the year. The anarchist bombing campaign continued intermittently for another twelve years.9]].

See also

• Espionage Act of 1917
• Industrial Workers of the World
• McCarthyism
• 1918-1920 New York City rent strikes

References

Bibliography

• Avakov, Aleksandr Vladimirovich (2007). Plato's Dreams Realized: Surveillance and Citizen Rights from KGB to FBI. Algora Publishing. ISBN 978-0-87586-495-2. ISBN 0-87586-495-3.
• Avrich, Paul (1991). Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background. Princeton University Press.
• Chafee, Zechariah (1920). Freedom of Speech. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Howe.
• Coben, Stanley (1963). A. Mitchell Palmer: Politician. New York: Columbia University Press.
• Daniels, Josephus (1946). 'The Wilson Era: Years of War and After, 1917–1923. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
• Dunn, Robert W. (1948). The Palmer Raids. New York: International Publishers.
• Finan, Christopher M. (2007). From the Palmer Raids to the Patriot Act: A History of the Fight for Free Speech in America. Beacon Press. ISBN 978-0-8070-4428-5.
• Hagedorn, Ann (2007). Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America, 1919. New York: Simon & Schuster.
• Kennedy, David M. (1980). 'Over Here: The First World War and American Society. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Murray, Robert K. (1955). Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919–1920. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Pietrusza, David (2007). 1920: The Year of Six presidents. New York: Carroll & Graf.
• Post, Louis F. (1923). The Deportations Delirium of Nineteen-twenty: A Personal Narrative of a Historic Official Experience (Reissued ed.). New York. ISBN 1-4102-0553-3. ISBN 0-306-71882-0.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Shepley, Nick (2015). The Palmer Raids and the Red Scare: 1918-1920: Justice and Liberty for All. Andrews UK Limited. ISBN 978-1-84989-945-1.

Further reading

• Pusey, Allen (2015). "Palmer Raids Target Immigrants". ABA Journal. 101: 100.
• Popkova, Anna (2 January 2022). "Imagining the Russian Community: Novoye Russkoe Slovo, the First Red Scare, and the Palmer Raids, 1919-1920". Journalism History. 48 (1): 41–60. doi:10.1080/00947679.2022.2027140. S2CID 246293091.
• Cohen, Harlan Grant (2003). "The (Un)favorable Judgment of History: Deportation Hearings, the Palmer Raids, and the Meaning of History" (PDF). New York University Law Review. 78: 1431.

External links

• Media related to Palmer Raids at Wikimedia Commons