by Philip Dray
Wesley Everest, an IWW lumberjack and decorated war veteran, had donned his uniform that morning in honor of the holiday. He had fired at the attackers from the IWW hall, then dropped his rifle and sprinted for safety as the Legion men came crashing in. He made it as far as a river just outside the town before he was overtaken. Wheeling around and holding his pursuers at bay with a pistol, he cried, “Stand back! If there are ‘bulls’ in the crowd, I’ll submit to arrest. Otherwise lay off me.”82 When Dale Hubbard, nephew of the president of the Employers Association, ignored Everest’s warning and advanced, Everest fired, killing Hubbard on the spot. Everest was then swarmed by Legion men, who, furious over the deaths of “Wedge” and Hubbard, beat him mercilessly before marching him to jail and leaving him in a bloodied heap on the floor of the lockup. That night the streetlights were doused long enough for a lynch mob to enter the jail. As he was dragged toward the door Everest shouted to his cellmates, “Tell the boys I died for my class.”83
EACH DAY, IT SEEMED, there were new threats to consider, new reports of radical mischief reaching the desk of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. In March 1919 the Third International meeting in Moscow had confidently embraced a policy of world revolution. The left wing of the Socialist Party, favoring the shift in direction shown by the Third International, did well in party elections in the United States that spring. In response the party ruptured, the more staid executive committee expelling forty thousand members, two-thirds of its body, for trying to turn the party into a revolutionary cause. In August this left wing departed formally, itself splitting into two factions—the aliens forming the Communist Party, with about sixty thousand members; the Americans, led by John Reed, forming the Communist Labor Party, with ten thousand. The old Socialist Party was left in the hands of Eugene Debs and Morris Hillquit.
Palmer had no sooner been confronted with the fact that two separate Communist parties had formed in the United States than muckraker Lincoln Steffens emerged after a brief visit to Moscow to make the spirited pronouncement, “I have seen the future, and it works.”84 Given the simultaneous rise in the number of strikes in America, the attorney general perhaps could not be blamed for imagining Communist and anarchist plotters in every darkened doorway. The increase in labor stoppages alone was disturbing—up from twelve hundred in 1914 to about thirty-five hundred each in the years 1918 and 1919, a trend accompanied by a soaring rate of new union membership, from 2.7 million at the beginning of the war to 4.2 million shortly after the armistice. President Wilson, meanwhile, distracted by his advocacy for the League of Nations and convalescing from the stroke he had suffered, was out of touch, not convening a single cabinet meeting between August 1919 and April 1920. In lieu of any calming words from the White House, and with increased action and rhetoric on the radical and labor fronts, the public outcry about dangerous “reds” grew in volume. Congress was moved in October 1919 to pass a resolution, aimed at the attorney general, demanding greater strides in the effort to rid the country of subversives.85
The apparent lameness of the White House in the crisis was a reminder that 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue would soon have a vacancy, and there was no discounting Palmer’s political ambition as he strategized how best to put down domestic radicalism. Two provincial figures, Ole Hanson and Calvin Coolidge, men far less connected to federal authority than he, had been transformed overnight into American icons for their sturdy displays of patriotism in the face of local labor troubles allegedly fomented by radicals. Surely leading the Justice Department’s crusade in that same battle on a national scale would be an even more impressive accomplishment, and a fitting enhancement to Palmer’s résumé if the Democratic Party wished to consider him as their standard-bearer.
The expectation of such an opportunity was not unrealistic. His life thus far had been more or less a steady, unimpeded march toward ever-grander attainments and rewards. Declared an intellectual prodigy as a child, he had graduated from Swarthmore at age nineteen in 1891 with the highest honors in the college’s history; in 1893 he passed the bar and worked in private practice for a decade before winning election to two terms in Congress from northeastern Pennsylvania. As vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee in 1912, he had helped deliver Pennsylvania to Woodrow Wilson, who in gratitude offered Palmer the position of secretary of war, which Palmer graciously turned down on account of his Quaker faith. He did accept from Wilson a series of key judicial assignments, including the influential post of alien property custodian, overseeing the wartime seizure of German patents and their sale to U.S. interests on the open market; the president named him attorney general in early 1919 over the objections of Thomas W. Gregory, the man retiring from the position, who distrusted Palmer as a smooth-handed political operator.
While Palmer worried about anarchists and possible Soviet influence in the United States, the outlook of his special deputy, J. Edgar Hoover, was somewhat more complex. Hoover’s dedication to ferreting out radicals appears to have been motivated not solely by concern for their politics, but by contempt for what he perceived as their hatred of authority, their disrespecting of religion, and their expressions of sexual freedom. As one historian of the era notes, to Hoover, a character such as Emma Goldman, for her long-standing belief in free love, atheism, and political assassination, “must have appeared a witch and a whore all wrapped in one.”86 Having worked initially for the Library of Congress, Hoover proved adroit at cataloging and managing vast reams of information, and he had quickly become the Justice Department’s leading expert on U.S.-based radicals, keeping tabs on no fewer than sixty thousand suspects.87 He also maintained a scrapbook of “anti-American” articles published by the radical press, soon to be joined by a second scrapbook of press notices about his and Palmer’s activities.
