ThePalmer Raids were a series of raids conducted in November 1919 and January 1920 by theUnited States Department of Justice under the administration of PresidentWoodrow Wilson to capture and arrest suspectedsocialists, especiallyanarchists andcommunists, anddeport them from the United States. The raids particularly targetedItalian immigrants andEastern EuropeanJewish immigrants with allegedleftist ties, with particular focus onItalian anarchists and immigrant leftistlabor activists. The raids and arrests occurred under the leadership ofUnited States Attorney GeneralA. Mitchell Palmer, with 6,000 people arrested across 36 cities. Though 556 foreign citizens were deported, including a number of prominent leftist leaders, Palmer's efforts were largely frustrated by officials at theU.S. Department of Labor, which had authority for deportations and objected to Palmer's methods.
The Palmer Raids occurred in the larger context of theFirst Red Scare, a period ofreactionaryfear of communists in the U.S. in the years immediately followingWorld War I and the successfulRussian Revolution.[1] There werestrikes that garnered national attention, and promptedrace riots in more than 30 cities, as well astwo sets of bombings in April and June 1919, including one bomb mailed to Palmer's home in response to his policy of politically motivatedmass arrests and deportations.[2]
During theFirst World War there was a nationwide right-wing campaign in the United States against the real and imagined divided political loyalties of immigrants and ethnic groups, who were feared to have too much loyalty for their nations of origin. In 1915,President Wilson warned againsthyphenated Americans who, he charged, had "poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life." "Such creatures of passion, disloyalty and anarchy", Wilson continued, "must be crushed out".[3] TheRussian Revolutions of 1917 added special force to fear oflabor agitators and partisans of ideologies such as anarchism and communism. Thegeneral strike in Seattle in February 1919 represented a new development inlabor unrest.[4]
The fears of Wilson and other government officials were confirmed whenGalleanists—Italian immigrant followers of the anarchistLuigi Galleani—carried out a series ofbombings in April and June 1919.[5] At the end of April, some 30 Galleanistletter bombs had been mailed to a host of individuals, mostly prominent government officials and businessmen, but also law enforcement officials.[5] Only a few reached their targets, and not all exploded when opened. Some people suffered injuries, including a housekeeper in SenatorThomas W. Hardwick's residence, who had her hands blown off.[5] On June 2, 1919, the second wave of bombings occurred, when several much larger package bombs were detonated by Galleanists in eight American cities, including one that damaged the home of Attorney GeneralA. Mitchell Palmer in Washington, D.C.[5] At least one person was killed in this second attack, night watchman William Boehner, and fears were raised because it occurred in the capital.[5][6][7]Flyers declaring war on capitalists in the name of anarchist principles accompanied each bomb.[5]
In June 1919, Attorney General Palmer told theHouse Appropriations Committee that all evidence promised that radicals would "on a certain day...rise up and destroy the government at one fell swoop." He requested an increase in his budget to$2,000,000 from $1,500,000 to support his investigations of radicals, but Congress limited the increase to$100,000.[8][9]
An initial raid in July 1919 against an anarchist group inBuffalo,New York, achieved little when a federal judge tossed out Palmer's case. He found in the case that the three arrested radicals, charged under a law dating from theCivil War, had proposed transforming the government by using theirfree speech rights and not by violence.[10] That taught Palmer that he needed to exploit the more powerfulimmigration statutes that authorized the deportation ofalien anarchists, violent or not. To do that, he needed to enlist the cooperation of officials at the Department of Labor. Only the Secretary of Labor could issue warrants for the arrest of alien violators of the Immigration Acts, and only he could sign deportation orders following a hearing by an immigration inspector.[11]
On August 1, 1919, Palmer named 24-year-oldJ. Edgar Hoover to head a new division of theJustice Department'sBureau of Investigation, theGeneral Intelligence Division (GID), with responsibility for investigating the programs of radical groups and identifying their members.[12] TheBoston Police Strike in early September raised concerns about possible threats to political and social stability. On October 17, theSenate passed a unanimous resolution demanding Palmer explain what actions he had or had not taken against radical aliens and why.[13]
