J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  ALIEN: “To go back to the old country.”

  Many of the prisoners, Spolansky observed, were “so illiterate that they could not even spell ‘Communist,’ much less understand its meaning.”

  “In those cases where the prisoners had obviously been misled or coerced into joining the Party,” the Chicago BI chief noted, “we released the misguided soul promptly.”8

  While this may have been true in Chicago, it wasn’t elsewhere.

  Although the figures would be much disputed, apparently upwards of ten thousand persons were arrested. Of that number, all but about four thousand were released after a few days, either because they were American citizens or because there was not even a red card to prove their party membership. Of those remaining in custody, more than half had been arrested without warrants. In many cases, the warrants were obtained only after the arrests had been made. As for search warrants, they were practically never used.

  In New York City some seven hundred persons were seized. According to the Times, “Meetings open to the general public were roughly broken up. All persons present—citizens and aliens alike without discrimination—were arbitrarily taken into custody and searched as if they had been burglars caught in the criminal act. Without warrants of arrest men were carried off to police stations and other temporary prisons, subjected there to secret police-office 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.”9

  Although this became almost standard procedure, there were variations. In Seattle, according to the testimony of an immigration inspector, Justice Department agents didn’t bother to search out radicals and match them with the warrants; “they went to various pool rooms, etc. in which foreigners congregated, and they simply sent up in trucks all of them that happened to be there.”10 In Boston some three hundred men were chained together and paraded through the streets to Deer Island in Boston Harbor, where conditions were so intolerable that one man dove five stories to his death and another had to be committed as insane. In Detroit eight hundred persons were held six days in a small, airless corridor on the top floor of the Federal Building, with a single clogged toilet and only occasional water and food.*

  “Revolution Smashed,” read the front-page headline of the New York Times, while its editorial page heaped praise on the attorney general. Featured prominently in all the papers was BI chief Flynn’s claim that the raids had been necessary to smash an imminent uprising.

  If the claim was true, the revolutionaries were amazingly ill prepared. What Flynn didn’t tell the reporters was that in searching hundreds of meeting places and residences, the agents found only four guns (three of them rusty pistols confiscated in an antiques shop) and no dynamite. Four “bombs” were found in Newark. Despite their owners’ claim that they were bowling balls, the raiders took one look at them and, seeing no holes, hastily immersed them in buckets of water. None of the agents had heard of the game boccie.

  In the aftermath of the raids, Hoover stayed busy. In addition to making sure that the Justice Department had an agent at each of the immigration hearings, he barraged Caminetti with memos, urging either that no bail be permitted or that it be set at an unmeetable amount, such as ten or fifteen thousand dollars. Allowing the aliens out on bail, where they could contact their lawyers, “defeats the ends of justice,” Hoover argued. Also, he contended, if kept in custody, they would be unable to propagandize.11

  Propagandizing was much on Hoover’s mind. Initially there had been little public outcry, probably because two to three weeks passed before most of the prisoners were allowed to see their families or attorneys, while friends who went to the jails and other detention centers looking for them were arrested also.† But, although the criticism was as yet confined to such liberal publications as the Nation and the New Republic, Hoover and Garvan organized a propaganda section within the GID. The forerunner of the FBI’s vast Crime Records publicity mill, it supplied newspaper and magazine editors with packets containing carefully edited samples of the most inflammatory radical literature; metal plates with prepared articles, editorials, and cartoons endorsing Palmer’s anti-Red crusade; plus a personal letter from the attorney general in which he offered to furnish the editors “with details, either general or in specific cases.”12

  Palmer’s offer to open the files of still-unresolved cases to favored newsmen was in itself an illegal act; it apparently bothered him no more than it did the FBI’s Crime Records Division in future years.

  Up to this point, Hoover had for the most part stayed in the background, at least insofar as the public was concerned. He now stepped out of the shadows and personally took over the defense of the raids.

  On January 21, in a public hearing that received nationwide coverage, Labor Secretary Wilson heard arguments in the first of the Communist deportation cases. Four lawyers representing the Communist party of America argued that since the party did not advocate bloodshed to advance its ends, its members therefore were not subject to deportation. “Special Counsel J.A. Hoover,” as the New York Times identified him, presented the Justice Department’s case, arguing that the words “destruction,” “annihilation,” and “violence” recurred throughout most Communist literature.*13 Three days later, Wilson again ruled that membership in the Communist party was a deportable offense. However, the victory of the former Central High debater was slightly tarnished by another decision the secretary of labor made the same day. Apparently learning for the first time of the change in Rule 22, Wilson immediately revoked it. But by this time most of the aliens had been incarcerated for over three weeks, so his action had little effect.

  On January 26 Hoover, in his role as “Palmer’s assistant,” was interviewed for the first time by the New York Times. He declared that of the thirty-six hundred aliens taken into custody during the recent roundups, three thousand were “perfect” cases for deportation, since their party cards had been seized at the time of their arrests. As for the other six hundred, “Hoover said it was believed that their membership would be proved by other evidence.”

