100 Years Ago, 4,000 Americans, in a Single Night, Were Rounded Up and Caged for Disagreeing With the President

[Joel]

The Palmer Raids: America’s Forgotten Reign of Terror

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.

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.

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.

[David13]

Well, I had scant information about this story.

But I can tell you that prior thereto there were similar violations of the Bill of Rights during the war between the states in the years 1861 to 1865 where Lincoln jailed and destroyed the property of many citizens for disagreeing with him or his war effort, even a number of state government officials in Maryland, legistators, etc, newspaper editors, and, not to mention killing hundreds of thousands of southern American citizens.

And, during WWII many people of Japanese ancestry or such in California and perhaps other places.

They probably would have done so with Germans, also, but they were harder to idenfity and there were far too many of them here. But there were threats or ... well, my grandparents passed themselves off in those days as ... Russians.

Probably other examples as well, certainly with individuals.

So, has happened before, will happen again.
dc

[gkearney]

Here's a bit about this from World War II. My high school was, until the year I enrolled, an all girls school. It was run by Quakers who are of course perhaps the ultimate pacifists. The school buildings and campus where huge, so big that they had never been able to fill the dormitory space they had, ever. This was why in the 1970's they relented and took boys which is how I ended up there.

When Germany and Italy declared war on the United States in early December 1941. There were a number of German and Italian families in effect trapped in the United States for the duration of the war. These were business people, diplomatic staff and so on. These "enemy nationals" as they were called were rounded up and placed in detention camps in New Jersey and on Long Island. These camps were nothing like what you are thinking and were nothing like what the interment camps of the Japanese were like. These camps were big estates of rich people which the government took over for this reason.

Now the rules of diplomatic services state that when you do this the country doing the interning, the US in this case, must house, feed, provide for the medical care of those so interned. You must also provide for the education of any minor children as well. This is where my school came into play. While the younger children were educated onsite in the "camps" the older children, over the age of 12, were sent to boarding schools, specifically Quaker run boarding schools. So for the first time ever my school filled its dormitories to overflowing with girls whose parents were interned "enemy nationals". The boy were sent to Germantown Friends School in Pennsylvania.

Now to "keep the peace", always important in any Quaker institution, the headmistress decided that while at Oak Grove there would be no war, no talk of it, no news of it, nothing what so ever. She banned radios from the campus, she censored all war news from the papers before putting them in the library. She never showed newsreels, she warned the parent not to send war news and even went so far as to censor the privet letters the girls go before giving them out. She was by all accounts somewhat of a tyrant. The school in those days was a closed campus, you didn't get to leave campus, its a very isolated location in Maine so she was able to pull this off. We alumni have been told by alumnae of those years that the whole thing was rather surreal, you would go home on holiday and the war was all you ever heard about, come back to school and it was as if you were in some sort of alternate universe.

[Mike Griffith]

I think Wilson was a terrible president. I think we should have stayed out of World War I. Without our intervention, I think a much fairer peace agreement would have been reached, which in turn would have avoided the bitterness caused by the draconian Versailles Treaty.