by Jay Feldman
In the days after November 7, there were a series of follow-up raids on URW centers and the headquarters of other radical groups. On November 8, another 250 arrests were made in Detroit and 60 in Bridgeport. The same day in New York City, a force that included “members of the anarchist, narcotic and Italian squads, plainclothes men, 700 men in uniform, agents of the Department of Justice, inspectors of the Immigration Service, and the State Constabulary,” all under the direction of the Lusk Committee, stormed over seventy reported Communist Party centers throughout the five boroughs, confiscating twenty-five tons of literature and arresting more than 1,000 individuals, only 35 of whom were held and charged with criminal anarchy. “Prisoners were taken in droves, the dangerous Reds to be divided later from the innocent bystanders.” Senator Lusk issued a statement that said, in part, “The time has come for the people of this country to take a definite stand on this question in order that we may know who our enemies are and deal with them as they deserve.”17
Palmer became an overnight hero. The Ohio State Journal out of Columbus called him “A Strong Man of Peace … in these troubled days a tower of strength to his countrymen,” while The Atlanta Constitution said Palmer brought “thrills of joy to every American,” and The Pittsburgh Post dubbed him “The Fighting Attorney General.”18
A week after the URW raids, the attorney general sent a letter and report to the Senate in which he responded to the accusations of the Poindexter resolution, detailing the Justice Department’s efforts against radical aliens.19 In the letter, Palmer recommended a peacetime sedition law that would make it possible to clamp down on radical aliens and citizens alike, and though none would ever be enacted, the next several months saw the introduction of some seventy such bills in Congress.
• • •
November 11 was Armistice Day, the first anniversary of the end of the fighting in Europe, and all across the country parades were held to commemorate the occasion. In the logging town of Centralia, Washington, a typical procession was planned.
The businessmen and law-enforcement officials of Centralia had been engaged in a long-standing campaign to eliminate the IWW presence from their town. In 1918, at least two Wobblies—one a blind newspaper vendor—had been abducted and severely beaten, and during a Red Cross parade on Memorial Day a mob had raided and forced the shutting of the local IWW hall. The office reopened in September, prompting a group of local businessmen to form the Centralia Protective Association, for the purpose of preventing further IWW activity in Centralia. After the Centralia Post of the American Legion announced the planned Armistice Day parade, rumors began circulating that the event would be the occasion of a repeat attack on IWW headquarters.
Founded in Paris by twenty World War I veteran officers on February 15, 1919, the American Legion was conceived as a patriotic support group for military veterans. It grew by staggering leaps, and within a year the membership rolls would increase to 840,000 men. The Legion was not only the largest of the patriotic organizations; it was also the most violent. Legionnaires, with the tacit approval of law-enforcement officials, were instrumental in breaking up public meetings, busting picket lines, and raiding the offices of radical groups. As one historian of the organization notes, without the contribution of the American Legion, “the Red Scare of 1919–20 might not have so effectively stopped American radicalism in its tracks.”20
The Armistice Day parade route was scheduled to pass by the reopened IWW office, which, given the rumors, was evidence enough to the Wobblies that their suspicions of an attack were well-founded. Arming themselves with rifles and pistols, six men occupied the office, four were stationed in two hotels across the street, and three more waited on a hill about a quarter of a mile away.
At about 2:00 p.m., the parade left the city park, led by the local Elks Lodge, which included two prominent Centralians—the city postmaster and the former mayor, an ex-clergyman—who carried long pieces of rope, “as a joke,” as the latter would later testify under oath.21 The Elks were followed by a marching band, a contingent of Boy Scouts, and three distinct blocs of servicemen and veterans in uniform: first, a group of marines and sailors, then the American Legion Post from nearby Chehalis, and finally the Centralia American Legion Post. Bringing up the rear were several automobiles carrying uniformed Red Cross nurses.
