by Jay Feldman
On February 7, a bill was prepared in the state legislature appropriating $100,000 “for the use of the Government in suppressing strikes and maintaining order during labor troubles.” The same day, Hanson warned the strikers that unless they ended their action by eight o’clock on the morning of the eighth, he would place the city under martial law. “The time has come,” he proclaimed, “for every person in Seattle to show his Americanism … The anarchists in this community shall not rule its affairs.”28
The labor council did not heed Hanson’s threat, but by the end of the day on February 8 it was apparent that the strike was not going to succeed. The AFL undercut the effort by calling upon its Seattle locals to withdraw their support, and the hard line adopted by Hanson resonated with the public. On February 11, the Seattle general strike ended.
As the man who had broken the strike, Hanson declared:
This was an attempted revolution which they expected to spread all over the United States. It never got to first base, and it never will if the men in control of affairs will tell all traitors and anarchists that death will be their portion if they start anything … Any man who owes a higher allegiance to any organization than he does to the Government should be sent to a Federal prison or deported. Let the National Government stop pandering to and conciliating the men who talk against it. Let us clean up the United States of America.29
Not everybody agreed with Hanson’s assessment. The Bureau of Investigation agents R. O. Samson and F. W. Byrn Jr., who were assigned to investigate the strike, telegraphed Washington that it had been a “purely local labor trouble” and, as such, did not affect the government any more than any other strike.
Hanson’s view became the prevailing one. Addressing a conference of governors and mayors on March 3, Secretary of Labor William Wilson declared that the Seattle general strike was “not industrial, economic [in] origin,” but rather a “deliberate attempt … to create a social and political revolution that would establish the soviet form of government in the United States and put into effect the economic theories of the Bolsheviki of Russia.”30
Six months after the strike ended, Ole Hanson resigned as mayor of Seattle and undertook a profitable lecture tour of the nation, speaking on the dangers of Bolshevism. By that time, the red scare would be in full swing.
The Overman Committee concluded its hearings on March 10 and issued a twelve-hundred-page report with the unlikely title Brewing and Liquor Interests and German and Bolshevik Propaganda. The Seattle general strike had solidified the committee’s opinion that the United States was under siege, and its recommendations included more rigorous enforcement of deportation laws, the passage of tougher sedition legislation, and a campaign of patriotic propaganda to counteract the Bolshevik literature that was supposedly flooding the nation. Overman declared, “We must bring home to the people the truth that a compromise with Bolshevism is to barter away our inheritance.”31
The press bought it whole. From coast to coast, headlines broadcast the looming Bolshevist menace. “EXTREMISTS HERE PLAN A REVOLT TO SEIZE POWER,” cried The New York Times. “I.W.W., ANARCHISTS, SOCIALISTS, IN CONSPIRACY TO OVERTHROW GOVERNMENT,” proclaimed the Los Angeles Times.32
At the end of March, the New York State Legislature took up the cause, authorizing the creation of a committee to investigate and report on “the scope, tendencies, and ramifications of … seditious activities.”33 The state senator Clayton R. Lusk was named chairman of the new committee, and Archibald E. Stevenson, who had dazzled the Overman Committee with his “expertise” on radicals, was appointed chief counsel. Hearings were scheduled to begin July 1.
That same month, the red scare gained momentum when the Third International meeting in Moscow called for a worldwide revolution, thereby confirming the worst fears of the U.S. government and the business community.
At 2:00 a.m. on April 30, the New York postal employee Charles Caplan was reading the newspaper as he rode the subway home after working the swing shift.34 His eye was drawn to an article about a bomb that had been delivered by mail to the home of the former Georgia senator Thomas W. Hardwick; the device had exploded, blowing off both hands of the Hardwicks’ maid and inflicting serious injuries on Mrs. Hardwick as well.
What struck Caplan was the description of the package—it was wrapped in straw-colored glazed paper and bore the return address of Gimbel Brothers department store. Just the day before, The New York Times had reported a similar package having been delivered to the office of Ole Hanson, who was out of town; only an accidental mishandling of the packet by Hanson’s staff had caused the sulfuric acid to leak out and thereby fail to set off the enclosed dynamite caps.