At 9 p.m. on November 7, 1919, a date chosen because it was the second anniversary of theBolshevik revolution, agents of the Bureau of Investigation, together with local police, executed a series of well-publicized and violent raids against theUnion of Russian Workers in 12 cities. Newspaper accounts reported some were "badly beaten" during the arrests. Many later swore they were threatened and beaten during questioning. Government agents cast a wide net, bringing in some American citizens, passers-by who admitted being Russian, some not members of the Russian Workers. Others were teachers conductingnight school classes in space shared with the targeted radical group. Arrests far exceeded the number of warrants. Of 650 arrested in New York City, the government managed to deport just 43.[A]
When Palmer replied to the Senate's questions of October 17, he reported that his department had amassed 60,000 names with great effort. Required by the statutes to work through the Department of Labor, they had arrested 250 dangerous radicals in the November 7 raids. He proposed a new Anti-Sedition Law to enhance his authority to prosecute anarchists.[16]
Inasmuch as Attorney General Palmer struggled with exhaustion and devoted all his energies to theUnited Mine Workerscoal strike in November and December 1919,[17] Hoover organized the next raids. He successfully persuaded the Department of Labor to ease its insistence on promptly alerting those arrested of theirright to an attorney. Instead, Labor issued instructions that its representatives could wait until after the case against the defendant was established, "in order to protect government interests."[18] Less openly, Hoover decided to interpret Labor's agreement to act against theCommunist Party to include a different organization, theCommunist Labor Party. Finally, despite the fact that Secretary of LaborWilliam B. Wilson insisted that more than membership in an organization was required for a warrant, Hoover worked with more compliant Labor officials and overwhelmed Labor staff to get the warrants he wanted. Justice Department officials, including Palmer and Hoover, later claimed ignorance of such details.[19]
The Justice Department launched a series of raids on January 2, 1920, with follow up operations over the next few days. Smaller raids extended over the next 6 weeks. At least 3,000 were arrested, and many others were held for various lengths of time. The entire enterprise replicated the November action on a larger scale, including arrests and seizures without search warrants, as well as detention in overcrowded and unsanitary holding facilities. Hoover later admitted "clear cases of brutality."[20] The raids covered more than 30 cities and towns in 23 states, but those west of theMississippi and south of theOhio were "publicity gestures" designed to make the effort appear nationwide in scope.[B] Because the raids targeted entire organizations, agents arrested everyone found in organizationmeeting halls, not only arresting non-radical organization members but also visitors who did not belong to a target organization, and sometimes American citizens not eligible for arrest and deportation.[C]
The Department of Justice at one point claimed to have taken possession of severalbombs, but after a few iron balls were displayed to the press they were never mentioned again. All the raids netted a total of just four ordinarypistols.[23]
While most press coverage continued to be positive, with criticism only fromleftist publications likeThe Nation andThe New Republic, one attorney raised the first noteworthy protest.Francis Fisher Kane, theU.S. Attorney for the Eastern District ofPennsylvania, resigned in protest. In his letter of resignation to the President and the Attorney General he wrote: "It seems to me that the policy of raids against large numbers of individuals is generally unwise and very apt to result in injustice. People not really guilty are likely to be arrested and railroaded through their hearings... We appear to be attempting to repress a political party... By such methods, we drive underground and make dangerous what was not dangerous before." Palmer replied that he could not use individual arrests to treat an "epidemic" and asserted his own fidelity to constitutional principles. He added: "The Government should encourage free political thinking and political action, but it certainly has the right for its own preservation to discourage and prevent the use of force and violence to accomplish that which ought to be accomplished, if at all, by parliamentary or political methods."[24][25]The Washington Post endorsed Palmer's claim for urgency over legal process: "There is no time to waste on hairsplitting over infringement of liberty."[26]
The individuals captured during the Palmer Raids were held in abysmal conditions: atDeer Island, six hundred prisoners were placed in barracks intended to house three hundred, with no heat and dwindling food; many were marched throughBoston in chains and handcuffs, showered with the spit and trash of bystanders. InDetroit, eight hundred prisoners were crammed into a windowless corridor with only one working bathroom and no beds. AtEllis Island, hundreds of men were forced to sleep on steel slabs without mattresses.[27]
