There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  A discernible shift in opinion was also taking place on the Supreme Court, evident in strong dissenting opinions in the case of Abrams v. United States. During the war a Russian immigrant and anarchist named Jacob Abrams and six others had printed and distributed five thousand pamphlets criticizing President Wilson’s interventionist policy toward Russia and advising American workers that a general strike in the United States might be an effective means of protesting it. In October 1918 five of the defendants, all Russian aliens, were convicted under the Sedition Act and sentenced to prison for from three to twenty years. On November 10, 1919, the Supreme Court heard Abrams on appeal and affirmed the convictions. In dissent were justices Louis Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes.

  This represented a turnabout for Holmes, who earlier that year had voted with the court’s unanimous ruling in the case Schenck v. United States, in which Schenck, a Socialist, had been arrested under the Espionage Act for distributing antidraft pamphlets. At issue was whether strong political opinions were protected by the First Amendment or could be deemed dangerous by Congress. “The question in every [such] case,” Holmes had written, “is whether the words used are used in such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.”108

  By November, however, when the Abrams appeal came before the court, Holmes’s thinking had evolved; now in his dissent he emphasized that the “clear and present danger” standard he had proposed in Schenck must relate to some very specific plot or act. “When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths,” he wrote, “they may come to believe … that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas [and that] the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market. We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expressions of opinions we loathe.”109

  Perhaps the most effective assault on the Red Scare mentality rose from within the federal government itself. Louis Post, the assistant secretary of labor, was a veteran journalist and attorney whose scope of experience included assisting the federal Reconstruction-era suppression of the Ku Klux Klan in South Carolina. In March of 1920 Labor Secretary Wilson fell ill, and Post became acting secretary. Never entirely comfortable with the hysterical tone of the hunt for radicals, he acted quickly to undo the arrangement wherein confessions wrought from hastily rounded-up suspects, without benefit of counsel, were used against them in Labor Department deportation hearings. He began canceling deportations and releasing from custody those who appeared innocent. “Very few, if any,” Post later said, “were the kind of aliens that Congress could in all reasonable probability have intended to comprehend in its anti-alien legislation.”110

  As he acquainted himself further with Palmer’s and Hoover’s methods, Post grew outraged at the extensive use the government had made of spies and agents provocateurs to entrap suspects. In one scenario, suspected Detroit subversives were sent notices that a package was being held for them at an American Express office. Federal agents had stuffed the packages with Communist literature the government had recently confiscated, and when the victims came to pick up the packages they were arrested. A more blatant and unfair form of entrapment the seventy-one-year-old Post could not remember.111

  Given the character of his inquiries, Post would not have been surprised to learn that Hoover was in the process of investigating him, in the hope of connecting Post to the IWW or some other radical cult. Post had in fact defended men and women persecuted in free speech fights during the First World War, and he and his wife had once entertained Emma Goldman in their home.112 But when Attorney General Palmer asked a House Rules subcommittee to consider impeaching Post, Congress stated it saw no reason to do so. Post, however, cleverly seized the opportunity to testify, using the platform to turn the tables on Palmer by publicly voicing his conclusions of the wrongs inherent in the Justice Department raids. In a book he wrote about the era, The Deportations Delirium of 1920, Post accused the department of reviving “the revolting secret-police operations of Germany and Russia before the World War had abolished Kaisers and czars.”113 Considering the thousands of people Palmer had “charged with [a] deportable offense,” there were in the end, according to Post, hardly “more than a canoe load of deportees.”114

  Post’s apostasy was echoed in June 1920 in a Massachusetts court ruling that membership in neither the Communist Party nor the Communist Labor Party was adequate grounds for deportation. Judge George W. Anderson, in handing down his decision, scolded the federal government and its agents for the slipshod, unconstitutional methods they had employed in their raids in November 1919 and January 1920. In Colyer v. Skeffington, Anderson characterized the extensive use Hoover’s agency made of spies and agents provocateurs as un-American. Through these secret agents’ infiltrations, Anderson posited, the U.S. Justice Department actually “operates some part of the Communist Party in this country.” Such a damning accusation from the bench infuriated Hoover,115 who immediately ordered a stealth inquiry into Anderson’s background and beliefs. Then a minor bombshell struck: a letter surfaced written by a Hoover surrogate instructing Justice Department agents to have informers arrange “radical” meetings for the night of January 2, 1920, in order to facilitate the second round of the Palmer raids. Congress and much of the press recoiled at such barefaced evidence of entrapment. “In the light of what is now known,” the Christian Science Monitor observed, “it seems clear that what appeared to be an excess of radicalism on the one hand was certainly met with something like an excess of suppression.”116

  Attorney General Palmer had probably played the fear card for the last time in any case. In late April 1920 he had warned of a radical uprising likely to be staged on May 1, the traditional “radicals’ holiday,” and urged sharp vigilance. Dutifully, many state and city governments called out militias and placed guards at official buildings and monuments. Police ringed the New York Public Library, Pennsylvania Station, the main post office, and other civic structures, while prominent judges, politicians, and the notably wealthy received extra protection. “City Under Guard Against Red Plot Threatened Today,” blared the New York Times, which warned that authorities would “strike swiftly in the event of Red hostility.”117 But when not a single incident or disturbance was reported anywhere in the country, the press, so long complicit in the antiradical fever, finally turned on Palmer, one paper suggesting that the May Day scare had been “a mare’s nest hatched in the attorney general’s brain,” and calling on Palmer to get over his obsession with Reds and let the country move on.118 Palmer and his associates tried to defuse the criticism by saying it had been the government’s astute warnings that had prevented trouble, but few appeared willing to accept such a claim.