Three days earlier, Caplan had processed sixteen similar items at the post office and set them aside because the seals on either end of the parcels made them first-class mail, and as such they lacked the proper amount of postage. Alarmed, Caplan got off the train at the next stop and returned to the post office in midtown Manhattan, where he and the night superintendent retrieved the packages, which were alike in every detail to the description of the Hardwick and Hanson parcels. They immediately called the chief of postal inspection for New York City. It took six hours for the bomb squad to dismantle one of the bombs, which the inspector in charge of the operation said was “the work of an expert,” adding that “he had never examined a bomb of more skillful construction or deadlier possibilities.”35
The addressees on the sixteen packages included Postmaster A. S. Burleson; the Post Office Department solicitor, William Lamar; the Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes; Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis; John D. Rockefeller; J. P. Morgan; the U.S. commissioner general of immigration, Anthony Caminetti; the immigration commissioner for New York, Frederic C. Howe; and A. Mitchell Palmer, the former alien property custodian who had succeeded Thomas Gregory as attorney general on March 5.
In the next few days, it was discovered that bombs had also been mailed to, among others, senators Overman and William H. King, Secretary of Labor Wilson, and the district attorneys who had prosecuted the Chicago IWW case and the Tom Mooney case in San Francisco.‡
In all, as many as thirty-six men had been targeted.
Suspicion naturally centered on Bolsheviks and the IWW, particularly since the bombs appeared to be intended for delivery on May 1, the day celebrated throughout the world as a labor holiday. Without a shred of evidence, The New York Times and The Washington Post concluded in editorials that radicals were to blame. Hanson, now a national celebrity for his role in quashing the Seattle strike, warned of a “widespread, national effort to overthrow the Government and society by violence” and proclaimed that the government was “on the wrong track in starting conferences instead of cemeteries in dealing with the I.W.W.… I trust Washington will buck up and clean up and either hang or incarcerate for life all the anarchists in the country. If the Government doesn’t clean them up I will. I’ll give up my mayorship and start through the country. We will hold meetings and have hanging places … The conspiracy to overthrow the Government is widespread. It permeates every State in the Union.”36
On May 1, newspaper coverage of the bomb plot played up the May Day angle, and in several major cities the day’s labor parades, meetings, and rallies were set upon by patriots and the police. In Boston, a police officer was fatally stabbed, one civilian and three other policemen were shot, and scores of “radicals” were injured in riots in two different locations. The 116 people arrested were all Socialists. In New York, the Russian People’s House and the offices of the Socialist New York Call newspaper were stormed by soldiers, sailors, and civilians who broke up meetings and beat the participants, about twenty of whom required medical attention. The worst incidents took place in Cleveland, where Army tanks and troop transport trucks were used to restore order after a parade, a Public Square meeting, and Socialist Party headquarters were attacked; 1 Socialist was killed, 25 wounded, and 106 arrested.
