by Jay Feldman
On the last day of 1919, in a New Year’s message to the nation, Palmer assured the American public that he fully intended “during the forthcoming year to keep up an unflinching, persistent, aggressive warfare against any movement, no matter how cloaked or dissembled, having for its purpose either the promulgation of [radical] ideas or the excitation of sympathy for those who spread them.”41 As Palmer framed it, then, the anti-red campaign was not against criminal activity but against the spread of ideas.
Louis Post, intensely disturbed by what he saw developing, wrote in a New Year’s entry in his journal, “At present there are signs of an overthrow of our Government as a free government. It is going on under cover of a vigorous drive against ‘anarchists,’ an anarchist being almost anybody who objects to government of the people by tories and for financial interests.”42
The January 2 operation was carried out in thirty-three cities, with The New York Times reporting 5,483 arrests.43 Of those, 2,435 were turned over to immigration officials for deportation proceedings, but since the Department of Justice had hijacked the entire process, Immigration’s role was merely to apply a rubber stamp.
The most authoritative overview of the Palmer raids comes from Post. His ringside seat as assistant secretary of labor, together with his unswerving commitment to the principles of constitutional democracy, makes his account by far the most convincing. About the January 2 raids he wrote:
Toward public law and private rights, these raids were if possible more defiantly reckless than those of November … [T]hey involved lawless invasions of peaceable assemblies—public and private, political, recreational and educational. Meetings wide open to the general public were roughly broken up. All persons present—citizens and aliens alike without discrimination—were arbitrarily taken into custody as if they had been burglars caught in the criminal act. Without warrants of arrest men were carried off to police stations or other temporary prisons, subjected there to secret-police inquisitions commonly known as the “third degree,” their statements written categorically into mimeographed question blanks, and they required to swear to them regardless of their accuracy. The sole excuse for these outrages was the mere presence of the victims at these open and lawful meetings.44
Most of these meetings, of course, were organized by undercover agents provocateurs.
Among the reported discoveries netted in the raids were “drawings alleged to represent the mechanism of bombs” in New Brunswick, New Jersey;45 four iron balls, alleged to be bombs, at a Newark location; and what Palmer characterized as “large quantities of revolutionary documents … together with many firearms.”46 Only the “revolutionary documents” turned out to be as described. The “bomb mechanism” drawings were sketches of phonograph inventions. The iron ball “bombs,” which were submerged in water and displayed for reporters, who unquestioningly reported their explosive capabilities, were bowling balls. And aside from three pistols capable of firing—two of which were .22 caliber—the “many firearms” were a bunch of stage props discovered in a raid on an amateur theatrical society. “At no place in all that nation-wide raiding of January, 1920,” wrote Post, “were any weapons or explosive materials or destructive mechanisms discovered from which an inference of projected crime, private or political, could be reasonably drawn. Even as to criminal thoughts the proof was flimsy—absurdly so in contrast with the severity of the raiding.”47
Agents broke into meeting halls and private homes without search warrants, tore apart offices and residences, and forced detainees to stand against the walls of meeting halls and searched them—all of which prompted the Massachusetts judge George Anderson to observe that “a mob is a mob, whether made up of government officials acting under instructions from the Department of Justice, or of criminals, loafers, and the vicious classes.”48 In many cities, the raids were “disgraceful legal travesties … in defiance of the law by officers of the law.”49 Countless arrestees were beaten and held incommunicado. Bails were established at $10,000, a gross violation of the Eighth Amendment. Citizens caught in the net were handed over to local law-enforcement departments for prosecution under criminal syndicalist laws. In Boston, eight hundred prisoners were marched through the streets in chains, and photographs of the procession appeared in newspapers as evidence of their violent and menacing nature. In Hartford, ninety-seven men were held in near-solitary confinement for five months, “practically buried alive.”50
The worst outrages took place in Detroit, where eight hundred aliens and citizens were held for six days in a windowless corridor on the fifth floor of the Justice Department building. They had the use of just one toilet and one sink, with no bedding, and, except for two biscuits and a cup of coffee twice a day, no food except what their friends or relatives brought them. The longtime journalist Frederick R. Barkley, who was sent by his newspaper, The Detroit News, to investigate, reported: “The heat was sickening, and the stench was almost overpowering … The conditions were such … that Mayor Couzens … informed the City Council that they were intolerable in a civilized city.” Barkley noted that the men were “fairly well-dressed for workingmen—not dirty looking fellows,” as “we have been led to believe bolshevists look like.”51
The situation in Detroit was so extreme that a citizens’ committee of prominent individuals—including businessmen, professionals, and the Episcopal bishop of eastern Michigan—was formed to look into the situation. Its findings were summed up by Bishop Charles D. Williams in a sermon in April 1921:
Businessmen are seeing “red.” They commenced seeing “red” with their drive on radicalism. They branded every one who had a progressive thought as a “parlor bolshevist,” and persons have been secretly arrested by paid spies on manufactured information and often reported without cause. I investigated several of these cases in Detroit, and found persons supposed to be dangerous radicals to be but simple, ignorant foreigners, unaware of what was being done to them. It is the foulest page in American history. The very principles of Americanism have been undermined by this hysteria and panic.52
The red scare was at its peak, as the avalanche carried away the nation’s lawmakers. On January 5, the various sedition bills under consideration in the House were combined into one piece of legislation by George S. Graham of Pennsylvania. Two days later, the New York State Legislature, whose Lusk Committee on seditious activities had been operating with unmatched zeal since the previous March, voted 140–6 not to seat five new Socialist members, who had been elected the previous November. On January 10, a Senate sedition measure sponsored by South Dakota’s Thomas Sterling passed and was sent along to the House.
