by Master of Deceit: J. Edgar Hoover;America in the Age of Lies
Why were these teachers and students brutalized by government agents? The union was founded by a Russian who then returned home to work for the Communists, and the organization quickly grew, spreading from city to city, serving as a voice for radical causes in America. URW halls were the perfect nodes on Hoover’s file cards — places where potential threats to America gathered. But the union hall was also a school where Russian immigrants — who might not have the slightest interest in politics — went to take classes and improve themselves.
The raid left the inside of the union building looking as if it had been hit by a tornado: a scene of bloodstains, shattered banisters, broken glass, and smashed furniture. Some 211 students and teachers were rounded up for questioning, and not one was allowed to speak to a friend, family member, or lawyer. Lavrowsky was lucky: there was no reason to believe he wanted to overthrow the American government, so he was released at midnight. By four thirty in the morning, 171 others were also let go. That left thirty-nine certifiably radical immigrants, who were marched to the tip of Manhattan, to be ferried out to Ellis Island. For most immigrants, Ellis Island had been their entry into America. But for the thirty-nine it was the staging area for their deportation. As he walked toward the ferry, one shouted, “We’re going back to Russia — that’s a free country.”
The headquarters of the IWW (International Workers of the World) after a police raid in 1919. The IWW was a pro-worker, anti-capitalist organization similar to the URW.
The next day, hundreds of New York City policemen spread across the city to round up more suspected immigrant radicals. In two days, more than a thousand people were taken into custody in New York alone. Despite the beatings, the late-night questions, and the atmosphere of fear, just seventy-five were finally determined to belong to a dangerous group, and only two — an Irish American and a native New Yorker — were charged with illegal support of violent politics. It was the same all over the country. In Hartford, Connecticut, one hundred men who spoke little English were nabbed. Week after week dragged by, and the detainees had little idea of why they had been taken in. Finally, after almost five months, lawyers managed to sort out which men were actually accused of being radicals and which simply did not speak English. All told, only 246 people captured in the raids were found to be so dangerous that they deserved to be forced out of the country. And yet Hoover and Palmer had good reason to believe that the night was a magnificent triumph.
The Bureau’s agents cracked a counterfeiting cell in Newark; in Trenton they broke into what may have been a bomb factory (that all depends on whether the black metal spheres they found were actually bombs or were intended to be used in the Italian bowling game of bocce), and in a Baltimore office of the union, they found their treasure: incendiary literature. A pamphlet in Russian urged workers to “convert small strikes into general ones; and convert the latter into an armed revolt of the laboring masses against capital and State. . . . We must mercilessly destroy all remains of governmental authority and class domination, liberating the prisoners, demolish prisons and police offices . . . shoot the most prominent military and police officers. . . . In the work of destruction we must be merciless.”
To Palmer, this was proof: Communism was no mere theory; it was a traitorous plot to destroy the American way of life. Hoover made sure the newspapers printed the pamphlet, and the public responded. Most Americans were thrilled by the raids. They felt safer because tough, determined men like Mitchell Palmer were protecting them. Indeed, Palmer was looking more and more like the ideal Democratic Party candidate for the 1920 presidential race. Encouraged, Palmer and Hoover began planning for another, far larger, roundup for the beginning of the new year.
Political cartoonists caught, and whipped up, the national mood of anger at “foreign extremists”— a tone not very different from that shown in anti-Muslim jokes after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
What a birthday present! On January 1, 1920, Hoover would turn twenty-five; the next day the alien radicals would get what they deserved. Hoover’s agents had spent the fall infiltrating meetings, joining clubs, and adding names to the card files. The moment an agent was sure someone was a dangerous radical, he filled out a warrant for the suspect’s arrest — though he was not required to supply any proof. By the end of December, Hoover held more than 3,300 warrants. And he was about to arrest every one of these potential terrorists.
The vengeance of American law came suddenly and swiftly. On the second night of January, agents swept through thirty-nine cities and hauled in somewhere between five and six thousand people — there was no exact count. In Detroit, eight hundred men were detained in a windowless corridor with just one water fountain and one toilet. They had no food, unless a family member figured out where they were and brought it. But the detainees were not allowed to speak to anyone — neither relatives nor lawyers. Their confinement lasted six days. When the Detroit group was finally processed, it turned out that 350 of the detainees were either American citizens or could prove that they were blameless immigrants.
In Boston, it was worse. Six hundred people were jammed into a prison that had beds for half that number, and for the first three frigid New England winter days and nights, there was no heat. Not surprisingly, two of the suspects — which is all they were — contracted pneumonia; another killed himself by jumping out of a fourth-floor window.
