by Jay Feldman
Palmer’s performance was as unimpressive as Post’s had been stirring. The New York Times defended the attorney general, but most newspapers around the country reflected the public’s growing skepticism toward the red scare. “The country will be slow to accept at face value everything that Mr. Palmer says,” wrote The Indianapolis News, “not because it doubts his veracity, but because it has come to feel that, on the Red question, he is something of an alarmist.” The Christian Science Monitor said, “In the light of what is now known, it seems clear that what appeared to be an excess of radicalism on the one hand was certainly met with something like an excess of suppression.”65
The red scare balloon was rapidly deflating, but the purposes behind the witch hunt had been accomplished. First, the radical movement had been squashed. Membership in the two Communist parties took a precipitous drop from seventy thousand to sixteen thousand, and the parties were driven underground. The IWW was all but finished. The Socialist Party moved toward the center and ceased to be a factor in American politics.
Equally important, the government and big business had inflicted a crushing setback on the labor movement. The Seattle general strike and the Boston police strike were disasters. The steel strike dragged on for months, until January 8, 1920, when, with only a hundred thousand steelworkers still out, the National Committee for Organizing Iron and Steel Workers voted to call off the strike. Twenty men had died, workers had lost $12 million in wages, and the strikers had not gained any of their original twelve demands.
The coal miners fared a bit better. On November 8, Palmer had submitted a motion to the Indiana judge Albert Anderson to make permanent the temporary injunction against the coal strike, which the latter did, ordering the UMW leaders to withdraw their strike call by the evening of November 11. After an all-night session on November 10–11, union officials reluctantly complied. “We do it under protest,” said the acting president, John L. Lewis. “We are Americans. We cannot fight our government.”66 President Wilson proposed a flat 14 percent wage increase and promised miners that a commission would be established to arbitrate their other demands. Many miners refused to return to the job, however, and the strike limped along for another month. On December 10, with eighty-four UMW officials, including Lewis, under citation for violating the injunction, the miners finally accepted Wilson’s offer, and the strike officially came to an end. Three months later, the arbitration commission recommended an increase of 27 percent but made no proposal for shorter hours or improved working conditions, and on March 31, 1920, a two-year contract was signed.
Though its effects would be felt for years, the red scare was essentially over. Not even another horrific bombing on September 16, 1920, on New York City’s Wall Street, the symbolic heart of capitalism, could elicit renewed panic from the American public. Although Palmer and Flynn depicted the attack, which killed more than thirty people and wounded over two hundred others, as “a challenge to the American Government,” the public was no longer responsive.67 “The usual pinch of salt must be used,” cautioned the Rocky Mountain News.68 The Justice Department devoted great time and effort to the Wall Street bombing, but, like the May Day and June 2 bomb plots, it was never officially solved, although it was almost certainly, like the other two cases, the work of the small Italian anarchist group known as the Galleanists.69
“The whole ‘red’ crusade stood revealed as a stupendous and cruel fake,” wrote Louis Post.70 It was a monstrous abuse of power, a cynical and sordid manipulation of the American public by government and business leaders, working in concert to solidify their power and repress minority opinion.
The implications of the red scare provide a sobering lesson. “Under Palmer’s assaults,” wrote the historian Robert K. Murray, “the inner light of freedom was made dimmer for everyone; not just his intended radical victims, but American society as a whole was the loser.”71 In summing up the effects of the red scare, Murray concluded, “Civil liberties were left prostrate, the labor movement was badly mauled, the position of capital was greatly enhanced, and complete antipathy toward reform was enthroned.”72
There was one more result. The most far-reaching outcome of the red scare was the institutionalization of the Bureau of Investigation as a political tool for spying on civilians, thereby fulfilling Palmer’s promise that the bureau’s intelligence gathering during the red scare would pay off as a resource “for future use at the hands of the Government.”73 By the time Warren Harding was elected president in November 1920, the BI was securely positioned to become the secret police force of the United States.
During the red scare, the assault on democratic values came not from radical subversives but from government repression. In order to defeat the threat of Bolshevist tyranny in the United States—a threat hardly of the magnitude portrayed by the Justice Department and the press—the government employed the very methods of tyranny it supposedly condemned. The “cure” brought on the very affliction it was purported to prevent.
Senator William Borah of Idaho saw the danger clearly when he warned, “The safeguards of our liberty are not so much in danger from those who openly oppose them as from those who, professing to believe in them, are willing to ignore them when found inconvenient for their purpose; the former we can deal with, but the latter, professing loyalty, either by precept or example undermine the very first principles of our Government, and are far the more dangerous.”74
Louis Post was equally alarmed about the corollary, “those pagan patriots who, without malice, without evil designs of any kind, but heedlessly, support any cause, however menacing it may be to American ideals, if its promoters decorate it richly enough with the American flag.”75
*The Justice Department also misspent federal funding by providing newspapers with plates of preprinted material “without charge, carriage prepaid.” The material included articles with headlines like “U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE URGES AMERICANS TO GUARD AGAINST BOLSHEVISM MENACE” and “TO ‘CONQUER AND DESTROY STATE,’ U.S. COMMUNISTS CALL FOR LABOR REVOLT.” See Nation, March 6, 1920, p. 299, for a facsimile of one such page.