  Finally there came a most sweeping indictment. On May 28 a group of some of the country’s most prominent judges, including Felix Frankfurter, Roscoe Pound, Swinburne Hale, and Frank Walsh, published, with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, an explosive pamphlet titled A Report Upon the Illegal Practices of the United States Department of Justice. Calling Palmer’s brand of intolerance “the most alarming manifestation in America today,” it gave a detailed account of his methods,119 citing that

  the office of the Attorney General, acting by its local agents throughout the country, and giving express instructions from Washington, has committed illegal acts…. Wholesale arrests both of aliens and citizens have been made without warrant or any process of law; men and women have been jailed and held incommunicado without access of friend or counsel … agents of the Department of Justice have been introduced into radical organizations for the purpose of informing upon their members or inciting them to activities.120

  The report reprinted numerous affidavits in which arrested radicals complained of being served inedible food, placed for punishment in “sweat rooms,” threatened with death, and denied exercise or reading material as well as access to
medical assistance.

  Hoover, having been tipped off about the publication, had immediately ordered a thorough secret inquiry into the lives of the book’s authors in hopes of discrediting them. The idea of a young self-important Washington bureaucrat like Hoover seeking ways to besmirch the reputations of the nation’s most eminent jurists, including four Harvard Law School professors, most of whom he had never heard of, was laughable, although it anticipated the paranoia and underhandedness for which Hoover would be known in his long tenure as director of the FBI.

  Palmer and Hoover themselves proved uncooperative witnesses when brought before a Senate hearing into the Justice Department’s tactics in spring 1921. Convened by Montana’s Thomas J. Walsh, who had led President Wilson’s Industrial Commission inquiry, the hearings confirmed much of what had appeared in the Report Upon the Illegal Practices. Of Hoover’s letter instructing agents to get radical suspects to hold a meeting at a specific time in order to better enable arrests, Walsh remarked, “It is difficult to conceive how one bred in the law could ever have promulgated such an order.”121 In his own turn in the witness chair, Palmer appeared willing to fob off responsibility for the department’s excesses on Hoover, saying his young associate had been the person “who was in charge of this matter.”122

  In fairness to the attorney general, his investigations had been demanded by Congress and by an anxious press and citizenry, and some sort of radical violent conspiracy did actually appear manifest in the various bombing and attempted letter-bomb attacks of 1919–1920, including the traumatic assault on Palmer himself. That he and Hoover had misjudged the scope and sophistication of the threat, however, and had proceeded against it in ways both reckless and excessive, there was by spring 1920 little doubt.

  This much-publicized failing helped neutralize Palmer’s hopes for the 1920 Democratic presidential nomination. However, Governor Calvin Coolidge, hero of the Boston Police Strike, fared better, receiving the nomination for vice president on the ultimately victorious Republican ticket behind Warren Harding. When Harding died in office on August 2, 1923, Coolidge, who had won America’s heart with the words, “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time,” became the thirtieth president of the United States.

  AND SO THE PEOPLE came eventually to recognize something wayward, un-American even, in what their own fears had produced. One clear measure of the rapidly declining influence of anti-red fever was the nation’s reaction to what proved to be the actual worst terrorist event of the era, a horrific bombing on Wall Street in New York City on September 16, 1920. The powerful bomb, secreted in a parked horse cart near the offices of J. P. Morgan and Company and set to detonate at noon, when lunchtime crowds would fill the street, killed forty people and wounded two hundred; it harmed only a handful of the leading Wall Street financiers assumed to have been its targets, none seriously, instead maiming and snuffing out the lives of clerks, messengers, and secretaries. While Palmer lost no time in declaring it a radical plot, a call that would have found vengeful support just a year earlier, now the cry of “Anarchist!” or “Bolshevik!” fell on mostly skeptical, or at least apathetic, ears. (Police, suspecting that Carlo Tresca might be involved, rushed immediately to his office, where they grew alarmed by a bulge in his suit coat pocket that turned out to be a sandwich.)123 The case was investigated by the New York police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation but never formally solved, although in all likelihood the bomber was Mario Buda, a New England anarchist who was part of the loose-knit group that gravitated around Luigi Galleani, publisher of the anarchist periodical Cronaca Sovversiva. Buda, historians believe, was angry over the Palmer era’s persecution of his anarchist colleagues, particularly his friends Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who several months earlier had been indicted for killing a South Braintree, Massachusetts, shoe company paymaster and a guard. Buda, who sailed to Italy, was never apprehended.124