Housed in prisons, corridors, or centers like Ellis Island, thousands of potential deportees were now in the government’s control. There was just one problem: in the name of protecting liberty, agents had twisted, ignored, bent, and even broken the law. American citizens wanted protection from “merciless” terrorists, but they also expected that a person taken away from his home and family would get to find out why — and be able to plead his case in court. In mid-January, the government began the process of figuring out who they had captured and what evidence they actually had against them.
The key to Palmer’s dragnet was the difference between the legal rights of American citizens and those who were not yet citizens. The Department of Labor oversaw immigrant issues at the time, and Palmer’s team had found ready allies in that office. But when it came time to sort out the thousands of people being held in miserable conditions, the secretary of labor was at home, battling illness. That left his assistant, Louis F. Post, in charge. John Reed and Hoover were opposite personality types, but Post and Hoover had a different kind of clash: they had directly opposing views of the nature of rights and law. The two views of America were about to collide.
Louis Post in a photo taken around 1896. Born in New Jersey to a family that could trace its ancestry in America back to 1633, Post devoted his life to expanding opportunities for all Americans, regardless of their origin, skin color, or income.
Hoover was pleased with the white, Protestant, male world in which he lived. In his mind, those segregated, insular streets were America at its best. His job was to identify and combat any threats to that happy homeland, and he took it very seriously. A diligent, thorough researcher, Hoover read all the Communist writings he could find. He knew exactly what Marx and Lenin advocated, on paper. To him, words predicted actions: Marx and Lenin spoke of the need for revolution. Communists believed in Marx and Lenin. So, he reasoned, Communists must be threats to the American government. Clearly, then, Communist immigrants did not belong in this country.
Post grew up in New York City, traveled to South Carolina in 1871 to gather evidence against the Ku Klux Klan, and made his name in Chicago advocating for teachers and other workers. He was a product of an America of mixture and turmoil, where immigrants, blacks, and the poor were struggling to make their way. Post knew all about Marx and Communism, of course. But for him, deeds spoke louder than words. Radicals were always spouting off about revolution, anarchy, class war, and the like. That did not mean any of them, or the workers who stuffed their pamphlets into their pockets, were ready to take up arms. Post demanded careful and specific proof that an immigrant was
actually plotting violent attacks before he was ready to deport anyone. In just his first month of reviewing cases, Post rejected more than two-thirds of the arrest warrants. Palmer was furious and went on the attack, using his allies in Congress to grill Post.
Confronted by suspicious representatives, Post was levelheaded, plainspoken, and all-American. He cut through the atmosphere of fear and made politicians who were ready to side with Palmer listen to common sense. “Are you a Communist?” one congressman asked. Post gave the perfect answer: Jefferson had been accused of being a radical, just as Lincoln was in his time. If you called someone an extremist, you put him in the best company.
Attorney General Palmer meeting the House Rules Committee to argue that Louis Post was in sympathy with America’s enemies. He is the man seated to the far right at the edge of this damaged print.
Post’s speech to Congress is the voice we must hear, even when we are filled with fear and consumed by suspicion. Every accused person — whether an American citizen or not — must know why he or she is in detention, be able to consult a lawyer, question witnesses who have spoken against him or her, and have a fair trial. Rounding up suspects and housing them for months in terrible conditions is un-American; speaking up for the rights of others is one of the nation’s greatest, most basic, traditions.
Post’s clarity and sanity won: Congress sided with him. He kept his job and went on reviewing the warrants Hoover’s men had gathered. Eventually, 2,200 out of the 3,300 actual immigrants seized in January were let go. Ever alert to job security, Hoover could see that the mood in the country was shifting.
Palmer had failed twice. First, he never found the original June 2 bombers who had attacked his own home. The only good witness the police tracked down threw himself out of a fourteenth-floor window even though he was under constant guard. The evidence gathered at that juncture pointed to a cell of Italians who hated all forms of government, not to Russians or Communists at all. The case was never solved. And second, Congress, judges, and the all-important court of public opinion sided with Post.
The public stopped believing in Palmer’s campaign of fear and anger, especially when he predicted a new wave of violence and terror, which never took place. The Democratic Party thought better of having him as their candidate for president.
In his personal scrapbook, Hoover kept a photo of Post colored in with red pencil. Next to it he included a poem, which he may even have written: “The Bully Bolshevik,” “disrespectfully dedicated to ‘Comrade’ Louie Post.” Here are a few verses:
The “Reds” at Ellis Island
Are happy as can be
For Comrade Post at Washington
Is setting them all free.
They’ll soon be raising hell again
In every city and town
To bring on Revolution
And the USA to down.
But Uncle Sam will clinch his fist
And rise up mighty strong
Take hold of Comrade “Louie”—
Send the “Reds” where they belong.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
But don’t forget, he’ll get his yet
For this is the land of the brave.
