Manufacturing Hysteria

by Jay Feldman

Wood, who had presidential aspirations of his own, saw his duty as not only to suppress the rioting but also to make a contribution to “the rounding up of the Red element,” and ordered an investigation by Army Intelligence of the radical influence among steelworkers in Gary.52 Amid “wholesale seizures of firearms, radical literature and red flags,”53 one of the items that turned up was a handbill, supposedly issued by the Communist Party, urging “overthrow of the military in Gary.” Four copies of this flyer were found in the possession of a striker, leading Colonel W. S. Mapes to tell reporters, “This is the most dangerous piece of literature that has ever come to my attention … Before we leave we intend to clean Gary of Red agitators.”54

  Nonetheless, despite a determined effort, Army Intelligence was unable to prove the strike was a “red” plot, and a Senate Labor and Education Committee report, published while the strike was still on, concluded that while radicals were attempting to use the strike to their advantage, “it would be unfair to say that they were the leading force behind the strike.”55

  An Interchurch World Movement report was more emphatic: “Charges of Bolshevism or of industrial radicalism in the conduct of the strike were without foundation.”56

  Over a hundred striking Gary steelworkers called a press conference to refute the notion that the strike was controlled by radicals and foreigners. These men were all U.S. citizens and skilled laborers at the top end of the salary scale. “We expect to continue until we win,” they told reporters, “but at no time do we intend to resort to violence or other methods that would discredit us in the eyes of the Constitution.”57

  No matter. By that time, the impression had been firmly planted and carefully cultivated in the public mind that the steelworkers’ walkout was, in the words of Portland’s Oregonian, “an attempted revolution, not a strike.”58 The mayor of Gary declared, “Deportation is the answer, deportation of these leaders who talk treason in America and deportation of those who agree with them and work with them.”59

  On October 6, the same day that General Wood arrived in Gary and declared martial law, the National Industrial Conference, as promised by Wilson at the end of August, convened in Washington. Unfortunately, it convened without the president.

  Since the end of the war, Wilson’s focus had been on foreign affairs, as he campaigned nonstop seeking public support for American ratification of the Treaty of Versailles and participation in the League of Nations. In September, he undertook an extended train tour of the country, speaking in several towns daily from the train’s rear platform. The stress of the effort took a sharp toll on his health. He began to experience severe headaches and asthma attacks, and in Wichita on September 26 the president’s doctor insisted that the train return to Washington. Six days later, Wilson suffered a debilitating stroke that impaired his vision and paralyzed the left side of his body.

  Wilson’s withdrawal from domestic affairs had already helped create the climate in which the red scare flourished. Now, with his inability to fulfill the functions of office, the cabinet was left to run the country, a development that created an even greater opening for those who found it politically advantageous to further exploit the red scare.

  The industrial conference itself was a fiasco. It was composed of representatives from three sectors: capital, labor, and the public. That the deck was stacked may be surmised from the fact that the twenty-two-member contingent representing the “public” contained eighteen men with corporate affiliations, including John D. Rockefeller Jr. and, most incongruously, U.S. Steel’s chairman, Judge Elbert Gary. Upon learning the composition of the “public” group, the United Mine Workers Journal asked mischievously, “Then for the love of Mike who will represent the employers?”60

  As expected, the issue of collective bargaining became the line in the sand. On behalf of the labor group, Gompers introduced a resolution proposing, in part, the right of workers to organize in unions and to bargain collectively. After days of debate and suggested revisions, the resolution was voted down by the employers’ group. Incensed, Gompers walked out of the conference on October 22, and the talks collapsed.

  A week before the industrial conference broke down, Senator Miles Poindexter of Washington, yet another man with designs on the presidency, declared to the Senate his belief that the increasing number of strikes around the country was “based on a desire to overthrow our Government, destroy all authority, and establish communism.” Poindexter offered the conviction that “the Government should take vigorous action to stamp out anarchy and lawlessness. There is grave danger that a government will be overthrown when it ceases to defend itself. This is no time for sensitiveness on the part of public officials.”61

  In a grandstanding move aimed at both boosting his own presidential profile and putting pressure on the Wilson administration, Poindexter introduced a resolution requiring the attorney general to inform the Senate why the Justice Department had not taken legal action against “the various persons within the United States who … have attempted to bring about the forcible overthrow of the Government …, who have preached anarchy and sedition, who have advised the defiance of law and authority, … and openly advocated the unlawful destruction of industry and … property.”62 Three days later, the Senate adopted Poindexter’s resolution.

  In fact, Palmer and the Justice Department had been working on that very scheme since the previous January; the heat from the Poindexter resolution now brought things to a head. Two days after Poindexter’s motion, The New York Times reported that “a Federal official … estimated that there were at least 50,000 aliens in the United States who were openly or secretly working for a Bolshevist form of government in this country … The evidence of the activities of these foreigners is now in the possession of the Federal authorities, and there is reason for stating that a strict enforcement of the deportation laws against these alien trouble makers is among the possibilities of the near future.”63

  Days before the Justice Department plan was scheduled to start, the third great strike of the fall began, giving Palmer yet one more justification for putting his deportation program into action.

