The Palmer Raids: America’s Forgotten Reign of Terror

FEE ^ | January 3, 2020 | Lawrence W. Reed

[gattaca]

The raids constituted a horrific, shameful episode in American history, one of the lowest moments for liberty since King George III quartered troops in private homes. Friday, January 3, 2020

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons | Public Domain (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en) Lawrence W. Reed Lawrence W. Reed Politics History Woodrow Wilson First Amendment Communism World War I Police State Exactly a hundred years ago this morning—on January 3, 1920—Americans woke up to discover just how little their own government regarded the cherished Bill of Rights. During the night, some 4,000 of their fellow citizens were rounded up and jailed for what amounted, in most cases, to no good reason at all and no due process, either.

Welcome to the story of the Palmer Raids, named for their instigator, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. Though largely forgotten today, they shouldn’t be. They constituted a horrific, shameful episode in American history, one of the lowest moments for liberty since King George III quartered troops in private homes.

The terror during the night of January 2-3, 1920, shocked and frightened many citizens. In her 1971 book, America’s Reign of Terror: World War I, the Red Scare, and the Palmer Raids, Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht wrote:

[T]error is not just a body count. Terror exists when a person can be sentenced to years in prison for an idle remark; when people are pulled out of their beds and arrested; when 4,000 persons are seized in a single night; and when arrests and searches are made without warrants. Moreover, for each person sent to prison for his views, many others were silenced. The author amply documents the government’s insensitivity to civil liberties during this period, its frequent brutality and callousness, and the personal grief that ensued.

The targets of the Palmer raids were radicals and leftists deemed by the Wilson administration to be hostile to “American values.” Ironically, none of those arrested had done anywhere near as much harm to those values as the man living in the White House—Woodrow Wilson, arguably the worst of the country’s 45 presidents. More on that and the Palmer Raids after some background.

A War on Democracy This wasn’t the first time the government in Washington had trampled the Bill of Rights. No less than the administration of John Adams, an American founding patriot, briefly shut down newspapers and dissenting opinion with its Alien & Sedition Acts of 1798. Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus and arrested thousands of political opponents in Northern states.

The most immediate precedents for the Palmer Raids were wartime measures of the same administration just a few years before. Wilson campaigned for re-election in 1916 on a boast that he had “kept us out of war” even as he authorized non-neutral aid for Britain and France. He then feigned surprise when Germany declared unrestricted warfare on ships carrying supplies to its enemies. It was the pretext for American entry into World War I in April 1917.

“Wars are dirty but crusades are holy,” writes Feuerlicht, “so Wilson turned the war into a crusade.” The conflict became “the war to end all wars” and a war “to make the world safe for democracy” while the president made war on democracy at home.

America was formally at war for only a week when Wilson created the Committee on Public Information (CPI). Its job was to convince Americans the war was right and just. A national venture in thought control, it bludgeoned the people with Wilson’s view until it became their view, as well. It was government propaganda on a scale never before seen in the US, flooding the country with CPI-approved war news, speakers, school materials, posters, buttons, stickers—the works.

Two months later, under intense pressure from the White House, Congress passed the Espionage Act. Any person who made “false reports or false statements with intent to interfere” with the official war effort could be punished with 20 years in jail or a fine of $10,000 (at least a quarter-million in today’s dollars), or both. It was amended in May 1918 by the Sedition Act, which made it a crime to write or speak anything “disloyal or abusive” about the government, the Constitution, the flag, or a US military uniform.

Wilson pushed hard for Congress to give him extraordinary powers to muzzle the media, insisting to The New York Times that press censorship “was absolutely necessary to public safety.” According to Christopher M. Finan in his 2007 book, From the Palmer Raids to the Patriot Act: A History of the Fight for Free Speech in America, a blizzard of hostile editorials killed that in Congress, fortunately.

The Post Office began destroying certain mail instead of delivering it.

Wilson’s attorney general at the time, Thomas Watt Gregory, strongly encouraged Americans to spy on each other, to become “volunteer detectives” and report every suspicion to the Justice Department. In a matter of months, the department was receiving about 1,500 accusations of disloyalty every single day.

Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson jumped into the cause with both feet, ordering that local postmasters send him any publications they discovered that might “embarrass” the government. The Post Office began destroying certain mail instead of delivering it, even banning certain magazines altogether. An issue of one periodical was outlawed for no more reason than it suggested the war be paid for by taxes instead of loans. Others were forbidden because they criticized our allies, the British and the French. “Throughout the war and long after it ended, [Burleson] was the sole judge of which mailed publications Americans could or could not read,” writes Feuerlicht.

