by Tim Weiner
Attorney General Gregory had an answer. As the searchlights played across America and the sirens of warning wailed louder, he put the Bureau of Investigation to work as a political strike force.
The Bureau conducted two major political raids during the war. The first was a nationwide attack on the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a left-wing labor movement with 100,000 members in the United States. The IWW had passed a resolution against the war; the rhetoric alone was a political crime under the Espionage Act. The attorney general intended to put the IWW out of business. President Wilson heartily approved. The New York Times opined that the union’s leaders were “in effect, and perhaps in fact, agents of Germany,” under the theory that the Germans paid the IWW to subvert American industries. The newspaper suggested that “Federal authorities should make short work of these treasonable conspirators.” Bureau agents and American Protective League members did so. They kicked in the doors at IWW offices, homes, and union halls in twenty-four cities across America, seizing tons of documents and arresting hundreds of suspects. Three mass trials led to the Espionage Act convictions of 165 union leaders. Their prison sentences ran as long as twenty years.
Politicians and the public applauded the arrests. Calls for the jailing of traitors, scoundrels, and spies rang from the pulpits of churches and the chambers of state legislatures. The attorney general found an easy target. He authorized the Bureau of Investigation to round up the “slackers”—men who had failed to register for the military draft—in the spring and summer of 1918.
The biggest slacker raid by far was a three-day roundup set for September 3, the most ambitious operation in the decade-long history of the Bureau of Investigation. Thirty-five agents gathered under the direction of Charles de Woody, the head of the Bureau’s New York office. The Bureau’s men were backed by roughly 2,000 American Protective League members, 2,350 army and navy men, and at least 200 police officers. They hit the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn at dawn, crossed the Hudson River in ferries, and fanned out across Newark and Jersey City. They arrested somewhere between 50,000 and 65,000 suspects, seizing them off sidewalks, hauling them out of restaurants and bars and hotels, marching them into local jails and national armories. Some 1,500 draft dodgers and deserters were among the accused. But tens of thousands of innocent men had been arrested and imprisoned without cause.
Attorney General Gregory tried to disavow the raids, but the Bureau would not let him. “No one can make a goat of me,” de Woody said defiantly. “Everything I have done in connection with this roundup has been done under the direction of the Attorney General and the chief of the Bureau of Investigation.”
The political storm over the false arrest and imprisonment of the multitudes was brief. But both Attorney General Gregory and the Bureau’s Bielaski soon resigned. Their names and reputations have faded into thin air. Their legacy remains only because it was Hoover’s inheritance.
“THE GRAVEST MENACE TO THIS COUNTRY”
The Red threat began to capture the imagination of the American government in the last weeks of World War I.
President Wilson sent some 14,000 American troops into combat against Bolshevik revolutionaries on the frozen frontiers of Russia. They were still fighting when the guns fell silent in Europe on November 11, 1918. The first battle of America’s war on communism was fought with live ammunition.
The president also launched a political attack on Russia’s radicals. To the shock of his top aides, Wilson personally authorized the publication of secret dossiers purporting to show that the leaders of the Russian Revolution were paid agents of the German government. These documents had been delivered to the White House by one of Wilson’s experts on propaganda, who thought he had produced “the greatest scoop in history.” The president consulted no one about their authenticity. They were fakes—crude forgeries sold to a credulous American by a czarist swindler—but they changed the political conversation in America.
Congress now joined the war on communism. In January 1919, the U.S. Senate began hearings on the threat, led by Senator Lee Overman of the Judiciary Committee. The Justice Department gave Senator Overman open-ended access to Bureau of Investigation records. In turn, his committee gave the Bureau copies of all its reports from every other branch of government. These files formed a cornerstone for the foundation of J. Edgar Hoover’s career.
The tone of the hearings was set by the testimony of a New York lawyer named Archibald Stevenson, a largely self-taught expert on the subject of the Soviets.
“The idea, then, is to form a government within this Government?” asked Senator Overman. “And to overthrow this Government?”
“Precisely,” Stevenson said.
“You think this movement is growing constantly in this country?”
It was, Stevenson said, and it constituted “the gravest menace to this country today.”
“Can you give us any remedy?” asked the senator.
“The foreign agitators should be deported,” he said. “American citizens who advocate revolution should be punished.”
Senator Overman concluded by saying it was high time to start “getting this testimony out to the American people and letting them know what is going on in this country.”
As the Senate’s alarm at the Red threat increased, the fighting spirit mustered for the world war festered. Nine million American workers in war industries were being demobilized. They found new jobs scarce. The cost of living had nearly doubled since the start of the war. As four million American soldiers started coming home, four million American workers went out on strike. The United States never had seen such confrontations between workers and bosses. The forces of law and order felt the Reds were behind it all.
On January 21, 1919—the day that the Senate took its first testimony on the Red threat—thirty-five thousand shipyard workers in Seattle walked off their jobs. Federal troops put down their uprising, but the spirit of the strike spread to coal mines and steel mills, to textile workers and telephone operators, and to the police force in Boston. Hundreds upon hundreds of strikes threw sand in the gears of the American engine. Political and economic fear ran across the country.