  Although the coal industry, like the steel industry, had realized enormous profits during the war, the wages of miners had remained stagnant. After the war, coal companies refused to negotiate a wage increase, claiming that the wage agreement of September 1917, which was supposed to expire when the war ended—but no later than April 1, 1920—was still in effect because, while fighting had stopped, the war could not be officially considered over until a treaty had been signed. When the conservative United Mine Workers union declined to support miners’ calls for action, wildcat strikes broke out in mines around the country. Finally, in September 1919, UMW officials put forth a proposal for a new contract that included a 60 percent pay increase, a six-hour workday, and a five-day workweek. Union leaders also set a deadline of November 1 for the signing of a new agreement, hoping that with winter approaching, the need for coal would be a strong bargaining chip in their favor.

  The mine owners would agree to no more than a modified wage increase, and that only under pressure from Secretary of Labor William Wilson, himself a former miner. In response, the UMW called a strike for November 1, labeling it “the greatest enterprise in the history of trade unionism in America.”64

  From his sickbed, President Wilson condemned the impending strike, and three days before it was to begin, he met with Palmer. Without consulting the rest of the cabinet, the two decided to seek an injunction. Palmer applied to Judge Albert B. Anderson of the Indiana District Court, and on October 31, Anderson issued a temporary order prohibiting the leadership of the UMW from involvement in the strike. Union leaders, while officially complying with the order, refused to call off the action. On November 1, nearly 400,000 coal miners across the country left the job.

  In announcing the strike, the UMW anticipated and tried to head off the inevitable red-baiting. “In calling this strike, the United Mine Workers have but one object in view,�
� said the UMW Journal, “and that is to obtain just recognition of their right to a fair wage and proper working conditions. No other issue is involved here and there must be no attempt on the part of anyone to inject into the strike any extraneous purposes.”65

  Their plea had no effect. Just as in the Seattle general strike, the Boston police strike, and the nationwide steel strike, the cry of “Bolshevism” went up immediately. The coal company spokesman T. T. Brewster issued a press release asserting—with no evidence—that Lenin and Trotsky had ordered and financed the strike.66 The Seattle Times referred to striking miners as “the I.W.W.’s, the American followers of Bolshevism and the anarchist syndicalists.”67

  “Thousands of them,” reported the New York Tribune, “red-soaked in the doctrines of Bolshevism, clamor for the strike as the means of syndicalizing the coal mines … and even as starting a general red revolution in America. The public has no conception of the way in which a large element among the miners has absorbed the Bolshevik economy and the theory of soviet control.”68

  Palmer condemned the leaders of the coal and steel strikes as ultra-radicals “who have no sympathy for our form of Government and no respect for our institutions. They would transplant the chaos of Russia to American soil.”69

  Just as it had in Seattle and Boston, and the steel strikes, the Bureau of Investigation secretly watched union leaders, including tapping their phones without warrants, reading all telegrams to and from the UMW’s acting president, John L. Lewis, and gaining confidential access to UMW bank accounts.‡

  The bureau, moreover, falsely discredited the coal strike as a radical revolt, despite BI agents’ reports that the action was not controlled by radicals, and ultimately assisted in breaking the strike, as BI accusations of radical influence were used to justify the need for government intervention.70

  With the steel strike in its second month, the coal strike under way, and the Poindexter resolution turning up the pressure on the Justice Department, the plan that had been afoot for almost a year was now unleashed, and the “skimming of the great American melting-pot” began in earnest.

  *Bowen concluded that service in the armed forces during the war had led to the radicalization of African-Americans. President Wilson, a southerner, had himself expressed a fear of this when he told his personal doctor, on March 10, that “the American negro returning from abroad would be our greatest medium in conveying Bolshevism to America” (Link, Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 55, p. 471).

  †One undercover agent heard “considerable radical talk” at strike headquarters, and another thought that since the Communist New England Worker newspaper supported the strike and distributed copies among the strikers, it was “the first step on the part of the radicals to participate in the strike” (Schmidt, Red Scare, p. 217).

  ‡About radical labor leaders, Palmer said, “We … have our spying system and know every one of them and by and by some of them are going to get hurt. I would advise them to go into the hills somewhere and shoot themselves” (New York World, Nov. 7, 1919).

  CHAPTER 7

  A Lawless Government

  History has come to know them as the Palmer raids. They started on November 7, 1919, six days after the beginning of the coal strike, when the Department of Justice marked the second anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution with nationwide raids on the offices of the Union of Russian Workers, an organization that Attorney General Palmer described as being “even more radical than the bolsheviki.”1 In eighteen cities, including Buffalo, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Newark, New Haven, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis, federal and local agents invaded URW headquarters and indiscriminately swept up everyone in sight, members and nonmembers, aliens and citizens alike.