Notwithstanding that in virtually every case t
he violence had been initiated by antiradicals and/or the police, the “radicals” were blamed, as the demand grew for “further repression of them and their activities.”37 Congress promptly announced that it would drop “the policy of tolerance” and consider legislation “to curb Bolshevism.”38
New York City police and Justice Department detectives worked around the clock on the mail bomb case. Two thousand radicals were placed under investigation as authorities proceeded from the assumption that “the conspirators … will be found among these agitators.” A high-up, albeit unidentified, federal official guaranteed: “It may be several days, a week or even a month, but I am confident that we will land every person concerned. No matter how long it takes, this investigation will continue until this case is solved. We already have several good clues, and we have made very good progress to date.”39
Rumors and hearsay abounded. A federal undercover agent cited an imaginary “Committee of Five,” considered the “most desperate band of anarchists” in the nation, as the perpetrators of the bomb plot.40 Another report claimed that “the police had twenty-one ‘Spanish anarchists’ ” and that arrests were imminent.41 One detective who first believed the whole thing to be the work of a crackpot soon changed his opinion, concluding that it was “a gigantic conspiracy by an organized gang.”42
On May 12, despite almost daily “breakthroughs” in the case, police announced that after two weeks of investigation, they had no clues and offered a reward for information. Evidence indicates, however, that the BI had actually tied the bombs to a small group of fanatic Italian anarchists—no more than fifty or sixty individuals—known as the Galleanists, but chose to keep this knowledge quiet, instead representing the bombs as part of a national conspiracy, which created greater alarm and allowed for a wider crackdown on radicals.§
On the evening of June 2, the mail bombs became almost insignificant when a new series of bombs exploded in seven cities. The blasts in Cleveland, Paterson, Boston (two), Philadelphia (two), and Pittsburgh (six) caused extensive destruction of property, but nobody was injured. In New York, however, an explosion killed a night watchman guarding the home of Judge Charles C. Nott.
The most sensational explosion occurred in Washington, D.C., where the home of Attorney General Palmer suffered extensive damage. None of the residents was harmed, but the bomber apparently tripped on the steps leading up to the front door of the house and blew himself up before he could plant the bomb. Pieces of his body were found as far as two blocks away.
Law-enforcement officials and the press once again quickly assumed that radicals were behind the bombings. The BI’s director, William Flynn, announced that the perpetrators were “connected with Russian bolshevism, aided by Hun money.”43 Similarly, The New York Times concluded, “These crimes are plainly of Bolshevist or I.W.W. origin.”44 Palmer himself called them “nothing but the lawless attempt of an anarchistic element in the population to terrorize the country.”45
The conclusion that the bombings were the work of radicals and were tied to the May 1 plot was based on copies of a leaflet found near Palmer’s house. The flyer, titled “Plain Words,” was a tirade filled with the most incendiary revolutionary rhetoric and threats:
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.
We are ready to do anything and everything to suppress the capitalist class; just as you are doing anything and everything to suppress the proletarian revolution.
The screed ended with “Long live social revolution! Down with tyranny!” and was signed, “THE ANARCHIST FIGHTERS.”46
Once again, the papers were filled with reports of swift developments in cracking the case. Though police worked twenty-four hours a day on it, they came up empty-handed.
Assistant Labor Secretary Louis Post, who would play perhaps the single most crucial role in bringing the red scare to a close, later wrote, “The lack of real ‘leads’ is remarkable … How was it possible for so gigantic a conspiracy of revolutionaries, if that is what it was, or so desperate an outburst of proletarian passion, if it was that, to have escaped detection when most of the detective agencies of the country, public and private, regardless of expense and frequently of lawful methods, were pursuing the perpetrators of its crimes with tireless zeal?”47
In fact, although neither the May Day nor the June 2 plot was ever officially solved, there is evidence that the Bureau of Investigation knew they had both been carried out by the Galleanists. The Justice Department instead characterized the bombings as part of a vast, nationwide conspiracy by a consolidated force of radicals, what Palmer labeled “a combined and joint effort of the lawless classes of the population to injure, if not destroy, the Government,” cynically manipulating the threat of such an invented insurrection in order to ignite public fears and power the antiradical/antilabor engine that drove the red scare.48