Because of their adoption of the revolutionary creed of the Third International, both of the new domestic Communist parties were now, in Hoover’s view, vulnerable to the Immigration Act of 1918, in that they were pursuing an alien ideology to seek the overthrow of the U.S. government. On November 7, 1919, his and Palmer’s agents responded, staging raids against the Union of Russian Workers, a New York–based labor organization founded in 1907 with four thousand members nationwide. The raids—timed to coincide with the second anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution—were carried out in a dozen cities, although the main focus was on the group’s lower Manhattan headquarters at Fifteenth Street off of Union Square, where two hundred men and women were captured along with numerous boxes of “radical propaganda.” A New York Times account suggests a scene that would be repeated dozens of times in cities across the country in the coming months:
The raid was executed swiftly. Automobiles filled with detectives, uniformed police, and federal agents drove up quietly one by one and parked on side streets. Those within had not the slightest idea of what was coming and the police had penetrated the Russian People’s House from top to bottom before any alarm was given.
Some of the women [were] especially vociferous in their demands to know the meaning of the raid. The harsh command to “Shut up, there, you, if you know what’s good for you,” brought silence, and those in the building were hustled into waiting automobiles and driven away.
A number of those in the building were badly beaten by the police during the raid, their heads wrapped in bandages testifying to the rough manner in which they had been handled…. Doors were taken off, desks were ripped open, and even the few carpets were torn up to find possible hiding places for documents.88
The November 7 raids were roundly applauded. “A fine looking bunch they are,” Buffalo’s chief of police said of fifty arrested radicals in his city. “It’s too bad we can’t line them up against a wall and shoot them.”89 The mayor of Davenport, Iowa, was even more explicit: “Load up the riot guns for immediate use and give them a reception with hot lead. We don’t want any Reds here and we will go to the limit to keep them out.”90 Humane by comparison was Tennessee senator K. D. McKellar’s suggestion
that America erect a penal colony on Guam for the nation’s political undesirables.91
Despite public and official applause for the Justice Department’s actions, the raids had scored little in the way of actual radicals. Most of the Union of Russian Workers’ upper echelon had repatriated to Russia following the Bolshevik Revolution, and the members who had stayed in the United States were chiefly engaged in nonpolitical work such as reading circles, musical events, and English-language classes. As historian Richard Gid Powers details, “Of the 650 arrested in New York [there was] evidence to hold only 39 after their initial interrogation.”92
There remained considerable pressure on Palmer from Congress, however, to carry through with the deportation of more then two hundred radicals seized in recent months and held at New York’s Ellis Island, particularly after November 25, when a supposed “bomb factory” was discovered in New York City and linked by investigators to the Union of Russian Workers. Deportations required the complicity of the U.S. Department of Labor, which governed issues related to immigration, and soon, with the coordination of the Labor and Justice departments, the first of what was assumed would be many large deportations was scheduled. Hoover had found the vessel necessary for the job in an aging troop transport, the Buford, bought by the United States from Britain in 1898 to ferry military personnel home from the Spanish-American War.
On December 20, after a last supper on American soil of frankfurters, cabbage, rice pudding, apple sauce, and coffee, the 249 deportees at Ellis Island were told to ready themselves for departure. The three best-known were Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and Peter J. Bianki, general secretary of the Union of Russian Workers. “Lugging their grips and old-fashioned, foreign-looking portmanteaus,” it was reported,
the Reds trooped into … the brilliantly lighted [waiting] room. They put their belongings down in heaps and squatted down on them. Some sat with hands under chin, elbows on knees; some read books; others glanced through tattered copies of newspapers. Groups talked noisily in Russian. Here and there a man strummed the melancholy strains of Russian peasant songs upon a battered banjo, guitar, or mandolin.93
Goldman and Berkman had been arrested at the Mother Earth offices on June 15, 1917, and charged with conspiracy to interfere with the draft; both were sentenced to two years in federal custody. Berkman was dispatched to a penitentiary in Atlanta, and Goldman to a facility in Jefferson City, Missouri; Mother Earth and a paper Berkman edited, the Blast, had been shut down. Despite their arrests on antidraft efforts, Hoover had managed to steer both of their cases into immigration violations, claiming Goldman’s long-ago naturalization to have been irregular and citing her “advocation of violence” for having published remarks in Mother Earth sympathetic to the three bomb-makers killed in the July 4, 1914, explosion in New York.94
“I do not consider it a punishment to be sent to Soviet Russia,” Goldman, who was dressed entirely in black, informed a reporter covering the Buford’s departure. “On the contrary I consider it an honor to be the first political agitator deported from the United States. The Czar of Russia never resorted to such autocratic methods as the government of the United States has in dealing with Russians…. This practice of deportation means the beginning of the end of the United States government.”95 Peter Bianki told the same newsman, “Damn the country … glad to go!” Ascending the gangplank of the ship, Bianki turned one last time and with a gesture toward shore shouted, “Long live the revolution in America!”96
The Buford hoisted anchor at dawn on December 21. “Shortly after 6 o’clock, splashing and rasping in the silence of the empty bay, the Buford’s prow swung lazily eastward,” it was recorded. “A patch of foam slipped from under the stern, and 249 persons who didn’t like America left it.”97 A security detail of 250 soldiers rode along on what the newspapers had dubbed “the Soviet Ark.” “It is hoped and expected that other vessels, larger, more commodious, carrying similar cargoes, will follow in her wake,” suggested the Cleveland Plain Dealer.98 Press coverage of the sailing was ample and mostly positive, providing Hoover with many new articles to add to his scrapbook, as well as the limerick:
I saw fair Emma leave our shores,
And crepe was festooned on her lid;
She sailed with many other bores who talked too much,
As Emma did.99
Two weeks after the boat’s departure, on January 2, 1920, Palmer’s agents struck again, as raids in thirty-three cities nabbed four thousand people. On January 6 the exercise was repeated, bringing the total number of suspects detained to almost ten thousand.