  The easing up of the great radical scare even lightened the mood toward the IWW. By July 1920 the Atlantic Monthly was lampooning the endless legal crucifixion of the Wobblies:

  Pietro is a laborer from Milan. He is standing on a street corner in Chicago. A cop tells him to move on. Pietro does not understand English and remains where he is. The cop thinks he is insolent and hits him with his club. Pietro makes wild gesticulations, which the cop interprets as violations of law and order; so be beats Pietro up and takes him to jail. Next morning Pietro is sentenced to a ten-dollar fine for resisting an officer. He hasn’t the money and works out the fine by ten days in the stone-quarry. By the time he is released, Pietro firmly believes that the government of the United States is brutal, unjust, and tyrannical. He finds an IWW pamphlet, or hears a soapboxer, and a “Red” radical has been manufactured.125

  But such journalistic empathy for the IWW came too late. Bloodied by vigilantes, cops, and government prosecutors, its leadership rent by the kind of small internecine turf wars that appear eventually in any cash-starved movement, the IWW was in a weakened condition. Certainly, its rhetoric of societal transformation already felt outmoded. The idea that capitalism was to be overthrown simply did not persuade a substantial number of American workers, nor did many adhere long to a belief in some vague millennial revolution that would create a workers’ society. In addition, the ranks of once-reliable IWW foot soldiers, such as harvest migrants and itinerant lumbermen, were diminished by the coming of the automobile and the arrival of greater mechanization in agriculture that reduced the need for field labor. The two Communist parties lured away many Wobblies, while others simply wandered off or did not rejoin the IWW after the upheavals associated with the First World War and the Red Scare.

  The “One Big Union” also increasingly found itself cut off philosophically from innovative trends in industrial labor relations such as government commissions of inquiry, corporate welfare programs, and the Protocolism of the 1909–1910 garment workers strikes. William Z. Foster delineated the ways in which the Wobblies and other groups had fallen out of step, writing, “For many years radicals in this country have almost universally maintained that the trade unions are fundamentally non-revolutionary; that they have no real quarrel with capitalism, but are seeking merely to modify its harshness through a policy of mild reform.” But, Foster emphasized, the efforts of the trade unions had proven effective, their brand of struggle “evolutionary” rather than utopian. “How long are American progressives going to continue deceiving themselves with the words of high-sounding preambles?” he asked. “When are they going to quit chasing rainbows and settle down to real work?”126

  Of course one very authentic reason for the IWW’s problems was that the Chicago trial of 1918 had impounded the organization’s leadership cadre. Rather than pursuing the agenda of a vital labor organization, those members who remained free on the outside found their time and effort largely consumed by the need to raise funds and mount clemency campaigns on behalf of those stuck in prison. “Remember you’re outside for us, and we’re inside for you,” went the words to one IWW song—a touching sentiment, but not altogether useful as the operational basis for a functioning labor organization.127

  Even among the incarcerated Wobblies differences arose. Some demanded a principled approach of noncooperation, agitation, and perhaps even the staging of a “strike” against prison work assignments. Others endorsed cooperating with prison authorities in the hopes of speeding their release, and to lessen the burden on those fighting on the outside.128

  In August 1919 the IWW managed to raise enough cash to pay bond for a number of the jailed Wobblies, who were released pending an appeal of their case. Forty-six men, including Big Bill Haywood, who was in poor health, walked out of prison, then embarked almost immediately on a nationwide speaking tour to raise additional defense money. With the war over, there were hopes that sympathy might be shown men convicted under the Espionage Act. But neither President Wilson, who continued to revile the Wobblies, nor Attorney General Palmer sh
owed any inclination to offer commutation of the original sentences, and the Supreme Court ultimately refused to hear the IWW’s appeal.

  With the Court’s ruling, thirty-seven of the forty-six released men turned themselves in to be reimprisoned. Several jumped bail, most sensationally Haywood, who discreetly boarded a ship bound for Russia, never to return. While his flight can be judged a flagrant insult to the Wobbly faithful, a refusal “to be martyred for the cause he personified,”129 he was by 1919 not the same combative, inspiring man who had gaveled the “Continental Congress of the working class” into existence in 1905. Worn down as he was by years of imprisonment, suffering from various physical ailments, his use to the IWW had probably become limited in any case, and given the government’s unwillingness to extend forgiveness, a return to the penitentiary had come to look very much like a death sentence.130

  DESPITE THE EFFECTIVENESS of Louis Post and respected jurists like Felix Frankfurter and Roscoe Pound in exposing the shameful methods of the Red Scare, it is impossible to disregard the large impact the Palmer raids had on America. They not only pasted the badge of radicalism and un-Americanism ever more firmly on the labor movement, they helped reinvigorate the gospel of “liberty of contract” and the open shop. More than 240 open shop advocacy groups appeared in forty-four states during the early 1920s, joining influential civic and business organizations such as the Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the National Grange that championed the open shop as a fundamental freedom, a vital redoubt against labor collectivism. Unions and labor supporters resisted and often tried to puncture the open shop propaganda, but business had latched on to a campaign linked to core American values, and knew it had a winner.