Several consequences of the June 2 bombings kicked the red scare into a higher gear. The most significant was that Palmer, a pacifist Quaker who had turned down the position of secretary of war in Wilson’s first cabinet before later accepting the alien property custodian post, was understandably shaken by the attempt on his life, and set out with a vengeance to eradicate the “anarchistic element” responsible for the bombings. Palmer announced a plan he had been working on for two months—the reorganization of the Justice Department to facilitate the hunt for radicals.49 He had already selected William J. Flynn, former head of the Secret Service, whom the attorney general called “the greatest anarchist-expert in the United States,” to replace Bruce Bielaski as director of the Bureau of Investigation;50 Frank Burke, former manager of the New York Secret Service office, as BI assistant director; and Francis P. Garvan, an experienced investigator who had worked with him in the alien property custodian’s office, for assistant attorney general in charge of overseeing the hunting of reds. Immediately after the bombings, their appointments became public. Palmer, Flynn, Burke, and Garvan, along with J. Edgar Hoover, would become five major players in the unfolding red scare.‖
Palmer, Flynn, and Garvan wasted no time in raising the specter of an imminent radical uprising. Appearing before the House Committee on Appropriations on June 13 to ask for an increase in the Justice Department budget, the attorney general said, “We have received so many notices and gotten so much information that it has almost come to be accepted as a fact that on a certain day in the future, which we have been advised of, there will be another serious and probably much larger effort of the same character which the wild fellows of this movement describe as revolution, a proposition to rise up and destroy the Government at one fell swoop.”51
Flynn and Garvan identified the “certain day in the future” as July 4,52 which had been designated by radical labor as the day for a general strike to free Tom Mooney, the San Francisco Socialist who had been convicted on trumped-up charges in the 1916 Preparedness Day bombing that killed ten people and injured forty others in San Francisco.53 Law-enforcement officials in the nation’s large cities began planning in order to crush the anticipated Fourth of July uprising.
A second consequence of the June 2 bombings was that the Lusk Committee in New York moved up its hearings from the beginning of July to June 12. On the day of its initial session, police and private detectives under the committee’s jurisdiction raided the Manhattan offices of the Russian Soviet Bureau, the unofficial embassy of the Soviet government. The bureau was run by Ludwig C. A. K. Martens, the unofficial Soviet ambassador, who had established the headquarters in January, ostensibly to set up trade relations with U.S. companies while also fostering close ties to American left-wing groups. Martens had presented his credentials to the State Department in March but was refused on the basis that the United States did not recognize the Bolshevik government.
In the raid on the bureau’s offices, the police took possession of vir tu
ally every piece of paper in the place and brought Martens and his associates in for questioning by the Lusk Committee. In defense of these actions, Lusk said the committee had information that “representatives of the Russian Soviet Government had an establishment in this city from which propaganda was being circulated advocating the Soviet form of government as it exists in Russia under the Bolsheviki.”54
Nine days later, similar raids were conducted at the Rand School of Social Science, the offices of the Left Wing Socialists, and the New York City headquarters of the IWW. When Lusk was asked about the purpose of these incursions, he answered, “Names!—Names of all parlor bolsheviki, IWW, and socialists. They will be a real help to us later on.”55
*Regin Schmidt, author of Red Scare, conducted an exhaustive search of the Department of Justice files at NARA and found that the government was instrumental in creating the red scare hysteria, rather than simply reacting to the pressure of public opinion, as earlier writers had concluded. Schmidt’s work is invaluable in documenting early DOJ and BI involvement in the creation of the red scare, but even without those sources an examination of the chronology of the unfolding of the process belies the theory that the government acted only when public opinion demanded a crackdown on the radical movement.
†Among the items Overman had supplied to the bureau were a letter charging that the Germans controlled American Jewish organizations and an unsubstantiated claim that German and Austrian arms manufacturers in the United States were providing the radical movement with weapons. Minnesota’s senator Nelson was also a BI informant (see Schmidt, Red Scare, p. 142).
‡For the Tom Mooney case, see Chapter 1 n. 18, above.
§For the case that the federal government, including President Wilson, knew the Galleanists were behind the bombings, see Schmidt, Red Scare, pp. 148–50.
‖The significance of Garvan’s appointment would become clear only half a year later, after the deportation of the 249 radical aliens aboard the “Soviet Ark” on December 21. As The New York Times reported the following day, “The action that ended yesterday had its beginning when Mr. Garvan joined the staff of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, it was said yesterday. He took office determined to stamp out the Red menace. The first results of this determination were the wholesale raids of the Department of Justice on Nov. 7 … Two hundred who went out yesterday … were the fruits of these raids.”