Lost in all the excitement of the raids, however, was the fact that somewhere at the bottom of all this activity there was supposed to be a conspiracy actively trying to overthrow the government of the United States. Thus far only four bombs, small iron balls actually, had been discovered in a single Communist Party meeting place. These had been removed under great care to a U.S. attorney’s office and for precaution submerged in a large pail of water, where they were duly exhibited to curious reporters, who transmitted word of their seizure far and wide. This damning evidence of a planned revolution, however, one critic of the raids later noted, “must have melted in the pail of water, for they were never heard of again.”100
QUIET MISGIVINGS ABOUT THE MANNER in which the campaign to rid America of “undesirables” was being carried out had begun to be shared among some jurists, journalists, and reformers. Raids, deportations, and the holding of suspects incommunicado as a means of battling un-Americanism had itself begun to feel un-American. Was the threat truly so great that it merited the disregard of civil liberties and—in the case of New York’s legislature, which in April 1920 expelled five duly-elected Socialists—the notion of democratically elected government?
The five Socialists—Charles Solomon, Louis Waldman, Samuel Orr, August Claessens, and Samuel DeWitt—had been called before the Assembly Speaker and accused of “seeking seats in the Assembly after having been elected on a platform that is absolutely inimical to the best interests of the State of New York and the United States.” In an all-night session at which the ouster was discussed, State Senator Clayton R. Lusk, who led the effort, insisted the Socialists represented revolutionary elements and declared that “any man who says the country is not in danger is uninformed, unintelligent or disloyal.”101 The Socialists’ defenders included Senator William Copeland Dodge, who countered that expulsion would contradict the Bill of Rights,102 as well as Assemblyman Theodore Roosevelt Jr., son of the former president, who warned that despite the body’s abhorrence of the principles of the Socialist Party, neither the accusations of disloyalty during the war nor intent to overthrow the U.S. government had been proven; to expel men duly elected to office would be “a crime against representative government.”103 After extensive and rancorous debate the Assembly voted 140–6 to suspend the five.
This bizarre act was instantly denounced. “Even the Czar of Russia,” pointed out the Schenectady Citizen, “permitted Socialists to sit in the Duma,” adding that about fifty thousand New York residents would be effectively without representation in the state Assembly with the expulsion of the men they had elected to office.104 There was also increasing doubt about the excessive actions of the legislature’s Lusk Committee, which had authorized raids on several left-leaning entities, chiefly in New York City. While some of the individuals captured in the Lusk raids had been aboard the Buford, most of the raids had produced rather comical results—Russian musicians captured during a rehearsal and packed off to jail with their instrument cases; “thirty-eight merrymaking youths” arrested while dancing at a party in Brooklyn; and several elderly men who seemed, upon reflection, as likely a threat to the United States as the pigeons in Herald Square.
Above all, it was the Buford deportations that had begun to haunt the nation’s conscience, gathering doubt about the sailing’s propriety best captured in a cartoon in Max Eastman’s Liberator showing the smoke from the departing vessel’s funnel obliter
ating the face of the Statue of Liberty.105 Labor Secretary William B. Wilson reported that the original intention had been to not deport anyone with family in the United States until arrangements could be made for all to travel together, but that officials at Ellis Island had taken matters into their own hands. Authorities there later professed to have been unaware that married men were among the deportees, a claim that was hardly credible since a group of wives and children had staged a noisy, heartrending demonstration in a futile attempt to see their husbands and fathers as the Buford prepared to leave.106
It was more troubling that the deportees had been treated with scant regard for their civil rights. Palmer and Hoover had exploited the fact that deportation issues were under the jurisdiction of the Labor Department, whose inquiries were pursued as an administrative matter under the Immigration Act of 1918 and were not subject to the legal constraints of criminal law or due process. As the deportations were technically not punishment, none of the accused was represented by counsel, nor did a judge or jury evaluate any of the “verdicts.” The Buford’s passengers, categorized by the press as “the un-holiest cargo that ever left our shores,”107 were for the most part only “guilty” of being aliens who harbored left-leaning thoughts. Alexander Berkman had tweaked Hoover about this just before the ship left, slyly pointing out that most of the “passengers” were not yet anarchists, but that he (Berkman) would make them so by the time they’d crossed the Atlantic.