by Jay Feldman
CHAPTER 6
A Skimming of the Great American Melting-Pot
As July 4, 1919, approached, the press parroted Justice Department officials’ warnings, issuing dire alarms about the forecast revolutionary uprising. “REIGN OF TERROR PLANNED,” blared a New York Times headline, while on the opposite coast the Los Angeles Times proclaimed, “RED RISING ORDERED.”1
The new BI director, William Flynn, met with law-enforcement officials from major cities across the country in order to coordinate federal, state, and local efforts to contain the impending revolt. Two companies of federal soldiers were sent to Chicago to assist the police department, which was also bolstered by a thousand volunteers. In New York, the entire eleven-thousand-man police force was assigned to twenty-four-hour duty, guarding all government buildings as well as the New York Stock Exchange and the homes of prominent citizens, while the state militia and hundreds of specially sworn deputies stood by on alert. Armed soldiers guarded the Federal Building in Boston, and police officers filled the streets of many American cities. In Oakland, California, police rounded up known radicals and held them in jail for the duration of Independence Day. Across the bay in San Francisco, police raided the local IWW headquarters and arrested three men, despite Captain John O’Meara’s assurance, “We have had secret details working among the alleged radical elements and reports show there is nothing to be apprehensive of.”2
O’Meara’s assessment was entirely accurate, the extravagant predictions of Palmer, Flynn, and Garvan notwithstanding. When the Fourth of July came and went without so much as a hint of an attempted revolution, Palmer and other law-enforcement officials attributed it to their security measures. The Christian Register, on the other hand, believed that the projected July 4 revolt “had been considerably over-emphasized in an attempt to impress public opinion with the gravity of an ultimate danger.”3
Scarcely had the fictitious threat of a Bolshevik insurrection passed when a rather more substantial crisis unfolded. On July 19, inflamed by reports of attacks by black men on white women, a mob of soldiers, sailors, and marines on leave in Washington, D.C., invaded an African-American neighborhood, severely beating one black man and threatening several others before police could stop them. The incident touched off four nights of race riots in the nation’s capital, leaving six people dead and a hundred injured.
The Washington race riots were not the first that year—there had already been smaller disturbances in other cities, including Charleston, South Carolina, in May, and Longview, Texas, earlier in July—but the D.C. disturbances were of a significantly greater magnitude and, taking place as they did in the nation’s capital, focused national attention on the issue of race relations in the United States.
The great migration of half a million African-Americans from the rural South to the industrial North during World War I had created friction between blacks and whites over housing and employment, and employers exacerbated the strains by hiring unemployed blacks as strikebreakers. Tensions were further intensified by the return of nearly 400,000 African-American soldiers, many of whom were determined to claim their civil rights as their due for having served the country in the war, which contributed to a growing resolve among blacks to resist and fight back against lynchings and other virulent manifestations of racism.
In the heat of summer, animosities sizzled, and the antagonism finally erupted in the streets. Twenty-five cities experienced major race riots, as more than 120 people were killed during what came to be known as the Red Summer of 1919.
The worst riots took place in Chicago. Five days after Washington quieted down, the Windy City exploded. The immediate cause was the death of Eugene Williams, an African-American youth who, while swimming in Lake Michigan, inadvertently crossed an invisible line dividing white and black beaches. Whites on the shore began pelting Williams with rocks, one of which hit him in the head, and he drowned. When police arrived, they refused to arrest the man responsible and instead took a black man into custody, triggering a weeklong rampage, during which fifteen whites and twenty-three blacks were killed, more than five hundred people injured, and close to a thousand people, many of them immigrants, left homeless by the fires that burned in South Side neighborhoods. It took the arrival of the state militia to stabilize the situation.
As was the case with the Seattle general strike, the government pinned the source of the trouble on radical agitators, who had been actively recruiting, with notably little success, among African-Americans. This view was given authority by Robert A. Bowen, director of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Translations and Radical Publications in New York. Three weeks before the Washington riots, in a report titled “Radicalism and Sedition Among the Negroes as Reflected in Their Publications,” Bowen, a South Carolinian, warned that African-Americans were being led down the primrose path by radical black editors in a “concerted effort, abetted by certain prominent white publicists, to arouse in the negro a well-defined class-consciousness, sympathetic only with the most malign radical movements.”4*
The government could not, Bowen warned, ignore such a trend.
Just as in the Seattle situation, the press jumped on the bandwagon. “Reds Accused of Stirring Up Negro Rioters,” cried the New York Tribune, while The New York Times quoted an unnamed federal official who said, “It is an agitation which involves the I.W.W., Bolshevism and the worst features of other extreme radical movements.” A Times editorial revealed how readily the stigma of disloyalty had been redirected after the war: “We know that in the early days of the war there was a pro-German and pacifist propaganda among the negroes, which may well have turned into a Bolshevist or at least Socialist propaganda since.”5 The editorial went on to say that “the situation presupposes intelligent direction and management”—the clear implication being that African-Americans, like laborers, were not, in and of themselves, capable of finding dissatisfaction with their condition, and therefore only some “intelligent direction and management” by outside agitators could explain the underlying discontent that found expression in the form of race riots or labor strikes.