†Abercrombie was the Labor Department solicitor; he was appointed—as were all departmental solicitors—by the attorney general and, as such, maintained a close relationship with the Justice Department.
CHAPTER 8
Grave Abuses and Unnecessary Hardships
At the beginning of 1921, a Senate subcommittee spent six weeks investigating allegations of illegal activities by the Justice Department during the red scare. For more than a year after the hearings, the subcommittee’s chairman, Thomas Sterling, stonewalled any move to bring the results to the Judiciary Committee’s attention. When Sterling at last offered a report, it was an unqualified defense of Palmer and the methods employed by the Department of Justice throughout the red scare.
A strongly critical minority report by the subcommittee’s Thomas J. Walsh of Montana, a progressive Democrat, echoed the charges made in the National Popular Government League pamphlet. Walsh maintained that although the Palmer raids took place in “a time of high feeling, approaching hysteria,” that reality offered no justification for the abuses committed by the government. On the contrary, Walsh argued:
It is only in such times that the guarantees of the Constitution are of any practical value. In seasons of calm no one thinks of denying them; they are accorded as a matter of course. It is rare except when the public mind is stirred by some overwhelming catastrophe or is aghast at some hideous crime, or otherwise overwrought, that one is required to appeal to his constitutional rights. If, in such times, the Constitution is not a shield, the encomiums which statesmen and jurists have paid it are fustian.1
Neither Walsh’s report nor Sterling’s version was taken up by the Judiciary Committee until February 5, 1923, nearly two years after the end of the hearings, and then only because Walsh finally forced a vote. When the committee chose to submit no report at all, Walsh made certain that both reports were published in the Congres
sional Record.2
After President Harding took office in March 1921, he appointed his friend and campaign manager, Harry M. Daugherty, as the new attorney general. Daugherty, in turn, brought in his old buddy William J. Burns, head of one of the most successful detective agencies in the country, to replace William Flynn as BI chief, and Burns promoted J. Edgar Hoover to assistant director.
Despite the crushing blow that had been dealt to the radical movement, Burns continued to play the red card, claiming that the absence of radical activity was proof positive of underground plotting. In March 1922, he told a House subcommittee on appropriations that “radical activities have increased wonderfully [sic],” and although “very little is ever said in the newspapers about it, … we are in very close touch with it, and it is stronger now than it ever was … [I]t is all underground work, and a great deal of it is going on.” In making his pitch for increased funding to combat radicals, Burns urged, “I can not impress upon you too much how dangerous they are at the present moment.”3 To the same subcommittee two years later, he averred, “Radicalism is becoming stronger every day in this country. They are going about it in a very subtle manner … I dare say that unless the country becomes thoroughly aroused concerning the danger of this radical element in this country we will have a very serious situation.” The underlying antidemocratic bent of the BI is evident in Burns’s complaint to the subcommittee: “These parlor Bolsheviks have sprung up everywhere, as evidenced by this American Civil Liberties Union of New York. They have also organized a civil liberties union on the coast. Wherever we seek to suppress these radicals, a civil liberties union promptly gets busy.”4
Harry Daugherty presided over the Justice Department during one of the most corrupt and scandal-plagued administrations in the nation’s history, and he was under constant fire during his three-year tenure as attorney general. In late 1922, he survived an impeachment attempt, but in February 1924 the Montana senator Burton Wheeler called for an investigation into the Justice Department’s failure to prosecute both antitrust cases and the celebrated Teapot Dome case, in which Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall received $400,000 for secretly leasing U.S. Navy oil reserves in Wyoming and California to private oil companies. In March, the Senate appointed a committee chaired by the Iowa Republican Smith W. Brookhart to investigate the allegations. Hearings began on March 12, with Wheeler as the committee’s prosecutor.
Before the hearings started, Daugherty directed the BI’s chief, William Burns, to dig up something on Wheeler, and on April 8 a federal grand jury in Montana indicted the senator on charges of receiving $2,000 from a Montana oilman after being elected to office. It was clearly a politically motivated indictment—a Senate investigation chaired by William Borah fully exonerated Wheeler, and he was also later acquitted in a criminal trial in Montana in which the government’s main witness was utterly discredited on the stand. One Washington correspondent wrote that the BI agents who found the “evidence” against Wheeler simply fabricated their story. According to another account, “Hoover was very active in that case.”5
Among the revelations brought to light by the Brookhart Committee was that the Bureau of Investigation, with Daugherty’s blessing, had been investigating congressional critics of the Justice Department since 1921; those who had been probed included Wheeler, Walsh, La Follette, and Borah, among others.*
The list of legislators whose offices, homes, and private lives were surreptitiously turned inside out was apparently so extensive that Wheeler, in questioning Gaston B. Means, a former BI detective who had been involved in the covert investigations, remarked that another senator had suggested to him that he could save time “by asking you what Senators you have not investigated.”6
Wheeler asked Means whether the purpose of searching La Follette’s offices was to stop the senator from his investigation of the Teapot Dome case.
