by Jay Feldman
On December 10, Attorney General Stone, having been unsuccessful in his attempt to enlist John Lord O’Brian as BI director, made Hoover’s appointment permanent. It was a choice that would have devastating long-term consequences for the future of civil liberties in the United States.
• • •
The world war and the red scare were history. The last German alien enemy internees were released in April 1920, and the last political prisoners jailed under the Espionage Act went free in December 1923.
The prosperity of the 1920s brought with it a relatively open and tolerant time, especially when compared with what had gone before. Women achieved suffrage. A literature of social criticism flourished, exemplified by the novels of Sinclair Lewis. The decade saw the emergence of jazz music, the Art Deco movement, and the Harlem Renaissance.
But the phantoms of the xenophobia and antiradical hysteria unleashed during the war and red scare were not completely laid to rest. That they still stalked the land was confirmed by the Sacco and Vanzetti case.
Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were two Italian-American anarchists who were associated with the Galleanists and may have played a part in the three major bombings of 1919–20. However, as in the instance of the Haymarket “conspirators” and the IWW organizer Joe Hill, Sacco and Vanzetti were prosecuted, convicted, and executed more for their political beliefs and previous activities—as well as for the deterrent effect—than for the murder of which they stood accused. At their trial, in talking to the jury about Vanzetti, the judge said, “This man, although he may not have actually committed the crime attributed to him, is nevertheless culpable, because he is the enemy of our existing institutions.”13 As in the Haymarket and Joe Hill cases, the evidence against Sacco and Vanzetti in the 1920 robbery-related killing for which they were tried was far from conclusive, and despite a worldwide plea for clemency the two were executed in August 1927.
In the early and mid-1920s, the lingering hostility to immigrants also manifested itself in other ways: the eugenics movement; the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan; a virulent anti-Semitic campaign spearheaded by Henry Ford; a successful California ballot initiative forbidding Japanese ownership of land; and the passage of a new law in 1924 that restricted immigration from eastern and southern Europe and put an end to immigration from more than a dozen Asian countries, including China, Japan, and India.
Toward the end of the decade, a new anti-alien campaign got under way, and especially after the stock market crash of October 1929, as the United States slid into the depths of the Great Depression and the nation returned to crisis mode—in this case, economic—the specter of nativism took on renewed life. The emotions behind the new crusade were all too familiar, the latest version of the resentment of immigrants that had been an undercurrent in American life for more than a hundred years. This time the target was Mexicans.
Immigration from Mexico had begun a steady climb in the 1880s. The first large wave came in the opening decade of the twentieth century, driven by the labor needs of the railroad companies; by 1909, the nine western railroads were employing just under six thousand Mexican workers, about 17 percent of their unskilled workforce.14 The following year, the Mexican Revolution sent people fleeing across the border, and with the urgent need for seasonal labor that accompanied the burgeoning expansion of agriculture throughout the Southwest, the large influx of Mexican immigrants was a boon. The migration continued during World War I, when Mexican workers shored up a depleted labor supply in the copper mines. After the war, the great numbers of African-Americans moving from the rural South to the industrial North created a dearth of field hands, and to fill the void, every year from 1917 to 1920 the Labor Department exempted fifty thousand Mexicans from the literacy test and head tax established by the Immigration Act of 1917.15 Mexican immigration peaked in 1924, as nearly ninety thousand people headed for el Norte, and then leveled off at about fifty thousand annually.16 By the end of the 1920s, the number of Mexicans working for the railroads had increased to almost twenty-three thousand, close to 60 percent of the industry’s unskilled laborers,17 and the mobility of American society enabled significant numbers of Mexican workers to also find employment all across the country in such diverse arenas as the automotive, canning, construction, meatpacking, mining, and steel industries.
With the 1924 bill that restricted influx from southern and eastern Europe and ended immigration from Asia, entrants from Mexico suddenly became a greater percentage of the total number of immigrants, and when the large numbers known to be coming over the border illegally were factored into the equation, the quantity of people crossing the Rio Grande now seemed enormous. Predictably, there was a backlash, as organized labor, patriotic societies, and eugenics advocates sent up cries calling for restrictions on immigration from Mexico.
The campaign for a quota was spearheaded by Texans. According to the Lone Star congressman John Box, the low wages and primitive living conditions of Mexican immigrants would “drive American labor to the deepest poverty and ultimately to extermination.”18†
Moreover, the restrictionists argued, Mexicans exacted a heavy social price. “A nation can not survive when the necessities of life are produced by an inferior and servile race,” another Texan told Congress. “Such a system, long continued, will destroy the fertility of the soil, abolish rural community life, and destroy our patriotic standards. The influx of Mexican peons is already taxing our schools beyond their capacity; it is lowering our educational standing; it is putting an extra burden upon our native people and taxpayers; it is creating an unhealthy political condition, and will ultimately result in the most serious consequences.”19 According to the Texas congressman Eugene Black, Mexicans were “germ-carriers, inassimilable, a people … of moral and financial pauperism, incapable of development away from that condition, whose influence is toward the breaking down of our social fabric.”20 Worst of all, Box stated, they were “a bad racial element” who would “create the most insidious and general mixture of white, Indian, and negro blood strains ever produced in America.”21
It was this last factor, wrote Robert A. Divine in his study of American immigration policy, that was at the heart of the push for quotas on Mexicans. “While undoubtedly organized labor was concerned with the effect of Mexican immigration on the wage scale,” observed Divine, “the drive for restriction represented primarily the desire to keep out what many considered an undesirable ethnic group. The economic and social arguments tended to be window dressing.”22
Until a quota might be set, deportation was seen as a viable alternative. During the summer of 1928, accordingly, the Border Patrol, which had been created as an arm of the Bureau of Immigration in 1924, began carrying out deportation raids on the ethnic Mexican community of the lower Rio Grande valley, invading homes without warrants, and creating fear and insecurity among the population. Anybody involved in labor organizing was a particular target.