Individuals were hauled into court for expressing reservations about Wilson or his war. One of many examples involved one Reverend Clarence H. Waldron, who distributed a pamphlet claiming the war was un-Christian. For that, he was sentenced to 15 years. In another case, a filmmaker named Robert Goldstein earned a 10-year prison award for producing a movie about the American Revolution, The Spirit of ’76. His crime? Depicting the British in a negative light. They were allies now, so that sort of thing was a no-no.

Of the roughly 2,000 people prosecuted under the Espionage and Sedition Acts, not a single one of them was a German spy. They were all Americans whose thoughts or deeds (almost none of them violent) ran counter to those of the man in the big White House. Hundreds were deported after minimal due process even though they were neither illegal immigrants nor convicted criminals.

The famous socialist, union activist, and presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs found himself crosswise with Wilson for opposing both the draft and the war. In April 1919, five months after the war ended, he was convicted of “seditious” speech, sentenced to ten years in prison, and denied the right to vote for the rest of his life. Sometime later, when Debs heard that Wilson would refuse to pardon him, he poignantly responded, “It is he [Wilson], not I, who needs a pardon.”

A Night of Terror Allow me to digress for a moment on the Debs case because it brings to mind a current controversy. President Trump was impeached by the House last month because he allegedly tried to cripple a political opponent by pushing for an investigation into that opponent’s possible corruption. But there was hardly a peep from the media in 1919, even though Debs ran for president four times before and would run yet again, and Wilson himself was flirting with the idea of running for a third term in 1920.

Hostilities in Europe ended in November 1918, but the Wilson administration’s assault on civil rights continued.

Wilson’s health eventually precluded another run, but Debs ran from his prison cell and garnered more than 900,000 votes. Wilson never pardoned Debs, but Republican President Warren G. Harding did.

Hostilities in Europe ended in November 1918, but the Wilson administration’s assault on civil rights continued. With the Germans vanquished, the new pretext to bully Americans became known as the “Red Scare”—the notion that communists under the influence of the new Leninist regime in Moscow were the big threat in the country.

Meantime, in March 1919, Wilson hired a new attorney general—A. Mitchell Palmer—who was determined to tackle it one way or another, especially after two attempted bombings of his home. Palmer was just what Wilson was looking for: “young, militant, progressive and fearless,” in the president’s own words.

The first of the two biggest Palmer Raids occurred on November 7, 1919. With Palmer’s newly appointed deputy J. Edgar Hoover spearheading the operation, federal agents scooped up hundreds of alleged radicals, subversives, communists, anarchists, and “undesirable” but legal immigrants in 12 cities—some 650 in New York City alone. Beatings, even in police stations, were not uncommon.

Palmer later said,

If . . . some of my agents out in the field . . . were a little rough and unkind, or short and curt, with these alien agitators . . . I think it might well be overlooked.

He pointed to a few bombings as evidence that the sedition problem was huge and required “decisive” action.

January 2, 1920—when the largest and most aggressive batch of Palmer Raids was carried out—was a night of terror: about 4,000 arrests across 23 states, often without legitimate search warrants and with the arrestees frequently tossed into makeshift jails in substandard conditions.

Leftists and leftist organizations were the targets, but even visitors to their meeting halls were caught up in the dragnet. No friend of liberty then or now, The Washington Post opined, “There is no time to waste on hairsplitting over infringement of liberties.” A few smaller raids were conducted, but nothing on the scale of January 2-3.

Palmer thought he would ride the Red Scare into the White House, but he lost his bid for the Democratic Party’s nomination later that year. Meantime, the courts largely nullified his dirty work. By June 1920, the raids were history. In the fall, the Democrats lost big as Republican Warren Harding ushered in “an era of normalcy.”

It’s hard to find any lingering trace of the “subversive” work the Palmer Raids were ostensibly intended to combat. Thousands were arrested when actual crimes were committed by a relative few. Certainly, none of the arrested Americans gave us a progressive income tax or a central bank or violations of free speech and due process. It was Woodrow Wilson and his friends who gave us all that, and much more mischief.

Let us remember the Palmer Raids and the administration that carried them out as black marks against American liberty, hopefully never to be repeated.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

Good post!

[Bonemaker]

“Wilson was our worst President, ever.”

2nd worst.

[BenLurkin]

“Though 556 foreign citizens were deported, including a number of prominent leftist leaders, Palmer’s efforts were largely frustrated by officials at the U.S. Department of Labor...”

Early Deep State pinkos.

[FreedomPoster]

Not giving up my rifles, won’t get on that bus.

But yes, I agree.

[FreedomPoster]

See the Hayek quote on my profile page. 2 paragraphs, 3rd quote down. Summarizes the European aspect of that very well.

[Henry Hnyellar]

Now do FDR.

[Grampa Dave]

Thanks for posting this scary time in our history.

Too many of today’s conservatives have a zero sense of how the rights of Americans were violated, even a hundred years ago.

