Palmer Raids
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The Palmer Raids were a series of controversial raids by the U.S. Justice and Immigration Departments from 1918 to 1921 on the radical left in the United States. The raids are named for Alexander Mitchell Palmer, United States Attorney General under Woodrow Wilson.
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[edit] Background
The crackdown on radical left-wing political groups had actually begun during World War I. After a series of bomb attacks of court buildings, police stations, churches and homes tied 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 1915, Wilson himself 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]
Handicapped by the secrecy of these groups and limited Federal law enforcement capabilities, 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 that reverberated through several major American cities. 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.
On June 15, 1917, Congress passed the Espionage Act. The law set punishments for acts of interference in foreign policy and espionage. 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 contain 10,000 names, were also seized.
In 1919, the U.S. House of Representatives refused to seat Socialist representative from Wisconsin, Victor L. Berger, because of his socialism, German ancestry, and anti-war views. Congress also passed a series of immigration, anti-anarchist, and sedition acts (including the Sedition Act of 1918) that sought to criminalize or punish advocacy of violent revolution.
In response, on June 2, 1919 a number of bombs were detonated by Galleanist anarchists in eight American cities, including one in Washington that damaged the home of newly appointed Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. Another bomb reportedly detonated near Franklin Roosevelt. Palmer himself was badly shaken up (the bomber himself, Carlo Valdonoci, was also killed by the bomb, which exploded prematurely in his face). All of the bombs were delivered with a flyer that clearly indicated the bombers' intent:
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.
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. 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 the 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 unlucky Palmer house bomber, was later identified as a militant follower of Luigi Galleani. Attorney General Palmer requested and promptly 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, with the aim of collecting evidence on violent radical groups and arresting those in violation of federal criminal codes.
[edit] The 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 database. Using the database information, starting on November 7, 1919, BOI agents, together with local police, orchestrated a series of well-publicized raids against apparent radicals and leftists, using the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918. Palmer and his agents were accused of using various controversial methods of obtaining intelligence and collecting evidence on radicals, including harsh interrogation methods, informers, and wiretaps. Ironically, however, it was Emma Goldman's voluminous and detailed subscription lists of 10,000 persons that may have provided more information to the government than any other single source of intelligence.
Victor L. Berger was sentenced to 20 years in prison on a charge of sedition. (The Supreme Court of the United States later threw out that conviction.) The radical anarchist Luigi Galleani and eight of his adherents were deported in June of 1919, three weeks after the June 2 wave of bombings. Although authorities did not have enough evidence to arrest Galleani for the bombings themselves, 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 a 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 radicals 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. During one of the raids, more than 4,000 radicals were rounded up in a single night. All foreign aliens caught were deported, under the provisions of the Anarchist Act. All in all, by January 1920, Palmer and Hoover had organized the largest mass arrests in U.S. history, rounding up at least 10,000 individuals.
The public reaction to these raids was favorable, and, in fact, may have forestalled reactionary violence by the public in the form of vigilantes. A group of young men in Centralia, Washington, lynched Wesley Everest, an IWW member, from a railway bridge. The coroner's report stated that the man "jumped off with a rope around his neck and then shot himself full of holes."
For most of 1919 and early 1920, the public seemed to side with Palmer.
[edit] Anarchist Response
Palmer announced that a Communist revolution was to take place in the U.S. on May 1 (May Day), 1920. No such revolution took place, but on September 16 of that year, a violent blast rocked Wall Street. The Wall Street bombing killed 33 people and wounded over 400; it was never solved, but was widely attributed to radical anarchists and Galleanists (adherents of recently-deported anarchist firebrand Luigi Galleani), especially Mario Buda, in revenge for the deportation of Galleani and the indictments of their colleagues Sacco and Vanzetti for murder. Palmer, in turn, felt his actions had been vindicated by the escalating violence. His popularity led him to run for the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party, which he lost to a dark horse candidate after a deadlocked convention. Palmer then resumed his private law practice.
For their part, the Galleanists continued their bombing campaign until as late as 1932, when they blew up the house of Webster Thayer, the judge who had sentenced Sacco and Vanzetti to death. By that time, many of the Galleanists had gone into hiding, fled the United States, or had been deported.
[edit] Postscript
Many of the Russian-origin radicals deported to the USSR became quickly disillusioned by what they found in Communist Russia; others stayed and became loyal Soviet citizens until, in an ironic twist, Stalin had most of them shot as potential traitors by the NKVD in the Soviet purges of the 1930s.
[edit] See also
- Anti-Communism
- Luigi Galleani
- A. Mitchell Palmer
- First Red Scare
- Industrial Workers of the World
- Wall Street Bombing
- Woodrow Wilson
[edit] References
- 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
[edit] Footnotes
1. David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 24.
[edit] Further reading
- 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.