  The Times account continued, “Deportation hearings and the shipment of ‘Reds’ from this country will be pushed forward rapidly, Mr. Hoover declared. Second, third and as many other ‘Soviet Arks’ as may be necessary will be made ready as the convictions proceed, he said, and actual deportations will not wait for the conclusion of all the cases.”14

  The reaction was slow in coming, but when it came it grew in momentum. As more details of the raid became known, a number of church groups and civic organizations protested the harsh treatment accorded the prisoners. “I was sent up to New York later by Assistant Attorney General Garvan and reported back that there had been clear cases of brutality in the raids,” Hoover told the writer Fletcher Knebel in a Look interview thirty-five years later, at which time he also admitted, “They arrested a lot of people that weren’t Communists.”15

  Hoover may have made such a report, but no copy of it is in the Justice Department archives. Another Hoover memo is there, however, dated January 28, 1920, to Attorney General Palmer, in which he emphatically denied the mistreatment stories. The agents “had been very carefully trained before making the arrests,” he said, and they were informed “that violence was not to be resorted to under any circumstances.”16

  As for his other latter-day admission, that a lot of people had been arrested who weren’t Communists, if such a disclaimer was made at the time, it too no longer exists. But there do exist several other memos, to Caminetti, in which Hoover urged that aliens be held even if there was no proof of radical affiliation, on the chance that evidence might be uncovered at some future date “in other sections of the country.”17

  Still another Hoover memo from this period survives, although for many years it too was suppressed. On February 21, 1920, in a “confidential” message to Assistant BI Chief Frank Burke, Hoover privately conceded that ther
e was “no authority under the law permitting this Department to take any action in deportation proceedings relative to radical activities.”18

  Hoover also wrote Burke, and others, that now that the Communists were out of the way, he was still hoping to make the deportation of IWW members “automatic and mandatory.” And, despite the mounting criticism of the raids (which he blamed on “bad publicity”), he still advocated using the dragnet approach, albeit in slightly modified form, with “selective” arrests of IWW agitators, “in groups of five hundred.”19

  Then, in March 1920, Abercrombie suddenly left the Labor Department to run for the Senate in Alabama. With Secretary Wilson again absent because of illness, Assistant Secretary Louis F. Post became the acting secretary.

  Post had a great deal on his conscience. He had signed Emma Goldman’s deportation order. Up to that time, he had also been her friend. He later explained his action by saying, “Whether or not I liked the law did not enter in. I was not a maker of laws but an administrator of a law already constitutionally made.”20 But this justification did not ease the discomfort he felt.

  Post had also been present at the Christmas Eve conference in Secretary Wilson’s office and had, like the others, gone along with Caminetti’s fervent argument, making possible the January raids.

  In March the new acting secretary quietly canceled hundreds of the arrest warrants.

  In early April, Post also canceled his first deportation warrant, in the case of Thomas Truss, a Presbyterian church trustee and Polish community leader whose membership had been automatically transferred from the Socialist to the Communist party. Post ruled that Truss—or, in effect, any alien—could not be deported if he did not know he was a member of a proscribed organization.

  By April 14, out of a total of 1,600 deportation warrants, Post had canceled 1,141, or about 71 percent, and earned a prominent place on Hoover’s enemies list.

  During the last two weeks of April, Hoover’s GID issued almost daily bulletins predicting that the long-anticipated revolution would now occur on May 1.

  On April 24 Secretary Wilson, who had returned from his leave of absence, heard arguments in the case of Carl Miller, a Communist Labor party member. Again appearing as special counsel, Hoover claimed that at least 50 percent of the recent strikes and labor unrest were directly traceable to the two Communist organizations.

  As for the CLP, he described its members as “a gang of cutthroat aliens who have come to this country to overthrow the government by force.”21 Secretary Wilson took the matter under advisement.

  On May 1 troops were called out in many of the nation’s cities. In New York the entire police force was placed on alert. Otherwise nothing happened.

  On May 2 many of the newspapers previously supportive of the attorney general’s crusade ran editorials criticizing Palmer’s cry-wolf hallucinations.

  On May 5 Secretary Wilson announced his decision in the Miller case, canceling the deportation warrant of the Communist Labor party member, on the grounds that the CLP platform, since it did not exclude the possibility of change through parlimentary means, could not be said to advocate violent revolution exclusively. This eventually led to the dismissal of all the Communist Labor party warrants.

  Long before this, an enraged attorney general, backed by the heads of the GID and BI, had called for the impeachment of Louis Post. Also greatly concerned about the recent setbacks, Palmer’s congressional allies arranged for the Rules Committee of the House of Representatives to schedule an “Investigation of the Administration of Louis F. Post, Assistant Secretary of Labor, in the Matter of Deportation of Aliens.” Post himself testified on May 7 and 8 of 1920.

