AFTER THE GREAT WAR: ANTIRADICALISM AND THE RED SCARE

The Palmer Raids

The xenophobia that underlay immigration restrictions and the revitalization of the Ku Klux Klan was also apparent in the Red Scare of 1920. On 2 January 1920 federal agents under the direction of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer raided pool halls, restaurants, and private homes in thirty-three American cities, arresting more than four thousand alleged radicals or communists, often without proper warrants. Arrested radicals who lacked citizenship papers were held for de portation hearings. Known as the Palmer Raids, this onslaught against civil liberties marked the height of a government campaign begun in 1919 to fight a perceived "red menace" that many believed to be a threat to American democracy.

Fear of Communism

After the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917, an unprecedented fear of radicalism gripped the United States. In March 1919 news that the Third Communist International was encouraging its members to foment global revolution compounded Americans' fears. By 1920 there were three rival American Communist parties—the Proletarian Party and two opposing factions both calling themselves the Communist Labor Party. These parties remained small but vocal. Together, the widespread fear of communism and the mere existence of Communist parties in the United States provided ammunition for Americans who interpreted the nation's postwar problems as the product of Communist infiltration rather than as predictable consequences of adjustment to a peacetime economy.

Postwar Problems

After the war rapid and haphazard demobilization brought inflation and unemployment. A startling wave of strikes—steelworkers, coal miners, Boston policemen, and a general strike in Seattle—began. Organized labor used the cessation of hostilities to push for wage increases it had forgone during the war. Ambitious politicians, antiunion employers, and enthusiastic journalists magnified the gravity of labor unrest through exaggerated claims about the radical origins of labor protest. In late April 1919 thirty-six government officials, including Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and Attorney General Palmer, received "May Day" bombs through the mail, heightening the growing fear of radical subversion.

Antiradical Campaign

In autumn 1919 the federal government launched a crusade to halt what was believed to be a concerted Communist plot to destroy the United States. Ironically, Palmer, who led this crusade against domestic radicalism, had been a staunch defender of individual rights in his early months as attorney general, but his receipt of a mail bomb and his presidential aspirations had prompted a political metamorphosis. He became an enthusiastic leader for the "100 percent Americanism" philosophy. On 7 November 1919 Palmer began coordinated nationwide raids to round up and detain alleged radicals. Soon Americans clamored for their deportation, and Palmer readily obliged. Just before Christmas the Buford, an Army transport with 249 aliens on board, set sail for Finland, where they were sent by rail to the Soviet Union. Palmer followed up with the even more sweeping raids of January 1920. He also used Americans* fear of radicals to destroy the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, also known as the "Wobblies")? a militant industrial union whose mission was to end capitalist exploitation of workers.

The Red Scare Subsides

By late 1920 the Red Scare waned as Americans turned away from the trauma of war to the calm of peace. As the bombings, Palmer Raids, and immigrant deportations subsided, many Americans realized that warnings of a radical Bolshevik threat had been greatly exaggerated. Ironically, Americans' most basic and cherished civil liberties, such as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and representative government, had been threatened more by the aggressive tactics of the federal government than by alleged radicals and foreign subversives.

Source:

Robert K. Murray, Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919-1920

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955).

PALMER RAIDS

PALMER RAIDS. The Palmer Raids (1919–1920) involved mass arrests and deportation of radicals at the height of the post–World War I era red scare. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer encouraged the raids in the hope that they would advance his presidential ambitions. Ultimately, the extra-constitutional nature of this action destroyed Palmer's political career. He was viewed not as a savior but rather a threat to the civil rights and liberties of all Americans. J. Edgar Hoover, the chief of the Justice Department's Radical (later General Intelligence) Division who actually organized the raids, went on to a forty-eight-year career as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) (originally called the Bureau of Investigation). The other principal, Anthony Caminetti of the Department of Labor's Immigration Bureau, remained an obscure bureaucrat.

A wave of strikes, race riots, and anarchist bombings in eight cities provided the context for the Palmer Raids. One of those bombs partly destroyed the attorney general's own home in Washington, D.C. From February 1917 to November 1919, federal agents deported sixty aliens of some 600 arrested as anarchists. More raids followed over the next two months, the most notable being the 249 persons, including Emma Goldman, deported on December 21 aboard a single "Red Ark," the Buford. The most ambitious raids occurred on January 2, 1920, with lesser efforts continuing over the next few days. In all, Hoover utilized 579 agents from the Bureau of Investigation and vigilantes from the recently disbanded American Protective League to orchestrate massive raids against communists in twenty-three states. At least 4,000 and perhaps as many as 6,000 persons from thirty-three cities were arrested. Most were Communist Party members or suspected members. About 300 were members of the Communist Labor Party. Among the abuses documented by the American Civil Liberties Union and such prominent attorneys as Zechariah Chafee Jr., Roscoe Pound, and Felix Frankfurter were abuses of due process, illegal search and seizure, and indiscriminate arrests, use of agents provocateurs, and torture.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hoyt, Edwin P. The Palmer Raids, 1919–1920: An Attempt to Suppress Dissent. New York: Seabury Press, 1969.

Preston, William. Aliens and Dissenters: Federal Suppression of Radicals, 1903–1933. New York: Harper & Row, 1966.

Schmidt, Regin. Red Scare: FBI and the Origins of Anticommunism in the United States, 1919–1943. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press/University of Copenhagen, 2000.

KennethO'Reilly

See alsoAnticommunism ; Deportation ; Radicals and Radicalism .