MR. MEANS. Well, how it was going to be used, I don’t know, except this way I would interpret it: If you found something damaging on a man you would quietly get word to him through some of his friends or otherwise that he had better put the soft pedal on the situation. That is the way the information is generally used when you find it.
SENATOR WHEELER. In order to deter him in going ahead with his work in the Senate, is that correct?
MR. MEANS. Work in the Senate or anywhere else, before his constituents, wherever he was, stop him—it doesn’t make any difference. Use it again afterward if he attempted to do anything else.
SENATOR WHEELER. And when you spoke about having somebody to go through Senator La Follette’s office, what do you mean by going through his office?
MR. MEANS. Oh, search his—find out all the mail that comes in, all the papers, anything that he has got lying around. Find out in his home. Just like you would take—the same principle that you pursue, Senator, when you make a criminal investigation. There is a servant working in this house. If she is a colored servant, go and get a colored detective woman take her out; have this colored detective woman to entertain her, find out the exact plan of the house, everything they discuss at the table, the family, write it down, make a report. And any information you find that is … damaging, why, of course it is used.7
Brookhart, the committee chair, asked the forty-five-year-old Means, “When did this terrific spy system start in the United States; by what official authority, if you know?”
MR. MEANS. I have been investigating since I was 21. It had been going on prior to that time. I never saw a candidate that loomed up, any little candidate for town marshal, that they didn’t go out and make an inquiry about him …
THE CHAIRMAN. And that gang, then, that is behind those investigations of that nature is the same gang that I have denominated as the Nonpartisan League of Wall Street, is that the crowd?
MR. MEANS. I think that President Wilson gave them the best designation: “Invisible Government.”
THE CHAIRMAN. Well, that is the same gang.8
In the wake of the Brookhart Committee hearings, President Calvin Coolidge, who had inherited the Oval Office after Harding’s death the previous August, asked for Daugherty’s resignation, and on March 28, 1924, the beleaguered attorney general stepped down. In his place, Coolidge appointed Harlan Fiske Stone, an esteemed jurist and former dean of Columbia Law School, who would later serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. Though politically conservative, Stone was a steadfast civil libertarian who had publicly spoken out against the red scare and the Palmer raids and had denounced the New York State Legislature for refusing to seat five elected Socialists in January 1920.
Six weeks after becoming attorney general, Stone asked the BI chief, Burns, to resign and moved Hoover up to acting director, intending it as an interim appointment. Stone also announced a reorganization of the bureau and a reordering of its priorities, declaring, “There is always the possibility that a secret police may become a menace to free government and free institutions because it carries with it the possibility of abuses of power which are not always quickly apprehended or understood.” Vowing that both illegal surveillance and persecution of civilians for their beliefs and ideas would cease, he said, “The Bureau of Investigation is not concerned with political or other opinions of individuals. It is concerned only with their conduct and then only with such conduct as it is forbidden by the laws of the United States. When a police system passes beyond these limits, it is dangerous to the proper administration of justice and to human liberty, which it should be our first concern to cherish.”9
With the expiration of the Espionage Act at the end of the war and no peacetime sedition act to take its place, the BI had altered its mode of attack on radicals, turning instead to the many state laws enacted during the red scare that forbade such ambiguous activities as “sedition,” “criminal anarchy,” and “criminal syndicalism.” The appropriations act that funded the BI gave it no authority to investigate violations of local statutes, but that did not deter the bureau. In 1922, federal agents were instrumental in the secur
ing of over a hundred state convictions under these laws, the most celebrated of which resulted from the raid on a secret meeting of Communist Party officials in Bridgman, Michigan, in August. Not surprisingly, Hoover was involved in the management of the Bridgman case.10
In pronouncing an end to illegal spying and the persecution of minority opinion, Stone intended to reverse entrenched Justice Department and Bureau of Investigation practice. Unfortunately, in J. Edgar Hoover, he chose the wrong man to carry out the new program.
Hoover’s early tenure as BI director offered no indication that he had ever been one of Palmer’s right-hand men in executing the illegal and repressive policies of the red scare, or that he had subsequently assisted Burns in keeping red hunting on the bureau’s front burner.11 On the contrary, seeing the chance to advance his career, Hoover suddenly became the champion of civil liberties and tolerance. Following Stone’s game plan, he reformed bureau procedures, fired incompetent agents, abolished the General Intelligence Division, and called a halt to the bureau’s antiradical activities. On October 18, he frankly admitted the illegality of past BI actions in the surveillance, arrest, and prosecution of radicals when he wrote to Assistant Attorney General William J. Donovan that “the activities of the Communists and other ultra-radicals have not up to the present time constituted a violation of the Federal statutes, and consequently, the Department of Justice, theoretically, has no right to investigate such activities as there has been no violation of the Federal laws.”12
Hoover gained the ringing endorsement of the American Civil Liberties Union by persuading its head, Roger Baldwin, that he had been an unwilling accomplice in the excesses of Palmer’s reign as attorney general and Burns’s stewardship of the Bureau of Investigation. Baldwin wrote to Stone to say he had misjudged Hoover, and the ACLU went so far as to issue a public statement of support for the newly configured bureau.