Palmer Raids and height of the Red Scare (jan 1, 1919 – jan 1, 1920)

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Red Scare: A term for anticommunist hysteria that swept the United States, first after World War I and then again after World War II, and led to government raids, deportations of radicals, and a suppression of civil liberties

Palmer Raids: series of raids ordered by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer on radical organizations that peaked in January 1920, when federal agents arrest six thousand citizens and aliens and denied them access to legal council.

World War I brought an end to the long period of reform stretching from the 1880s to the 1910s. A resurgent political and social conservatism emerged in the war’s aftermath. Progressivism survived, but limited government dominated national political life from 1919 until the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt as president in 1932. During the 1920s, the progressive call for economic regulation gave way to a business-first outlook. President Calvin Coolidge declared, “The man who builds a factory builds a temple. The man who works there worships there.” The same theme prevailed in U.S. foreign policy: American business needs were the top priority. Socially, the conservative turn drew on postwar anxieties about a rapidly changing nation. In 1919 alone, an antiradical Red Scare, a massive strike wave, and white violence against African Americans roiled the country — a preview of an eventful but anxious era.

The war effort, overseen by a Democratic administration sympathetic to organized labor, had increased the size and power of labor unions. Membership in the American Federation of Labor (AFL) grew by a third during World War I, reaching more than three million by the armistice. Workers’ expectations also rose as the war economy brought higher pay and better working conditions. Labor sought to preserve and expand the wartime gains after the peace. Over the course of 1919, more than four million wage laborers — one in every five — went on strike, a proportion never since equaled. A walkout of shipyard workers in Seattle sparked a general strike that shut down the entire city. Another strike disrupted the steel industry, as 350,000 workers demanded union recognition and an end to twelve-hour shifts. Union members ranging from textile workers and coal miners to city police and longshoremen joined the year’s wave of worker protest. Most of the 1919 strikes sought basic economic objectives — more pay, fewer hours — rather than a socialist revolution, but the bold exercise of worker power still stoked fears of rising radicalism among labor’s opponents.

That same year, the Soviet Union’s new Bolshevik leaders founded the Third International, intended to foster revolutions abroad. With an eye on Europe’s ongoing unrest, some Americans perceived political radicalism as an urgent threat at home. Wartime hatred of Germans quickly gave way to hostility toward Bolsheviks (labeled “Reds,” after the color of communist flags). Under the banner of “one hundred percent Americanism,” groups such as the newly formed American Legion decried socialists, communists, and the anticapitalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) as un-American. In a telling example, Ole Hanson, Seattle’s mayor during the general strike, wrote a book called Americanism Versus Bolshevism and toured the country lecturing about the threat of revolution. Ironically, American communists remained few in number and had little political influence. Of the 63 million adults in the United States in 1920, no more than 13,000 belonged to a communist organization.

The tiny fraction of political revolutionaries who endorsed violence, however, fueled a wave of political repression. In the midst of the 1919 strike wave, radical followers of an Italian anarchist, who promised “blood and fire” and hoped to ignite a revolution, began attempting to assassinate public officials with explosives. In April, thirty-six bombs were discovered, unexploded, by alert postal workers. They were addressed to, among others, a U.S. senator, a Supreme Court justice, business magnate John D. Rockefeller, and U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. In June, nine similar bombs exploded in seven cities and, most gruesomely, in an effort to kill the attorney general a young man blew himself up outside Palmer’s Washington, D.C. town house, obliterating its front parlor. The next day, with the vocal support of House and Senate members, Palmer vowed to find and jail every last conspirator.

These terrifying bombings helped drive the ensuing Red Scare and provided the pretext for a much broader assault on political radicals of all stripes. The attorney general set up an antiradicalism unit within the Justice Department and appointed his assistant J. Edgar Hoover as head. (Hoover would go on to lead the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the FBI, from 1924 until his death in 1972.) Starting in November 1919, Palmer ordered a series of roundups that would go down in history as the Palmer raids but were actually planned and executed by Palmer’s ambitious deputy, Hoover himself. The raids targeted the headquarters of radical organizations and indiscriminately arrested thousands, often immigrants who had committed no crimes but who held anarchist or revolutionary beliefs. Lacking the protection of U.S. citizenship, many were deported without indictment or trial. The raids peaked on a notorious night in January 1920, when federal agents invaded homes and meeting halls, arrested six thousand citizens and aliens (immigrants without U.S. citizenship) and denied the prisoners access to legal counsel.

The Red Scare’s combination of antiradicalism and anti-immigrant sentiment had dire consequences in the case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Though the Palmer Raids had ended in January 1920, the antiradical fervor had not ebbed. Later that year, in May, local police arrested Sacco, a shoemaker, and Vanzetti, a fish peddler, for the murder of two men during a robbery in South Braintree, Massachusetts. Sacco and Vanzetti were Italian immigrants and self-proclaimed anarchists who had evaded the draft. Convicted of the murders in 1921, they sat in jail for six years while supporters appealed their verdicts. In 1927, Judge Webster Thayer denied a motion for a new trial and sentenced them to death. Scholars still debate their guilt or innocence, but the case was clearly biased by prosecutors’ emphasis on their radical ties and foreign birth. The executions of Sacco and Vanzetti became a lasting symbol of the Red Scare’s hostilities and divisiveness.

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