For months, the Bureau of Investigation had been carrying out surveillance of prominent black radicals on both the right and the left, including the black nationalist Marcus Garvey, the outspoken NAACP leader and Crisis editor W. E. B. Du Bois, and the Socialist editors A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen. Now, two days into the Chicago rioting, the new BI assistant director, Frank Burke, ordered the Chicago field office to begin an inquiry into whether radicals had been instrumental in causing the outbreak. Although this and other Justice Department investigations failed to produce any direct link connecting the riots and either radical propaganda or activities, J. Edgar Hoover kept the issue alive in an internal BI memo that, while offering no evidence, insisted that radicals were somehow implicated.
In the official Justice Department report issued after riots occurred in a number of other cities, Bowen went a step further, insisting that the very occurrence of the riots proved that “there can no longer be any question of a well-concerted movement among a certain class of Negro leaders of thought and action to constitute themselves a determined and persistent source of a radical opposition to the Government, and to the established rule of law and order.”6
Initially, Palmer disagreed, stating that the riots “were due solely to local conditions and were not inspired by Bolshevik or other radical propaganda.”7 But the Justice Department continued to peddle the fabrication that radicals were behind the uprisings, as The New York Times reported that “according to information now in the hands of the Department of Justice … I.W.W. and Soviet influence were at the bottom of the recent race riots in Washington and Chicago.”8 The effect of such baseless charges was to keep suspicions of both radicals and African-Americans on the front burner and to reinforce the notion that the red menace was reaching into every sector of American life.
Palmer, whose well-known presidential ambitions were, at least to begin with, well served
by his anti-red crusading, soon came to the conclusion that radical propaganda was indeed corrupting the African-American population. “These radical organizations have endeavored to enlist Negroes on their side, and in many respects have been successful,” he told Congress.9 Just as a few months earlier all Germans and German-Americans had been suspect, all African-Americans were now worthy of suspicion.
By midsummer, Palmer had begun to discern “a bolshevist plot in every item of the day’s news.”10 To deal with the perceived threat, he created, on August 1, the General Intelligence Division to coordinate antiradical activities and tapped the rising Justice Department star J. Edgar Hoover as its head. The GID, better known as the Radical Division, quickly turned into the hub of the Bureau of Investigation, and the crusade against radicals became the BI’s main pursuit, as Hoover and the bureau’s director, Flynn, deftly exploited the red scare to increase the BI’s influence and funding.
Using the skills he had learned as a cataloger at the Library of Congress, Hoover established a cross-referenced index-card system called the “Editorial Card Index” that by the end of 1920 contained “over 200,000 cards, giving detailed data not only upon individual agitators connected with the ultraradical movement, but also upon organizations, associations, societies, publications, and special conditions existing in certain localities.”11 Within months of the GID’s creation, its work expanded to cover general intelligence work, including “economic and industrial disturbances” as well as international issues. Hoover received weekly reports from the field offices and issued a confidential weekly bulletin to select government officials, covering “the entire field of national and international operations and … all situations at home or abroad” that were worthy of scrutiny.
It was during the red scare following World War I that the foundation of the later, all-powerful FBI was laid, as Hoover’s Editorial Card Index mushroomed to 450,000 cards by December 1921,12 containing what Palmer called “a remarkable record of facts, available for future use at the hands of the Government.”13
A month after the establishment of the GID, two new radical organizations arose that commanded the division’s attention. The Bolshevik revolution had splintered the Socialist Party, as the more radical members advocated the overthrow of the U.S. government and the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat, while the moderates continued to favor the slower approach of evolutionary change and working to change capitalism from within. By the time the party’s annual convention opened in Chicago on August 30, a majority of the more than 100,000 members backed the first group, which was itself split into two factions: the American-born, who sought to establish a uniquely U.S. variety of Communism, and the immigrants, who saw the Russian model as the only viable alternative.
Both dissident groups split from the Socialist Party, with the foreign-born bloc, which represented 90 percent of the insurgents, founding the Communist Party, thus aggravating already well-developed xenophobic attitudes, and the native-born circle forming the Communist Labor Party.
The combined defections reduced Socialist Party membership by over two-thirds, to about thirty thousand, but the establishment of the two new Communist parties reinforced the government’s belief that the numbers and influence of radicals were on the rise everywhere, even though the combined membership of the two Communist parties was between forty thousand and seventy thousand—at the most, less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the adult population of the United States.14 Characteristically, out of fear of the radical ideas posed by these parties, the government grossly overestimated the actual threat they posed.