When the marchers passed the IWW hall without incident, it appeared that violence would be averted, but after about a block the paraders suddenly did an about-face and headed back toward Wobbly headquarters. When the Centralia Legionnaires reached the office, they stopped.
What happened next has never been definitively determined, but within seconds a fusillade of bullets poured down on the Centralia Legionnaires from all directions. The Legionnaires later claimed they were fired on without cause; the Wobblies insisted that several of the Legionnaires rushed the building and had forced open the front door before the shooting began. Whatever triggered the gunfire, three Legionnaires fell dead in the cross fire. Among those killed was Warren O. Grimm, the Centralia Legion post commander and a prominent member of the Centralia Protective Association.
Eleven Wobblies were quickly arrested, and another, Wesley Everest, himself a World War I veteran who had fought in Europe, escaped and fled the town. He was pursued by a posse, and after a firefight in which a fourth Legionnaire was mortally wounded, Everest was captured and beaten. That night, the lights went out throughout Centralia; during the blackout, a mob dragged Everest from his jail cell, beat him again, threw him into a car, and drove him out of town. En route, he was emasculated and, in a stark reenactment of the Frank Little lynching, hanged from a railroad bridge.
The Centralia killings touched off a fierce wave of reaction across the country. Senator Miles Poindexter sounded his theme of governmental indulgence of radicals, saying, “Instead of deporting and otherwise punishing as the laws provide this miserable human vermin which seeks to destroy civilization, the government has shown them many favors.”22 His fellow Washington senator, Wesley L. Jones, told the Senate, “The shots that killed these boys were really aimed at the heart of this Nation by those who oppose law and seek to overthrow our Government.”23 Meanwhile, the press cried out for vengeance. “It reads like an atrocity of the Huns,” said The Pittsburgh Press. “The sooner the firing squad is got into action the better.” The Boston Evening Transcript called it “an act of war against the United States” and insisted that “the I.W.W. organization … be throttled.” The United Presbyterian demanded that “every Bolshevist in this land change his course or swing at the end of a rope.”24
In Washington, D.C., the BI’s assistant director, Frank Burke, wired the special agents F. D. Simmons and F. W. McIntosh of the Seattle field office, instructing them to begin a complete investigation. In their initial response the day after the incident, the two agents reported that the IWW attack had been unprovoked. Several days later, however, having had more time to investigate, they learned from eyewitnesses that before any shots were fired, the parade had come to a halt and a Legionnaire had left the march, approached the IWW office, and attempted to open the door. Failing, he turned back to his fellows and said, “Come on, boys,” prompting several more Legionnaires to leave the parade and move toward the hall. The first man managed to open the door, whereupon the firing began. The agents concluded that the tragedy was not a result of premeditated action on the part of either the Wobblies or the Legionnaires, but rather had its roots in the animosity that had existed between the union men and the townspeople for months and arose spontaneously out of the heat of the occasion. “What was done by the ex-soldiers appears to have been done on the spur of the moment, on impulse,” said Agent McIntosh’s report, “and the previous feeling existing generally between the two factions made the first move a signal for rather concerted action by those within available reach.”25
Nevertheless, despite Agent Simmons’s acknowledgment of the fact that these momentous findings shed “new light on matter,” he advised that they
“be kept absolutely confidential by Department at this time as I believe County Prosecutor will resent publication as an interference with his case.”26 Not only did the Bureau of Investigation never reveal what it had discovered about the Centralia shootings, but it actually aided the prosecution in its case and even advised the county prosecutor on how to rebut the testimony of the eyewitnesses who maintained that the Legionnaires had opened the door of the IWW office and were about to enter before the shooting started. Moreover, the bureau would later point to the Centralia incident as evidence that proved the IWW was engaged in a crusade of “sabotage and lawlessness.”27
Of the ten Centralia Wobblies who were tried the following March, two were acquitted, one was found insane, and the rest were given sentences of twenty-five to forty years. In an affidavit taken after the trial, the juror E. E. Torpen declared, “I verily believe … that if these men had not been affiliated with the I.W.W. organization they would never have been convicted.”28 Other jurors confirmed this sentiment.