The White House was vacant. President Wilson had set sail across the Atlantic aboard the USS George Washington, seeking to bring an end to all wars. He and his most trusted aides went to France in pursuit of his dream of a League of Nations, a global alliance to keep the peace. Wilson called his proposal a covenant; a messianic element tinged his mission. His wartime allies, the leaders of England and France, found Wilson unbearably sanctimonious. They were far more interested in punishing Germany than in building a new world founded on Wilson’s visions.
Without a peace treaty, the United States was still in a state of war abroad. Without a president in the White House, the nation had no one to lead the war at home.
Wilson was out of the United States from December 4, 1918, to February 24, 1919. Nine days later, he left again for France, and he stayed away for four months. On the day he set sail for the second time, Wilson named an old political ally as the new attorney general.
A. Mitchell Palmer was a handsome man of forty-seven, a three-term congressman from Pennsylvania, a pacifist Quaker and a smooth talker with flexible principles and soaring ambitions. A ranking member of the Democratic National Committee, he had served as Wilson’s political manager at the 1912 Democratic convention. During 1918, he had run the Justice Department’s Alien Property Office as a fief, giving friends and cronies custody of seized German property and patents worth millions. Now he leaped at the chance to run the Justice Department.
Palmer had one great goal in mind. He fancied himself the next president of the United States.
“WE WILL DYNAMITE YOU!”
Thirty-six brown paper packages of dynamite made their way through the U.S. mails in late April 1919. They constituted the biggest conspiracy to commit political murder in the history of the United States.
On April 29, the first bomb arr
ived at the Atlanta home of Thomas W. Hardwick, who had just left his seat as a U.S. senator from Georgia. Hardwick had helped pass the new Anarchist Exclusion Act, aimed at deporting radical foreigners. The bomb blew off the hands of his housekeeper.
Not one of the mail bombs reached its intended victim. A postal clerk in New York found sixteen of them on the postage-due shelf; the bombers hadn’t used enough stamps. The would-be assassins were evidently semiliterate; they had garbled some of the addressees’ names. But their hit list was sophisticated.
Attorney General Palmer led it. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes was on it. So was Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who had overseen more than one hundred Espionage Act convictions. Five members of Congress were marked for death, including Senator Overman. The secretary of labor and the federal immigration commissioner, both responsible for deportation proceedings under the Anarchist Exclusion Act, were on the list. So were the mayor and the police commissioner of New York. The most famous targets were the nation’s foremost bankers, John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan. The least famous was a plump, balding twenty-nine-year-old Bureau of Investigation agent named Rayme Finch.
Finch had spent months chasing members of a gang of Italian anarchists led by Luigi Galleani, the founder of an underground journal called Cronaca Sovversiva—the Subversive Chronicle. Galleani had perhaps fifty followers who took to heart his calls for violent revolution, political assassination, and the use of dynamite to sow terror among the ruling class. Literate revolutionaries drew a bright line between propaganda of the word and propaganda of the deed. Galleani believed in deeds. Finch and a handful of his fellow Bureau of Investigation agents had followed a broken trail from the Ohio River Valley to the Atlantic Ocean, ending in a February 1918 raid on Cronaca Sovversiva’s offices in Lynn, Massachusetts. The raid led to Galleani’s arrest and, a year later, to a judicial order for his deportation, along with eight of his closest adherents, under the new Anarchist Exclusion Act. Late in January 1919, Galleani had filed his final appeal when a flier appeared in the mill towns of Massachusetts and Connecticut, signed by “The American Anarchists.” It promised a coming storm of “blood and fire.”
“Deportation will not stop the storm from reaching these shores,” it said. “Deport us! We will dynamite you!”
On the night of June 2, 1919, nine more bombs went off in seven cities. Again, each target escaped alive. In New York, it was a municipal judge, though a night watchman on the street was killed. In Cleveland, it was the mayor; in Pittsburgh, a federal judge and an immigration inspector; in Boston, a local judge and a state representative. In Philadelphia, the bombers hit a church; in Paterson, New Jersey, a businessman’s home.
In Washington, D.C., a young man blew himself up on Attorney General Palmer’s doorstep. The blast rocked a row of elegant town houses. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the thirty-seven-year-old assistant secretary of the United States Navy, was coming home from a late supper with his wife, Eleanor, when the explosion shook the spring night. The front windows of their home at 2131 R Street in Washington were blown out. Across the street, Palmer was standing in the ruins of his front parlor. The façade of his house was shattered.
The sidewalks were filled with shards of glass and broken branches and bits of flesh and bone. It took a very long time to determine that the fragments of the disintegrated body were in all likelihood the mortal remains of a twenty-three-year-old immigrant named Carlo Valdinoci, the publisher of the Cronaca Sovversiva.
Copies of a fresh diatribe against the government, printed on pink paper, fluttered in the wreckage. “It is war, class war, and you were the first to wage it under cover of the powerful institutions you call order, in the darkness of your laws,” it read. “There will 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.” It was signed “The Anarchist Fighters.”