Because the Sedition Act was no longer in effect after the war, the Justice Department could not prosecute radicals for simply advocating the overthrow of the government. Instead, the strategy became the deportation of alien radicals under the Alien Act of October 16, 1918. This statute, which superseded the already stringent immigration law that had gone into effect in May 1917, allowed the government to deport, with a warrant from the secretary of labor, any alien belonging to an anarchist organization. A classic example of the principle of guilt by association, the 1918 law made it possible for an alien to be deported for simply being a member of the IWW, even without having engaged in any illegal activity. As John Higham wrote in Strangers in the Land, his classic study of American nativism, the Alien Act was a reflection of the widespread “impression that radicalism permeated the foreign-born population, that it flourished among immigrants generally and appealed to hardly anyone else.”15
The deportation policy enacted in late 1919 had actually been formulated much earlier. On January 8 of that year a headline in the New York World declared, “MEET ‘RED’ PERIL HERE WITH A PLAN TO DEPORT ALIENS.” The story below stated, “Announcement was made in Washington that there is a definite plan to round up and deport all the alien ‘Reds’ in the United States and that the Departments of Labor and Justice are co-operating in preparing a list of every person in the country who has been drawn into the Bolshevik movement.”
The government lost no time in putting the plan into action. On the morning of February 6, two hours before the Seattle general strike was scheduled to begin, immigration officers swept up forty men,16 described by the Chicago Tribune as a “motley company of I.W.W. supporters, bearded labor fanatics, and Bolshevist agitators,” loaded them into two heavily guarded sleeper cars, and shipped them east for deportation.17 According to one immigration official traveling with the train, the agency had been working on the project for more than a year.
That the red scare was, to a significant degree, a government move against labor can be clearly seen from the Tribune’s prophetic evaluation of the situation, as it noted that “the train blazed a trail which, immigration authorities agree, will entirely solve the greatest danger of an industrial unrest during the reconstruction period.”18
As the train made its way to the East Coast, one newspaper after another cheered “such a skimming of the great American melting-pot.”19 The Seattle Times thought it high time that “the interference of foreigners in the affairs of this country be curbed” and that immigrants be made to understand that “this is a country of Americans, by Americans, and for Americans.” The Washington Post applauded the “serious cleaning up” of “bewhiskered, ranting, howling, mentally warped, law-defying aliens” and “international misfits.”
Few and far between were voices like The Duluth Herald, which expressed concern over “those who are trying to make the fight against Bolshevism broad enough to cover everything that doesn’t appeal to them,” and the Socialist New York Call, which believed that the deportations struck at “the whole question of the right to think differently from the powers that be.”
The government was moving steadily and decisively toward wholesale deportations of aliens and prosecution of citizens, as The New York Times revealed after the discovery of the May Day mail bombs. “The expected round-up of anarchists and other radicals who are agitating for the overthrow of this Government did not begin yesterday,” said the Times on May 2. “The authorities [are] moving slowly, but thoroughly,” with the expectation that “all agitators of alien citizenship will be deported, while those of American citizenship will be held for criminal prosecution in the Federal courts.”
The distinction was a crucial one, for while proceedings against citizens were judicial, against aliens they were administrative, and therefore not only required a significantly lesser degree of proof but also were not subject to the lengthy delays of the judicial process. As New York’s immigration commissioner, Frederic Howe, pointed out, “In deportation cases it is not necessary to provide a preponderance of testimony, or to convince the court of the justice of the charge; all that the government needs to support its case is a ‘scintilla’ of evidence, which may be any kind of evidence at all. If there is a bit of evidence, no matter how negligible it may be, the order of deportation must be affirmed.”20
A week after the June 2 bombings, Wilson’s cabinet discussed “d
eportation of aliens who advocated changing [the] government by force.”21 Attorney General Palmer proposed “very stringent alien & sedition laws,” which he thought would “make it possible to reach radical socialists who did not resort to force,” but whom he considered nonetheless dangerous. In a series of ensuing meetings, officials of the Labor Department, which had jurisdiction over immigration and deportation, and officials of the Justice Department agreed to “the closest cooperation and harmony” regarding matters of deportation.22
By August, when the GID came into existence, the plan to deport alien radicals was moving relentlessly toward implementation. On August 12, the BI’s director, William Flynn, issued a directive ordering “a vigorous and comprehensive investigation” of anarchists, Bolsheviks, and others who advocated changing the government by force or violence; the emphasis was to be on aliens, “with a view of obtaining deportation cases.”23 Two weeks later, Hoover and Assistant Attorney General John T. Creighton met with the immigration commissioner general, Anthony Caminetti, and they agreed to arrest fifty targeted aliens who had been under investigation.24
At the same time, the war between capital and labor continued unabated. Whereas the largest strike of 1918 had involved 60,000 machinists, 1919 saw nine separate labor disturbances that involved more than 60,000 workers. By the end of August, there had been the Seattle general strike and the New York City building trades strike in February (60,000 and 125,000 workers, respectively); the Chicago building trades lockout in July (115,000); the Chicago stockyards strike (65,000) and the nationwide railroad shop workers strike in August (250,000).25