Hoover was canny. As he saw Palmer fading, he distanced himself from him. And when a new attorney general took office, Hoover knew just what to say. Harlan Stone — later a Supreme Court justice — was a reformer, horrified by the Palmer raids. Hoover so brilliantly convinced Stone that he shared those views that, in 1924, at the age of twenty-nine, Hoover was named head of the Bureau of Investigations. That is the job which, under various names, he would hold for the next forty-eight years — the rest of his life. Hoover had no doubt that the Russians were a real danger. Palmer’s fall showed him that he would have to refine his tactics, pick his moment, and fight again.
THE LEGEND: For thirty years, book after book, movie after movie, comic strip after comic strip told the story of how J. Edgar Hoover’s efficient, relentless men tracked down and killed the ace bank robber John Dillinger. Hoover was so obsessed with the handsome criminal his men had gunned down that he displayed Dillinger’s death mask outside his office. To meet Hoover, you had to pass the gangster’s cold dead face.
THE FACTS: In the 1930s, movies and radio, national magazines, and syndicated gossip columns reached all across America. Hoover understood that in order to protect himself and gain new power, he needed relentless public relations. He really did create an efficient organization that killed or captured the most famous criminals of the Gangster Era. At the same time, he created an equally efficient organization to sell his — and only his — version of how that happened. If you opposed his story, or did not fit into it, Hoover would fight you every day of your life.
Persons in Hiding was a 1939 movie based on the official FBI version of the bloody rise and blazing fall of the bank robbers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow.
In the 1920s, most experts believed that the American economy had turned a corner and clear sailing was ahead. Indeed, in 1929 a prestigious Yale professor announced that “stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” To many, the 1920s seemed to prove the optimistic, individualistic version of American history. More than any other place in the world, America could provide the goods, the income, and the opportunity people wanted.
Then, on Black Monday, October 28, 1929, the stock market crashed. The slide that began that autumn extended until the summer of 1932, by which time stocks had lost 90 percent of their value: a share that had cost one hundred dollars was now worth just ten. A man who enjoyed a good job in 1929, bought a car on credit, a home with a loan, and was building his family nest egg with ever-rising stocks was now out of work, standing on an endless line to cadge some free bread, or was so ashamed that he left his family to hobo around the country. His wife and kids scraped by.
Angry, hungry, scared Americans began looking for new answers. Perhaps the country needed a new kind of government, a new economic system. To many miserable Americans, even a bank robber seemed like a hero — a little guy striking back, taking what he needed. J. Edgar Hoover saw the despair and doubt of the Depression completely differently. First, a modern nation needed a modern investigation force — which he would build from the ground up. Then, second, he must convince the public that he was the man to guide these fearless, efficient lawmen. In order to do that, he needed to win three propaganda wars: making sure he was seen as tough and masculine; convincing the public to root for the FBI, not for glamorous bank robbers; and erasing the story of his own most famous agent.
Tracer bullets used for night firing practice at the FBI training facility. Hoover put in place specialized training such as this to improve the skills and quality of his agents.
When Hoover took over at the Bureau, he faced a daunting task. The agency was a relic of a time of lax standards and small, ineffective national government. Some of his agents were corrupt; others owed their jobs to political connections rather than their crime-fighting skills. And they did not have very much to do. Agents rarely carried guns or made arrests, and they had no role at all in enforcing state laws. That left only cases that crossed state lines — federal cases — and there were very few laws covering such national crimes.
But Hoover had the energy, drive, and determination to create a modern, efficient organization. In 1924, he began gathering fingerprints from around the nation, and in the 1930s, he created a police lab and a training facility. He laid out clear, precise management rules and enforced them — even if it meant bitterly criticizing his most trusted officers. The men he handpicked were not the average cops on many local police forces or the shady private investigators the Bureau had employed in the past. Instead, his agents had legal training, would not take bribes, and were backed up by scientists and technicians who could find a clue invisible to others. The Bureau was Hoover’s vision of logic, dedication, and order made real. He was like one of the Founding Fathers, but instead of creating a nation and its
Constitution, he built an agency to protect that country.
Hoover mapping the network of his offices and men. The map is a portrait of the national agency, linked by the clear chains of command he made possible.
A national fingerprint collection perfectly suited Hoover’s vision of law enforcement: scientific information gathered in well-organized files that allowed a small team of experts to catch criminals and protect the innocent.
Nearly all the agents were men, and, at first, almost all were mainline Protestants. Later the FBI would become significantly Catholic and Mormon as well, with still only a very few Jews. Throughout the Hoover years, a trickle of black men were fully trained, accepted by their peers, and given responsibility for missions, but the agency remained almost entirely white until the 1960s. Hoover built the Bureau in his image of America and American values: upstanding, efficient, precise, uncompromising, familiar: a place where whites were at the center, men were men, and everybody knew the rules.