Shortly after the Centralia killings, the House Committee on Immigration discovered that of the nearly seven hundred hundred aliens who had been arrested on anarchy charges between February 1917 and November 1919, only sixty had actually been deported. This was largely attributable to the compassion and decency of Frederic C. Howe, the New York commissioner of immigration and administrator of Ellis Island. In his autobiography, The Confessions of a Reformer, Howe explained:
Men and women were herded into Ellis Island. They were brought under guard and in special trains with instructions to get them away from the country with as little delay as possible. Most of the aliens had been picked up in raids on labor headquarters; they had been given a drum-head trial by an inspector with no chance for defense; they were held incommunicado and often were not permitted to see either friends or attorneys, before being shipped to Ellis Island. In these proceedings the inspector who made the arrest was prosecutor, witness, judge, jailer, and executioner. He was clerk and interpreter as well. This was all the trial the alien could demand under the law …
I was advised by the Commissioner-General to mind my own business and carry out orders, no matter what they might be. Yet such obvious injustice was being done that I could not sit quiet … Members of Congress were swept from their moorings by an organized propaganda, and demanded that I be dismissed because I refused to railroad aliens to boats made ready for their deportation. I took the position from which I would not be driven, that the alien should not be held incommunicado, and should enjoy the right of a writ of habeas corpus in the United States courts, which was the only semblance of legal proceedings open to him under the law.29
With lawmakers and the newspapers calling for his head, Howe responded, “If it has been charged that I have released radicals or any one else held for deportation, the charges are entirely false. I had no power to release anybody and did not release anybody. All releases were made at Washington.”30 It made no difference, and Howe chose to resign. “There were some orders I would not carry out,” he wrote in his autobiography. “And I wanted to be rid of political office that compelled compromise.”31 His successor, Byron Uhl, would be constrained by no such lofty concerns.
While the Howe drama was playing out, the Bureau of Investigation announced that in a return raid on the Russian People’s House, agents had discovered a “bomb factory” that had somehow been missed in the earlier raids. Inspector Owen Eagan of the Bureau of Combustibles called the find “the most deadly and dangerous assortment of explosives and bomb ingredients I have seen in many a year.”32 Eagan estimated that a hundred bombs could be made from the confiscated ingredients, which allegedly included TNT as well as “muriatic acid, sulphuric acid, ammonia hydrate and glycerine sulphate.” He implied that such chemicals may have been used in the May mail bombs, and agents also stated that “the bottles had not been standing idly for any length of time.” Strangely enough, however, no other mention of the bomb-making materials was ever made, making it just one more in a series of sensational accusations in the bombing cases that went nowhere.
The imaginary bomb factory, combined with the Howe hysteria, added more steam to the red scare. The Department of Labor now reversed its earlier position and ruled that mere membership in the Union of Russian Workers was indeed grounds for deportation under the Alien Act, and when the Buford sailed out of New York harbor on December 21 with its cargo of deportees, 184 of its 249 passengers were URW members who had been apprehended in the November 7 raids. By Assistant Secretary of Labor Louis Post’s count, “no less than 175 such persons” were guilty of nothing more than their URW membership.33 One deportee who did not even belong to the group but was simply enrolled in a math course that happened to be in progress at the time of the raid, was swept up along with the others and, despite a total lack of incriminating evidence at his deportation hearing, wound up bound for Russia on the Buford.
• • •
The November roundups were just a dress rehearsal, and on January 2, 1920, the Justice Department engineered a second and far more extensive set of raids. The targets of these new attacks were the Communist Party and the Communist Labor Party.