In a few weeks, after changes in personnel at theDepartment of Labor, Palmer faced a new and very independent-minded Acting Secretary of Labor in Assistant Secretary of LaborLouis Freeland Post, who canceled more than 2,000 warrants as being illegal.[28] Of the 10,000 arrested, 3,500 were held by authorities in detention; 556resident aliens were eventually deported under theImmigration Act of 1918.[29]
At a Cabinet meeting in April 1920, Palmer called on Secretary of LaborWilliam B. Wilson to fire Post, but Wilson defended him. The President listened to his feuding department heads and offered no comment about Post, but he ended the meeting by telling Palmer that he should "not let this country see red."Secretary of the NavyJosephus Daniels, who made notes of the conversation, thought the Attorney General had merited the President's "admonition", because Palmer "was seeingred behind every bush and every demand for an increase in wages."[30]
Palmer's supporters in Congress responded with an attempt toimpeach Louis Post or, failing that, tocensure him. The drive against Post began to lose energy when Attorney General Palmer's forecast of an attempted radical uprising onMay Day 1920 failed to occur. Then, in testimony before theHouse Rules Committee on May 7–8, Post proved "a convincing speaker with a caustic tongue"[28] and defended himself so successfully that CongressmanEdward W. Pou, a Democrat presumed to be an enthusiastic supporter of Palmer, congratulated him: "I feel that you have followed your sense of duty absolutely."[31]
On May 28, 1920, the nascentAmerican Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which was founded in response to the raids,[32] published itsReport Upon the Illegal Practices of the United States Department of Justice,[33] which carefully documented unlawful activities in arresting suspected radicals, illegalentrapment byagents provocateur, and unlawfulincommunicado detention. Such prominent lawyers and law professors asFelix Frankfurter,Roscoe Pound andErnst Freund signed it.Harvard ProfessorZechariah Chafee criticized the raids and attempts at deportations and the lack oflegal process in his 1920 volumeFreedom of Speech. He wrote: "That aQuaker should employ prison and exile to counteract evil-thinking is one of the saddest ironies of our time."[34]
TheRules Committee gave Palmer a hearing in June, where he attacked Post and other critics whose "tender solicitude for social revolution and perverted sympathy for the criminal anarchists...set at large among the people the very public enemies whom it was the desire and intention of the Congress to be rid of." The press saw the dispute as evidence of the Wilson administration's ineffectiveness and division as it approached its final months.[35]
In June 1920, a decision byMassachusetts District Court JudgeGeorge W. Anderson ordered the discharge of 17 arrested aliens and denounced the Department of Justice's actions. He wrote that "a mob is a mob, whether made up of Government officials acting under instructions from theDepartment of Justice, or of criminals and loafers and the vicious classes." His decision effectively prevented any renewal of the raids.[36][37]
Palmer, once seen as a likelypresidential candidate, lost his bid to win theDemocraticnomination for president later in the year.[38] The anarchist bombing campaign, following the ideology ofpropaganda of the deed, continued intermittently in the US for another twelve years.[39][5]
The legal issues involved in the 1919 Palmer Raids during theWoodrow Wilson administration have been resurrected during thedeportations during the second Trump administration.[40]
Current Trump administration policy has been compared to the Palmer Raids, and the "Repatriations" of the 1930s":
Former President Donald Trump's call for historic "mass deportations" of immigrants from the United States is forcing the nation to revisit past expulsions that left deep wounds still felt today.The big picture: From the Palmer Raids of Jewish and Italian immigrants of 1919 to the mass deportation of Mexican immigrants in the 1950s, previous deportation operations ignored civil liberties, heightened racial tensions and disrupted families of American citizens for generations.[41]
It has also been compared to the Irish Expulsion, the Palmer Raids and the “Soviet Ark”, the “Mexican Repatriation” duringThe Great Depression, “Operation Wetback” during theDwight D. Eisenhower administration, and "The Deporter-in-Chief" during theBarack Obama administration.[42]
In the 105 years between 1892 and 1997, the United States deported 2.1 million people.[43] Between 2001 and 2008, during thePresidency of George W. Bush, about 2.0 million people were deported, while between 2009 and 2016, during thePresidency of Barack Obama, about 3.2 million people were deported.[44]
A hundred years ago, the Palmer Raids imperilled thousands of immigrants. Then a wily official got in the way.(subscription required)
Donald Trump has promised to deport millions on "Day One." He wouldn't be the first president to round up undocumented immigrants en masse.
Further reading
Media related toPalmer Raids at Wikimedia Commons