  Hoover’s GID supplied the Rules Committee with much of the anti-Post material it used in its inquiry, transmitting it secretly through Albert Johnson, chairman of the powerful House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. Hoover also attended the hearings himself, as the attorney general’s unofficial observer. His report to Palmer summed up not only Post’s testimony but also, unintentionally, the whole Red crusade: according to Hoover, Post claimed “that the Department of Justice had broken all the rules of law in its activities against the Reds and…that these acts were committed with the knowledge and approval of the Attorney General.”22

  What Hoover didn’t mention—but it wasn’t necessary, for Palmer was quite aware of the newspaper headlines—was that the congressmen believed Post.

  The seventy-one-year-old assistant labor secretary, with his meticulous memory for individual cases and his patient but firm espousal of the need for fairness in each, had won over even the diehards on the committee. This case had been canceled because there had been an “automatic,” as distinguished from a “knowing,” transfer of membership; that case, because the person had quit the party on learning its aims. He had dismissed these cases because there was no arrest warrant, or no supporting proof, or the evidence had been illegally obtained, or because the alien had signed a document he could neither read nor understand, or because force had been used.

  It was now A. Mitchell Palmer who was under fire. And it did not let up. On May 25 the National Popular Government League released its study of the raids, in the form of a 67-page pamphlet, which began:

  “For more than six months, we, the undersigned lawyers, whose sworn duty it is to uphold the Constitution and Laws of the United States, have seen with growing apprehension the continued violation of that Constitution and breaking of those Laws by the Department of Justice of the United States Government.”23

  There followed a carefully researched catalog of illegal acts committed during and after the raids, documented with sworn affidavits and photographs. Yet it was not the contents which gave the pamphlet its greatest impact but its sponsor and signers.

  The league was a prestigious urban reform group that not even the GID would have dared call radical; the twelve signers of the pamphlet included some of the most illustrious figures in American jurisprudence.

  Three of the most prominent were associated with Harvard: Roscoe Pound was dean of the Harvard Law School, and widely acknowledged to be the greatest legal scholar in the United States; Felix Frankfurter and Zechariah Chafee, Jr., the latter the author of the classic Free Speech in the United States, were both professors of law at the university. Their signatures added special weight to the pamphlet’s charge that those in the office of the attorney general had little understanding of, and even less concern for, the principles of constitutional law.

  There is every reason to believe that the George Washington Law School graduate took it quite personally.

  However, perhaps the most important signer was, insofar as the general public was concerned, the least known: Francis Fisher Kane, the former U.S. attorney in Philadelphia. On receiving Burke’s instructions, Kane had immediately contacted his superior, Attorney General Palmer, protesting that if another mass roundup were conducted there would undoubtedly be many injustices and many innocent people hurt. He felt so strongly about this that he threatened to resign if Palmer did not cancel the January 2 raids. Palmer ignored his letter until January 3, at which time Kane submitted his resignation, to both the attorney general and the president. According to Coben, “Kane’s response provided the first indication from a responsible public official—and a fairly important member of the Justice Department at that—that laws had been violated during the raids and not all of those arrested were engaged in a revolutionary plot.”*24

  The credentials of the twelve lawyers were such that their condemnation of the Justice Department sent shock waves through the American legal establishment and, coming just a month before the Democratic National Convention, caused panic among Palmer’s backers.

  Hoover reacted in what was to become characteristic fashion. He opened a file on each signer. He also searched his own files and had his friend General Marlborough Churchill search those of MID, for any evidence that the critics had radical associations or beliefs. It wasn’t an easy task, for as Donald Jo
hnson observes in Challenge to American Freedom, “Every one of these men had supported the war, many of them had been important government officials, and their reputations were beyond reproach.”25

  With Louis Post, Hoover went even further. Convinced for some reason that Post was a tool of the IWW, he had the Chicago BI office sift through that organization’s voluminous correspondence for any mentions of Post’s name.†

  But Hoover’s heaviest ammunition was Post’s friendship with Emma Goldman. When Palmer himself was called before the Rules Committee, he charged that Post was guilty of harboring an “habitually tender solicitude for social revolutionaries and perverted sympathy for the criminal anarchists of the country”—neglecting to mention that it was Louis Post who’d signed Emma Goldman’s deportation order.26

  As for the signers of the pamphlet, Palmer referred to them as “12 gentlemen said to be lawyers.” He was appalled that, as such, they would take the word of “these ignorant aliens,” rather than that of his own agents, “these splendid men, these real Americans.” There must be some “further ulterior motives” to their criticism. Some of these lawyers had even appeared in court representing the aliens, which established “pretty clearly” that “they were there because they believed in the communist ideas and desired to defend them.27

  Palmer ignored the many other prominent persons who had joined the twelve in condemning the raids, among them John Lord O’Brian, Charles Evans Hughes, and Harlan Fiske Stone, dean of the Columbia University School of Law.

  It is not known whether Hoover also opened files on his former boss and the two future chief justices of the U.S. Supreme Court. But there is no reason why they should have been the only ones excluded.

  By June 1 the turnabout was complete. A. Mitchell Palmer was called before the Rules Committee to answer “Charges Made Against the Department of Justice by Louis F. Post and Others.”