“THE BLAZE OF REVOLUTION”
The Boston and Pittsburgh field offices of the Bureau of Investigation were the first to report that Moscow was behind the bombings.
Palmer presumed that the Reds were responsible. He had become the attorney general in the same week that the Soviets had proclaimed the Comintern—the international Communist movement. Announcing that the movement aimed to overthrow the existing world order, Lenin had openly invited Americans to join them.
On the morning of June 3, sitting in the ruins of his library, Palmer received a small delegation of Senate and House members. “They called upon me in strong terms to exercise all the power that was possible,” he recounted. “ ‘Palmer, ask for what you want and you will get it.’ ”
On the front page of every newspaper in America, he vowed to hunt down the bombers. Now he needed hunters.
First he chose a new leader for the Bureau of Investigation: William J. Flynn, the former chief of the U.S. Secret Service. Palmer proudly introduced him to the press as America’s finest detective. An old-time New York cop with a high school education, Flynn had worked as a plumber before finding his calling. He cut a fine rotogravure figure with his derby, his cigar, and a big belly rounded by beer and beefsteaks. He had a number of newspaper reporters in New York and Washington wrapped around his finger, and he had cultivated a reputation as a master sleuth who never gave up on a case.
Flynn had warned the nation that hundreds of thousands of foreign agents were within the United States. The government, he believed, was well within its rights to jail any number of suspects to catch a spy or a saboteur. His first move was to raid the Reds.
On June 12, 1919, Bureau of Investigation agents and New York state police sacked the newly opened Soviet diplomatic offices at 110 East 40th Street in Manhattan. They seized reams of files—but nothing to link the Reds to the bombings.
The next day, Attorney General Palmer went to Congress and asked for money and new laws to stop the Reds and radicals. He warned that the next attacks could come within days or weeks, perhaps on the Fourth of July. He had started to see a growing global conspiracy of Communists and common crooks, parlor pinks and sexual perverts—“a mass formation of the criminals of the world to overthrow the decencies of private life.” He took the bombing of his house as the clearest sign that “the blaze of revolution was sweeping over every institution of law and order” in America, “licking into the altars of churches, leaping into the belfry of the school bell, crawling into the sacred corners of American homes.”
On June 17, Palmer and Flynn met at the Justice Department with a handful of aides. They emerged to announce that the Bureau of Investigation would round up the bombers in short order. Flynn was convinced the attacks were the work of the Russian Bolsheviks.
Six days later, the Bureau’s agents interviewed Luigi Galleani, who was sitting in a holding cell on Deer Island in Boston Harbor, awaiting deportation. They got nothing from him. The next morning, he was on a ship to Italy, never to set foot in America again. Galleani and his anarchist gang were never charged; the investigation went on for twenty-five years without resolution. His followers would soon strike again, carrying out the biggest terrorist attack America ever had witnessed.
“SECRET AGENCIES PLANTED EVERYWHERE”
Two ships crossed in the Atlantic. One took Galleani away from America. The other brought the president home.
On July 8, Woodrow Wilson returned to the United States after five futile months fighting for his League of Nations. His vision of world peace was slipping away, evanescent as the ocean waves. He had scant support from America’s wartime allies. The U.S. Senate was increasingly scornful. Wilson soon was off on a cross-country campaign, taking his argument to the citizenry. No national radio stations existed in 1919; the president had to deliver his message in person. He traveled over eight thousand miles by railroad, making forty speeches in fifteen states.
The president appeared as a prophet of doom. Wheezing, coughing, seeing double, blinded by heada
ches, Wilson delivered an apocalyptic vision to the American people. He foresaw the nation and the world under the never-ending threat of war. He spoke of the Russian Revolution as if it were a gigantic cloud of deadly gas, floating west across the Atlantic, bringing “the poison of disorder, the poison of revolt, the poison of chaos” to America.
“Do you honestly think, my fellow-citizens, that none of that poison has got in the veins of this free people?” the president asked. “Men look you calmly in the face in America and say they are for that sort of revolution, when that sort of revolution means government by terror.” Without peace, “that poison will steadily spread, more and more rapidly until it may be that even this beloved land of ours will be distracted and distorted by it.”
He warned that the United States would have to be ready to fight “in any part of the world where the threat of war is a menace.” The enemies of the United States would not rest: “You have got to watch them with secret agencies planted everywhere.” The nation would have to keep a great standing army and navy in a constant state of high alert.
“And you can’t do that under free debate,” the president said. “You can’t do that under public counsel. Plans must be kept secret. Knowledge must be accumulated under a system which we have condemned, because we have called it a spying system. The more polite call it a system of intelligence.”
As the president whistle-stopped westward across the Great Plains, a new American intelligence system was taking shape in Washington.
“WHEN THE TIME CAME FOR A REVOLUTION”
On August 1, 1919, the attorney general assigned J. Edgar Hoover to crush the Communist conspiracy against the United States. He had taken an instant liking to Hoover, whose tireless work won strong commendations from his chiefs at Justice.