In December, Hoover’s Radical Division sent Anthony Caminetti in the Immigration Bureau a classic example of the type of flawed and falsified intelligence that was later to become a hallmark of Hoover’s tenure as head of the FBI. Although its own investigations had found otherwise, the division’s report on the Communist Party claimed that the organization had been both a major influence in the labor disturbances of 1919 and an instrumental force in provoking the previous summer’s race riots. The day after the Buford’s departure, Hoover sent Caminetti a list, supposedly based “upon careful and thorough investigations,” of more than fifteen hundred alien CP members for whom arrest warrants were requested.34 In fact, these “careful and thorough investigations” were nothing more than the word of informers, accepted whole cloth with no corroborating evidence.
Hoover asked for the warrants by December 27, all but ensuring that the understaffed and underfunded Immigration Bureau would be unable to review every case in the allotted five days. On December 24, Labor Secretary William Wilson agreed that alien CP members were deportable, and by the end of the month Hoover’s number of requested warrants had grown to three thousand. Then, without seeking Labor Department confirmation, Hoover decided that alien Communist Labor Party members were also deportable. “The Communist Party,” he wrote to Caminetti on the same day of the labor secretary’s decision, “is exactly similar to the Communist Labor Party … It is therefore the intention of this office to treat the members of the Communist Labor Party in the same category as those of the Communist Party.”35
It was all blatantly illegal. To begin with, deportation rulings were strictly within the province of the Labor Department, which housed the Immigration Bureau. Nevertheless, as the Massachusetts district court judge George W. Anderson wrote in his ruling on a habeas corpus case brought by a group of detainees, “The general conduct and control of this wholesale deportation undertaking [was] assumed by the Department of Justice.”36 Moreover, the Bureau of Investigation’s annual appropriation from Congress was expressly for the detection and prosecution of crimes against the United States, and deportation measures were administrative, not criminal proceedings.*
Most decisively, neither the Communist Party nor the Communist Labor Party was outlawed at the time, and the Justice Department’s pursuit of them was clearly outside its purview. Hoover, of course, knew all this and later admitted as much, writing to the BI’s assistant director, Frank Burke, in February that there was “no authority under the law permitting this Department to take any action in deportation proceedings relative to radical activities.”37
Palmer was also aware of the illegality of the plan. Louis Post recounts a meeting in which the attorney general instructed Labor Department representatives that they were obliged to issue any arrest warrants he requested without his being required to p
roduce any proof of sufficient cause.38 When the Labor Department employee A. Warner Parker protested, Palmer challenged him. “Do you mean to tell me,” demanded Palmer, “that there is no law under which you can issue a warrant for the arrest of an alien when I certify that he is subject to deportation?”
“Mr. Attorney General,” responded Parker calmly, “not only is there no such law, but no such law would be Constitutional if there was one.”
But the legalities were clearly of little concern. Undercover infiltrators were ordered to have their groups arrange meetings for the evening of January 2, and on December 27 Palmer issued guidelines to Justice Department agents who would be carrying out the upcoming raids.
One more crucial step in preparation for the raids was a change in the rules governing an alien’s right to counsel. On December 31, under pressure from Hoover, John W. Abercrombie,† who was acting secretary of labor while Secretary Wilson was ill and Assistant Secretary Post was engaged with other business, changed the wording of Rule 22 of the Labor Department guidelines for deportation hearings.
Rule 22, which had been changed in the aliens’ favor by Labor Secretary Wilson the previous March, provided that at the beginning of a deportation hearing, an alien had to be informed of the right to counsel. Hoover complained to Caminetti that the attorneys who defended aliens were advising them not to make any statements about their activities or organizational affiliations. Caminetti, in turn, suggested to Abercrombie that it would be better to revert to an earlier version of Rule 22 that allowed an alien to testify “without being hampered by the advice of counsel.”39 Abercrombie immediately changed the wording of the rule to say that the alien should be apprised of the right to counsel “preferably at the beginning of the hearing,” or when the hearing had “proceeded sufficiently in the development of the facts to protect the Government’s interest.”40