[Liberty Valance]

bump

[schurmann]

“...So confident was the German ambassador in his country’s hold on the loyalties of German Americans that he famously warned the American Secretary of State that if America declared war on Germany, a million German Americans would rise in rebellion against the government. The Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, replied that would not deter the government because we had a million and one lamp posts available...” [Rockingham, post 20]

Your numbers, dates, contexts, and names/titles of officials are incorrect.

Arthur Zimmermann was Deputy State Secretary for Foreign Affairs of the Imperial German government during the aftermath of the sinking of RMS Lusitania (May 1915); that was when he warned James W Gerard (US ambassador to Imperial Germany) that “the United States does not dare do anything against Germany because we have five hundred thousand German reservists in America who will rise against your government if it should dare to take any action against Germany.” Gerard replied “that we have five hundred and one thousand lamp posts in America and that is where the German reservists would find themselves hanging if they tried any uprising.”

Zimmermann had been elevated to State Secretary for Foreign Affairs before the United States declared war in spring 1917.

President T Woodrow Wilson’s address to Congress made it clear that his request for a declaration of war was based on the German intent - stated publicly on 31 January 1917 - to wage unrestricted submarine warfare not only against Allied shipping, but against any neutral merchant traffic approaching the British Isles or other Allied destinations, and deemed by submarine crews to be of doubtful provenance. U-boats of the Kaiserliche Marine did just that in the ensuing weeks.

The remark about making the world “safe for democracy” was an afterthought and contained nothing sneaky.

Whether American attitudes about warfare at that point in time were realistic is another argument. Geostrategic realities in 1917 precluded anything like “balanced trade” with all belligerents, because of the Allied blockade of the Central Powers.

The quotes can be found on page 711 of the hardbound edition of Robert K Massie’s _Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea_ (New York: Random House, 2003. ISBN 0-679-45671-6)

[dfwgator]

Did the US object to the British naval blockade of Germany that made it necessary for the Germans to attack shipping?

[Fedora]

Wilson's policies and the Palmer Raids are certainly open to criticism on several fronts, but the article (like much of the literature on this subject) is off-base in its assertion that, "Of the roughly 2,000 people prosecuted under the Espionage and Sedition Acts, not a single one of them was a German spy." The first target of the Palmer Raids, the Union of Russian Workers (URW aka Russian Workingmen's Association) had close ties to the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW aka Wobblies), which had worked with Germany's sabotage network in the United States during the war, and elements of the IWW and URW had subsequently joined forces with the Soviet-directed Third International by the time of the Palmer Raids (at which time the ink on the Treaty of Versailles was still drying and Allied troops were still deployed against the Bolsheviks in some parts of Eastern Europe and Russia--there were actually U.S. troops in Siberia until April 1920). The second target of the Palmer Raids, a precursor to CPUSA called the Communist Labor Party of America, was likewise formed from groups that had worked with the Germans during the war and were now working with the Soviets. The initial public opposition to the Palmer Raids was voiced by The Nation, whose staff was linked to the German and Soviet propaganda networks; and The New Republic, which was pro-Soviet. The legal opposition to the raids was led by Assistant Secretary of Labor Louis Post, whose wife Alice Thatcher Post had worked with multiple German front groups during the war; and the National Popular Government League (NPGL), a left-wing advocacy group that had also come within the German and Soviet orbit. The NPGL legal coalition against the Palmer Raids was assembled by Felix Frankfurter, a Harvard Law School professor acting as a front man for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, then a contact of Soviet agent Santeri Nuorteva. Frankfurter would later play a key role in promoting Soviet agents such as Alger Hiss within the FDR administration.

[Rockingham]

I am confident of what I read even though it is not at hand and available as to the specifics. It may be that a similar story has been correctly attributed to both Lansing and Gerard. Assuming that is so, Lansing might have appropriated Gerard's experience, or Germany may have delivered the same message to both men in their respective capacities, a common diplomatic tactic to assure receipt of a message and to emphasize a point.

Supposedly, Wilson was induced to declare war on Germany by British representations that their enemy was near collapse and that the US needed to join the war if it wanted to help craft the peace. Wilson, the pacifist, was thereby inveigled to declare war in order to shape the peace. In truth, Britain, France, and her allies were in desperate circumstances and needed immediate American entry into the war.

As it was, American financial support and supplies were of rapid benefit, but troops in the field took longer due to our dismal military readiness. To Pershing's enduring credit, he insisted that the American Army would participate only as organized units under American command and not as small scale and individual replacements to fill gaps in the Allied trench works. And then the Americans arrived, first as Marines in the crucial stand of the Third Battle of the Marne, then as trained Army units itching to go on the offensive.