The same day, the House of Representative voted for a second time not to seat Victor L. Berger, the Socialist newspaper publisher and activist from Milwaukee. In 1911, Berger had become the first Socialist to serve in Congress, and in 1918, while under indictment for violation of the Espionage Act for his antiwar crusading, he was returned to the House after an absence of six years. After indignantly holding up his swearing in for nearly a year, the House—with only Representative Edward Voigt of Wisconsin voting in Berger’s favor—refused to seat him, which resulted in a special election in Wisconsin’s Fifth District. Running against a Democratic-Republican coalition candidate, Berger won again, and again on January 10 the House voted to exclude him, this time by a count of 330–6.
On January 12, Francis Kane, U.S. attorney for eastern Pennsylvania, who had protested the proposed raids to Palmer before they were undertaken, sent a letter of resignation to President Wilson. “I feel out of sympathy with the anti-radical policies of Mr. Palmer and his methods of carrying them out,” wrote Kane, whose district included Philadelphia, where the January 2 raids netted two hundred people.
I am strongly opposed to the wholesale raiding of aliens that is being carried on throughout the country … I am also utterly opposed to the enactment of a new espionage act “with teeth in it” now that we are, to all intents and purposes, at peace. I believe that the enactme
nt of such a new act as Mr. Palmer has proposed would lead to an entirely unnecessary repression of free speech and interference with the liberty of the press. I could not conscientiously and whole-heartedly take part in the enforcement of such a law.53
Although Kane’s objections to a new bill would ultimately prevail, at the moment panic was carrying the day. On January 14, the House Judiciary Committee merged the Graham and Sterling measures and began hearings on the combined Graham-Sterling bill.
Meanwhile, the Palmer raids continued. As late as January 20, “truck loads of alleged Reds” were arrested in Seattle;54 of the 316 taken into custody there, only 27 were held for deportation hearings.
Although Labor Secretary Wilson ruled on January 25 that membership in the Communist Party was a deportable offense, it was the Justice Department that drove the entire process. As Post described it, throughout January and February, “agents of the Department of Justice, contemptuous of the exclusive authority of the Department of Labor and using the machinery of the Bureau of Immigration pretty much at their own will and for their own ends, were dealing dictatorially with the whole subject as if all authority had through some subterranean channel been passed along to them.”55 At deportation hearings, BI agents variously served as guards, stenographers, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and interpreters.
Two months after the January 2 raids, Acting Labor Secretary Abercrombie abruptly resigned, and the mantle fell to Louis Post. At seventy-one years old, Post was at the end of a long and distinguished career in public life. He was an unabashed progressive, an advocate of free speech and gender equality, and an opponent of imperialism, trusts, and racial discrimination, who had nevertheless supported the war effort despite its inconsistency with his beliefs.
When Post took command of the Labor Department on March 6, he discovered a staggering backlog of case files that had languished since reaching the Immigration Bureau. Post immediately threw himself into the quagmire, relieving Caminetti of any involvement with the cases and ordering that all records be sent to his office for his personal review. He declared that membership in the Communist Labor Party was not in itself a deportable offense, thereby directly negating Hoover’s previous decision on the CLP. Moreover, he canceled the warrants for the hundreds of former Socialist Party members whose names had been automatically transferred to the CP rolls without their knowledge. Post also ruled that the contention by Palmer, Hoover, and Caminetti that constitutional safeguards did not apply in these cases was indefensible, and he restored the detainees’ rights to counsel, habeas corpus, and reasonable bail and the right to confront their accusers. Finally, he reduced the excessive $10,000 bails to $1,000.
Between March 6 and April 10, Post and his assistants reviewed as many as a hundred cases a day. Of the approximately 1,600 individuals whose records they assessed, Post canceled about 1,140 warrants and ordered about 460 deportations. Of those he had deported, Post wrote, “I had no alternative under the law but to order their deportation if proof of membership in the Communist Party were clear, however innocent the individual might have been.”56
Bound by Labor Secretary Wilson’s decree that CP membership was a deportable offense under the 1918 Alien Act, Post was nonetheless clearly troubled by the mandatory deportations:
I could not sleep at night for thinking of some of the cases where the men had to be sent out. They were good, hard-working and useful men, who would have made good citizens; but it was proved that they were members of this organization, even though they did not know what its purpose was; even though they thought they were joining an organization of men from their own country; even though they thought that they were going to school. I have deported such men, because the evidence showed that it was clear that they belonged to the organization.57
All told, in the thirty-seven hundred to four thousand cases he oversaw, Post canceled 75 percent of the warrants, ordering only about seven hundred deportations, the overwhelming majority of which were for nothing more than membership. Not surprisingly, Post’s actions earned him the enmity of Palmer and Hoover, who undertook a campaign to discredit him. Hoover ordered a BI investigation of Post and assembled a file on him that ran to 350 pages, but when no real incriminating evidence was found, Congress took up the crusade. On April 15, the Kansas representative Homer Hoch submitted a resolution of impeachment against Post.