By the following summer, rumors were circulating to the effect that the government would soon deport all Mexicans. One area newspaper reported that most Mexicans were so frightened they were saving money in order to return to Mexico as soon as possible.
The Mexican government, needing a reconstituted labor force to rebuild the country after the revolution, encouraged their return. As incentives, returnees were offered financing for the purchase of land, as well as a discount on import duties, including exemptions on farm equipment, household goods, and $100 per family in provisions.
By the spring and summer of 1930, Mexicans were being deported “en masse” from southern Texas. According to one newspaper, “The Mexican people of the valley were in a state of virtual panic, expecting to be deported by the thousands, and thousands of them were leaving rather than wait to be arrested.”23
As the Depression worsened, the notion that illegal aliens were occupying jobs that would otherwise go to American citizens took on increased currency. As one historian of the Mexican deportation and repatriation writes, “The
idea that aliens were holding down jobs and that by giving those jobs to Americans, the depression could be cured, runs through the depression years as a cure-all with little foundation in fact.”24
On January 6, 1931, the newly appointed Secretary of Labor, William N. Doak, told the Senate that there were about 400,000 illegal aliens in the United States, and that 100,000 of them were deportable under existing immigration laws. He also suggested that those laws be stiffened to make deportations easier. Doak’s comments were published in the nation’s newspapers, and one of the people who read them was Charles P. Visel, head of the Los Angeles Citizens Committee on Coordination of Unemployment Relief.
Visel immediately sent a telegram to Colonel Arthur Woods, national coordinator of the President’s Emergency Committee for Employment, offering a scheme to get Doak’s suggested deportations under way in Southern California. “Figure four hundred thousand deportable aliens United States,” said Visel. “Estimate five per cent in this district. We can pick them all up through police and sheriff channels … You advise please as to method of getting rid. We need their jobs for needy citizens.”25
Visel was using code: in Los Angeles, “deportable aliens” meant, above all, Mexicans, who constituted by far the largest ethnic minority in the area. With nearly 100,000 Mexican immigrants, Los Angeles was home to the largest concentrated Mexican ethnic population outside of Mexico City.
Visel followed up his January 6 telegram to Woods with a letter to the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce’s Crime and Unemployment Committee, saying that since illegal aliens were breaking the law by being in this country, “it would be a great relief to the unemployment situation if some method could be devised to scare these people out of our city.”26
On January 8, Woods answered Visel, telling him, “There is every willingness at this end of the line to act thoroughly and promptly.” Encouraged, Visel wired Doak, asking the secretary of labor to send Immigration Bureau agents from other cities to Los Angeles in order to create a climate of fear. “This apparent activity,” said Visel, “will have tendency to scare many thousand alien deportables out of this district which is the result desired.”27 Doak responded warmly, thanking Visel for his efforts and instructing him to put his plan into action directly.
Visel’s strategy, as he outlined it, was to first use local newspapers and radio stations to broadcast an imminent roundup of illegals by immigration officials, and then arrest some “prominent deportable aliens.”28 The arrests would be accompanied by heavy media coverage, which would intimidate “an army of aliens” into leaving the United States, thereby supposedly opening up job opportunities for unemployed American citizens.
The ball was rolling, and on January 12 anti-Mexican sentiment gained momentum when the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors endorsed proposed legislation to prevent illegal aliens from establishing residence, holding a job, or conducting any type of business. Disputing Doak’s numbers, Supervisor John R. Quinn claimed that there were actually between 2.5 million and 3 million aliens residing in the United States, and that California was home to between 200,000 and 400,000 of them, making his upper estimate of the state’s illegal population equal to Doak’s nationwide figure. “If we were rid of the aliens who have entered this country illegally,” said Quinn, “our present unemployment problem would shrink to the proportions of a relatively unimportant flat spot in business.”29 He also claimed that purging the illegal aliens would cause crime rates to plummet. Finally, playing on the old fears that aliens and radicalism were closely associated, Quinn turned the issue into one of national security, asserting that “most of the so-called ‘Red problem’ ” would also be solved.
