The Palmer Raids: America’s Forgotten Reign of Terror

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

[<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.