• • •
At the end of April, Palmer made one more attempt to ramp up the red scare with the announcement of another May Day “plot.” On April 30, in a three-column headline, The New York Times warned, “NATIONWIDE PLOT TO KILL HIGH OFFICIALS ON RED MAY DAY REVEALED BY PALMER.” According to the attorney general, the two Communist parties and the IWW were working together as part of a “worldwide plan” to assassinate “Federal and State officials and other prominent figures in national life,” as well as to bring about a general strike. In a replay of the previous summer’s July 4 “plot,” state militias were dispatched to guard public buildings and the homes of prominent citizens. In Chicago, police rounded up 360 radicals and held them in custody for the day. When May 1 came and went without a single “radical” disturbance, Palmer naturally attributed it to the police presence, but he had cried wolf once too often, and public opinion quickly began to turn against him.
The nonexistent May Day plot and the call for Post’s impeachment were the turning points in the red scare frenzy, as people who opposed Palmer’s methods but had perhaps been reluctant to protest in public now began to speak out. In New York, the former Republican president William Howard Taft condemned the “wholesale deportation of aliens.”58 In the House of Representatives, the Alabama congressman George Huddleston admonished his colleagues, saying:
You gentlemen have read in the newspapers about the raids upon aliens—unconstitutional raids, raids without process of law, raids in which American citizens, women as well as men, were arrested, were beaten, were dragged to jail and held without legal process … Many private homes were invaded without legal process … Private papers were seized and carried off for evidence. There was no process of law for any of this … Oh, a lawless people is bad enough, but a lawless government is infinitely worse.59
Post demanded the opportunity to testify in his own behalf, and on May 7 and 8 he appeared before the House Rules Committee that was determining whether or not to proceed with his impeachment. The Rules Committee was chaired by Washington’s Albert Johnson, who on April 12 had entered a long and ferocious attack on Post into the Congressional Record.
One of the primary charges against Post was that he usurped Caminetti’s authority when he relieved the commissioner general of the power to order deportations. Post quickly set the committee straight on the matter, informing them: “The Bureau of Immigration has nothing whatever to do, the Commissioner General of Immigration has nothing whatever to do with the proceedings except to act in a ministerial capacity to obey the orders of the Secretary of Labor. He, in other words, is the sheriff, as it were, of the Secretary of Labor in these matters and nothing else … There is no judicial power whatever vested in the commissioner general.”60 He made it perfectly clear that only the secretary of labor or himself, as acting secretary, had the authority to order deportations, and derided the House Immigration Committee—also chaired by Johnson—for being ignorant of the law in accepting such rulings from Caminetti.
Post also denounced the Department of Justice, saying despite its claim of a great armed conspiracy, the raids had yielded a mere three pistols. He further established that with regard to deportation cases, the Department of Justice had absolutely no investigative authority.
In his two days before the committee, Post acquitted himself brilliantly, impressing even his erstwhile detractors. Two conservative newspapers, Spokane’s Spokesman-Review and Portland’s Oregonian, characterized him as “mentally supple, quick-witted, … a living exhibit of vigor and sustained power. He pounced upon Attorney General Palmer one minute, then hurled a charge of ‘non-lawful’ p
erformance at Anthony Caminetti, Commissioner General of Immigration, and landed a terrific wallop here and there to the House immigration committee … The impression created by Mr. Post was altogether favorable to himself.”61
By the end of Post’s testimony, North Carolina’s Edward W. Pou, one of his main congressional critics, was thoroughly won over, to the point of declaring, “I want to say, Mr. Secretary, that my feeling is that in what you have done, speaking for myself, I believe you have followed your sense of duty absolutely.”62 When Pou then walked out of the hearings, it was a sure indication that the impeachment of Post was going nowhere.
• • •
The spotlight now shifted to Palmer. On May 28, the National Popular Government League published a sixty-seven-page pamphlet called To the American People: Report upon the Illegal Practices of the United States Department of Justice. It was a devastating indictment authored by twelve leading attorneys, including Francis Kane, Felix Frankfurter, and Zechariah Chafee Jr. The charges were both wide-ranging and specific, referring to “the utterly illegal acts which have been committed by those charged with the highest duty of enforcing the laws—acts which have struck at the foundation of American free institutions, and have brought the name of our country into disrepute.”63
At the Rules Committee’s invitation, Palmer appeared on June 1 to defend himself and his department. He was defiant, denying any wrongdoing and blasting both Post and the authors of the NPGL report. He denigrated the former for “his habitually tender solicitude for social revolutionists and perverted sympathy for the criminal anarchists of the country.” The latter he contemptuously called “12 gentlemen said to be lawyers [who] have either been woefully deceived or have deliberately declared their political convictions rather than their judgment as reasoning men.”64