  When the Union of Russian Workers was founded by exiled Russian anarchists in New York in 1907, its “Fundamental Principles” urged “the toiling masses [to] make themselves masters of all the riches of this world by means of a violent social revolution.” The URW was declared to be “a broad revolutionary organization of workers carrying on a direct struggle against all the institutions of capitalism and Government,” whose purpose was to “educate the working class to take the initiative and exercise power themselves in all their undertakings, thus developing the consciousness of the absolute necessity and inevitability of a general uprising—social revolution.”2

  A dozen years later, the URW had evolved into a tame, loosely affiliated group of local chapters that functioned as a social, educational, and mutual-aid society for Russian immigrants, with between four thousand and seven thousand members, the great majority of whom had joined the organization with no inkling of or interest in the subversive fundamental principles.3 The group’s anarchist leadership had returned to Russia after the Bolshevik revolution, and in 1919 URW offices were places where recent immigrants could attend a dance on the weekend; take night classes in subjects like English, math, automobile repair, and driver’s education; and generally commiserate about life in a new country as they downed a glass of vodka with fellow expatriates. In 1923, an investigator who had studied the URW wrote that “no disorder, no crime, no preparation for crime, even, has been traced to any group of the Union of Russian Workers. Their sin, such as it is, has consisted in talk only.”4

  Despite the organization’s benign existence, the Bureau of Investigation, insisting on a literal interpretation of the fundamental principles, had been monitoring the URW for well over a year before the November 1919 raid. By February 1919, anticipating the deportation of URW members, the BI had infiltrated the Russian People’s House (the URW’s national headquarters in Manhattan) on the conviction that it was a camouflage for an anarchist underground. With a minimum of accurate investigative effort, the BI could undoubtedly have determined that the URW had evolved into little more than an ethnic fraternal organization, but the bureau’s view, skewed by its determinedly antiradical bent, was inclined to see revolutionaries under every rock and attribute far more power to them than they actually possessed.

  In March, however, the Labor Department instructed its personnel to “avoid technicality or literalness in the enforcement” of the Alien Act of 1918,5 and in July the Immigration Bureau told the Justice Department that no individual should be arrested or deported for mere membership in the URW, but rather that “the alien must be an active Worker in order to be subject for deportation.”6 Not to be denied, the BI contended the opposite, that an alien’s membership in the organization was indeed grounds for deportation, and with its greater funding and increasing influence the Justice Department was able to force its will on the Labor Department.

  On August 14, the Lusk Committee raided the Russian People’s House, a four-story brownstone on East Fifteenth Street, confiscating hundreds of copies of the URW journal Bread and Freedom and taking fourteen men into custody, three of whom were held on $10,000 bail. The next day, apparently inspired by the committee’s example, J. Edgar Hoover suggested a similar raid on the Russian People’s House to the BI’s assistant director, Frank Burke; the following month, he again proposed the idea to Burke, saying it would be a way of getting the names of the people connected with the organization, in preparation for “a simultaneous raid” on URW facilities across the country.7 At the end of October, he informed the commissioner general of immigration, Anthony Caminetti, that the BI was organizing a nationwide roundup of URW members and requested that the Bureau of Immigration furnish arrest warrants. Caminetti complied, issuing five hundred warrants.

  On November 7, under orders from the BI chief, William Flynn, to “leave no stone unturned to end all symptoms of anarchy in the United States,”8 Justice Department and local law-enforcement agents swept down on URW headquarters around the country and, despite having only five hundred arrest warrants, took 1,182 individuals into custody.9 Of those, just 439 were held for deportation hearings, in some cases for extended periods of up to five months. In a number of circumstances, prisoners were physically and mentally abused and even
tortured.10 Bails were set at $10,000 and up.

  The largest haul of people, literature, and office equipment was made at the Russian People’s House, where 360 “anarchists” were arrested—308 were soon released11—and “tons of literature” confiscated.12 According to press accounts, law-enforcement officials meted out gratuitous violence in the raid on the Russian People’s House. “A number of those in the building,” said The New York Times, “were badly beaten by the police during the raids, their heads wrapped in bandages testifying to the rough manner in which they had been handled.” The New York World story noted that despite the display of force, “little resistance was offered.” When thirty-five of the arrestees were transported to Ellis Island the following day, the Times reported, “most of them … had blackened eyes and lacerated scalps as souvenirs of the new attitude of aggressiveness which has been assumed by the Federal agents against Reds and suspected Reds.”13

  Ostensibly, the raids were to root out the perpetrators of the June bombings. Although the Justice Department almost certainly suspected the Galleanists by this time, the official line was still that authorities had not found “the faintest clue” to indicate who was behind the bombings and that these raids would sooner or later yield leads.14

  But the real reasons for the raids were twofold. The first purpose was to round up alien “radicals” for deportation, as evidenced by the fact that citizens who were arrested were quickly released, whereas aliens were detained. The second purpose was as a trial run for a much larger operation that would soon be launched. “This is the first big step,” announced the attorney general’s office, “to rid the country of these foreign trouble makers.”15 Three days after the URW raids, the Department of Justice confirmed “that the Government’s war on these alien agitators and conspirators is just getting under way and that there will be no letup until the country has been rid of them. Other important arrests in various parts of the country are known to be pending.”16