Able to do the math and project rising American troop levels, Germany's strategists knew that civilian hunger, revolutionary agitation, faltering munitions production, and a renewed Allied offensive could not be resisted. Wilson got his peace settlement, thereby letting loose upon the world an idealism about war and foreign relations that has often animated American counsels toward phenomenally destructive decisions and effects.

Trump, to his credit, has little in the way of Wilsonian fantasies about the tractability of the world to armed idealism. War is to be avoided when possible, and the American military is needed to defend America's honor and interests by fending off or crushing our enemies when the need arises. The Washington-Jackson schools of American foreign policy are back in charge, just as we need against the menaces of the era.

[kearnyirish2]

I agree about the dangers; I don’t have any answers - but attacks like the NYC attack in a rental truck a couple of years ago, by a Muslim who was on a “watchlist”, was ridiculous.

[kearnyirish2]

Sure; Wilson’s actions have to be viewed in that context.

[kearnyirish2]

Sure; “May Day” is a worldwide commemoration of the Haymarket bombing - though we don’t celebrate it. The urban workers were always a threat; with control of a few cities a small number of Bolsheviks in Russia began their conquest of the whole country.

[kearnyirish2]

He knew he had to do something; I’m no fan of FDR, but when conditions get bad enough, poor people flock to communism, and the reaction flocks to fascism. Thankfully we in the US never had to watch those factions fight it out in our streets while most of Europe did.

[Openurmind]

There are always risks of course no matter what. But we either support the constitution or we do not. The Constitution was designed to protect the very absolute minority from mob influenced rule using the power of government with selective exceptions.

This absolute minority is one... Each and every individual as that one with rights which are always to trump the mob and government. It is important that we not dilute or deviate from this principle concept or we will be lost as a Free Republic. :)

[kearnyirish2]

I understand that, but if your child was run down on a bike path in NYC by a guy with links to terrorists would you be glad the government restrained itself and turned him loose? How about the Boston Marathon bombers, after the Russian government had warned us specifically about the older brother (who masterminded it)?

Leaving American citizens defenseless against these killers is ridiculous; your ideal work in a system where the government works in the interests of its citizens - and it is so obvious that our government doesn’t.

[Openurmind]

Please do not misunderstand, in no way am I trying to protect monsters. But should we all as innocent lawful individuals lose any constitutional rights “just in case”? Pre-punish everyone to prevent the “possible” actions of the one? Violate the rights of everyone because of the false narrative that there is a terrorist under every bed and in every closet?

Are you familiar with the Hegelian dialect concept? Once you understand how and who actually created these monsters you would understand where I am coming from.

“and it is so obvious that our government doesn’t.”

Absolutely, and why I am against all “one size fits all” universal oppression from government over the people. We do not work for them, they work for us as individuals and they have forgotten this.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

when ^{government mismanagement makes} conditions get bad enough, poor people flock to communism, and the reaction flocks to fascism.

The man whose public spirit is prompted altogether by humanity and benevolence, will respect the established powers and privileges eVen of individuals, and still more those of the great orders and societies, into which the state is divided. Though he should consider some of them as in some measure abusive, he will content himself with moderating, what he often cannot annihilate without great violence. When he cannot conquer the rooted prejudices of the people by reason and persuasion, he will not attempt to subdue them by force; but will religiously observe what, by Cicero, is justly called the divine maxim of Plato, never to use violence to his country no more than to his parents. He will accommodate, as well as he can, his public arrangements to the confirmed habits and prejudices of the people; and will remedy as well as he can, the inconveniencies which may flow from the want of those regulations which the people are averse to submit to. When he cannot establish the right, he will not disdain to ameliorate the wrong; but like Solon, when he cannot establish the best system of laws, he will endeavour to establish the best that the people can bear.

The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.

Some general, and even systematical, idea of the perfection of policy and law, may no doubt be necessary for directing the views of the statesman. But to insist upon establishing, and upon establishing all at once, and in spite of all opposition, every thing which that idea may seem to require, must often be the highest degree of arrogance. It is to erect his own judgment into the supreme standard of right and wrong. It is to fancy himself the only wise and worthy man in the commonwealth, and that his fellow-citizens should accommodate themselves to him and not he to them. It is upon this account, that of all political speculators, sovereign princes are by far the most dangerous. This arrogance is perfectly familiar to them. They entertain no doubt of the immense superiority of their own judgment. When such imperial and royal reformers, therefore, condescend to contemplate the constitution of the country which is committed to their government, they seldom see any thing so wrong in it as the obstructions which it may sometimes oppose to the execution of their own will. They hold in contempt the divine maxim of Plato, and consider the state as made for themselves, not themselves for the state. The great object of their reformation, therefore, is to remove those obstructions; to reduce the authority of the nobility; to take away the privileges of cities and provinces, and to render both the greatest individuals and the greatest orders of the state, as incapable of opposing their commands, as the weakest and most insignificant.