After Doak agreed to send a special officer and eighteen agents from neighboring districts to Los Angeles to work on the project, Visel issued the press release announcing the deportation drive. His statement emphasized that law-enforcement agents from the city police force, the county sheriff’s office, and the San Francisco, San Diego, and Nogales offices of the Bureau of Immigration would all be participating in the effort. The release was intended for publication in all L.A.-area papers, “especially foreign language newspapers.” In a letter to Woods, Visel wrote, “It is the opinion of the Immigration authorities here that these articles will have the effect of scareheading [sic] many thousand deportable aliens.”30
On January 26, a headline on the front page of the Los Angeles Times announced, “UNIFIED EFFORT TO OUST ALIENS BEING EVOLVED.” An article in the Illustrated Daily News the same day warned, “Aliens who are deportable will save themselves trouble and expense … by arranging their departure at once,” while the Examiner darkly cautioned, “Deportable aliens include Mexicans, Japanese, Chinese, and others.”
On the twenty-ninth, the leading Spanish-language newspaper, La Opinión, ran a lengthy story quoting from Visel’s press release, as well as from the articles that had appeared in the English-language papers. The banner headline—“PROXIMA RAZZIA DE MEXICANOS”—left no doubt in readers’ minds that the deportation drive was first and foremost aimed at them, and although the Immigration Bureau’s district director, Walter E. Carr, insisted that the drive on illegals was not directed “against any one race,” the message was clear enough, as waves of fear rippled through the Los Angeles Mexican and Mexican-American community.31
On February 9, President Herbert Hoover got into the act, announcing “a vigorous alien deportation drive to … conserve employment for American labor” and asking Congress for half a million dollars to add 245 patrolmen to the force engaged in deportation work.32
Since Labor Secretary Doak’s January 6 declaration of war on illegals, a series of raids in the New York City area had yielded five hundred deportable aliens, resulting in “Ellis Island’s detention pens … being taxed to capacity.” In the most notorious raid, eighteen “deportables” had been apprehended at a Saturday night dance in Manhattan when a squad of Immigration Bureau officers descended on the Finnish Workers’ Education Association and blocked the doors, forcing the musicians to stop playing and ordering the one thousand attendees to produce proof that they were in the United States legally. “In an atmosphere of hysteria tinged with indignation,” all but sixteen men and two women “passed the test.”33 As a result of these types of wanton raids, Doak was dubbed “The Deportation Chief” as expulsions reached an all-time, one-year peak of 18,142 in 1931.34
President Hoover’s National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement—commonly known as the Wickersham Commission—condemned these raids in its 1931 report, saying, “The apprehension and examination of supposed aliens are often characterized by methods unconstitutional, tyrannic, and oppressive.” The report confirmed that little had changed in the processing of deportation cases since the red scare more than a decade earlier, with the Bureau of Immigration still acting as “investigator, prosecutor, and judge, with despotic powers,” inflicting “grave abuses and unnecessary hardships.”35 In addition to unjustified raids, those abuses included star-chamber proceedings, third-degree interrogations, and summary deportations.
Writing in The New Republic, the Baltimore lawyer Reuben Oppenheimer, the chief author of the Wickersham Commission report, further summarized its findings:
The action of the Department of Labor is final. There is no probation, no pardon, no effective way to mitigate undue hardships. The suspect has no regular method of appeal. The remedy of habeas corpus is insufficient and, in the great majority of cases, unavailing because of the suspect’s ignorance or poverty …
Under the present system, … foreign-born residents of this country live in a constant state of apprehension that they will suddenly be made a subject of administrative process, carried on without their knowledge … Anonymous communications are largely relied upon in apprehending suspects. Proceedings are carried on in secret by immigration officials, who, while generally honest and hardworking, are, for the most part, never personally interviewed or investigated before the Department of Labor employs
them …
[I]t is often customary for the immigrant inspectors to jail suspects without any warrant; … both the persons and effects of many supposed aliens are searched without a warrant …
[I]n some instances the suspect is definitely discouraged by immigration authorities from procuring a lawyer.36
The Wickersham Commission’s report was issued at about the time the deportation crusade was getting under way in Los Angeles, where immigration officials took thirty-five deportable Mexicans into custody during the first week of February. The first large-scale operation took place in the small city of El Monte on February 13, as sheriff’s deputies and immigration agents stopped and questioned three hundred people and netted thirteen illegals, twelve of whom were Mexicans, which would appear to belie the district director Carr’s contention that the roundups were not directed “against any one race.” The L.A. County sheriff, William Traeger, and federal agents announced that they would continue “nightly raids on suspected quarters” until they were satisfied that “all parts of the county offering a safe haven for unwanted foreigners have been covered.”37
In the San Fernando and Pacoima areas, immigration agents conducted warrantless door-to-door searches, requiring that Mexicans and Mexican-Americans produce proof of legal residency, and those who could not were arrested. A central premise underlying the dragnet approach to finding illegals was the notion that “a Mexican is a Mexican,”‡ and any person of Mexican ethnicity, whether an illegal Mexican national, a legal-resident Mexican national, or a U.S. citizen, was therefore justifiably subject to search and seizure. The fact that many of those apprehended for deportation were identified by paid informers contributed to the terror, as Mexicans and Mexican-Americans were never sure who might finger them to the authorities.