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To: Fedora

1920s Woodrow Wilson / anarchists / communists / progressive ping


23 posted on 01/04/2020 6:10:46 AM PST by piasa (Attitude adjustments offered here free of charge.)
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To: piasa; MadMax, the Grinning Reaper
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.
51 posted on 01/04/2020 9:26:18 PM PST by Fedora
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