SYMHC Classics: Palmer Raids Pt. 2

This 2016 continuation of our coverage of the Palmer Raids covers a series of raids on perceived threats to national security by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. Thousands of people were rounded up, many without cause or warrant, and kept in horrifying conditions.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Today's Saturday Classic is the conclusion of last
Saturday's episode on the Palmer Raids, which we are running
after getting a request from our listener Amy. Last week
part one covered some of the historical context, including a
series of bombings that took place in nineteen nineteen, and
today's episode is about the series of raids, arrests, incarcerations,

(00:24):
and deportations that followed those bombings. This originally came out
on December seventh, twenty sixteen. Welcome to Stuff You Missed
in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome

(00:45):
to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy B. Wilson.
So in our last episode, we talked about the fear
and unrest that gripped the United States at the conclusion
of World War One. Armistice certainly did not put an
end to the stresses of financial problems and racial divide
and labor strikes that were happening throughout the country, and

(01:07):
there was a growing fear that a revolution incited by
foreign anarchists or communists was going to change America forever.
And after rising through the political ranks to become Attorney General,
and after a series of coordinated bomb attacks on prominent
US citizens. A. Mitchell Palmer made it his mission to
root out what he believed to be a revolutionary threat

(01:28):
to national security. So we highly recommend you listen to
part one of this two part episode before this one
so that you have a fuller context for the events
that we're about to talk about. Because while there were
some legitimate concerning events that happened, this quickly spread and
became about one man's hunt to basically get rid of

(01:49):
as many immigrants as he could. Starting on November seventh,
nineteen nineteen, two years after Russia's Bolshevik Revolution, locations in
twelve different sets danes and towns were raided by Palmer's
assembled forces in a coordinated effort. One of the rated
locations was the Russian People's House at one thirty three

(02:11):
East fifteenth Street in New York, and this building housed
the office of the Federated Unions of Russian Workers, as
well as a cafeteria and classrooms. When the agents from
the Department of Justice arrived, they had warrants for a
few suspects, but they launched a full scale attack on
the entire building and everyone in it. Furniture and property

(02:31):
were destroyed, and students from classrooms were violently herded into
stairwells and in many cases shoves so that they fell downstairs.
Several hundred people in total were beaten with quote blackjacks
and stair rails. Those same several hundred people were taken
to a nearby Department of Justice office and questioned. Only

(02:53):
an estimated one fifth of those initially taken into custody
were held. The rest were released, but many of them
were seriously injured. The treatment of the group at the
hands of the Department of Justice led to a protest
at Madison Square Garden the following night, led by attorney
and activist Dudley Field Malone, and a letter was written
to the Attorney General by the New York Bar Association

(03:15):
that demanded to know if the raid had indeed been
under the direction of the Department of Justice, and also
requested an investigation into the events. That letter was never
acknowledged by Palmer's office. The same night of that protest,
on November eighth, a group of men had gathered to
discuss purchasing a vehicle so that everyone in the community

(03:36):
to learn how to drive. That meeting in Bridgeport, Connecticut
was raided and sixty three arrests were made. Sixteen people
were released over the following two days, but after three
days of being held in cramped quarters at the local
police station with little to no food, the remaining forty
seven were moved to the Hartford Jail under the direction
of the Department of Justice, and while they were in

(03:59):
the heart for jail, there were additional arrests being made
and those individuals were added to the numbers, and people
who applied for visitation to the arrested men were also
often jailed until the Hertford group number ninety seven. They
were questioned, they were threatened with suffocation and hanging, and

(04:20):
they were beaten. The Department of Labor and the Department
of Justice worked in conjunction to file arrest warrants after
the fact for all of the men that were held there.
They were all kept alone in their cells with agents
of the Department of Justice as their only visitors. They
were allowed no reading materials. Many of the men had
no idea what they were even being held for, and

(04:42):
when they questioned that their jailers got no information. Most
had no idea if there was bail set for them,
and if there was how much it was. They were
given two to five minutes per day at a sink
outside of their cells to wash their face and hands,
and they were allowed five minutes of tubb time per
month to wash their bodies. Food was often insufficient and

(05:05):
also foul, and family and friends were not allowed any
contact with these men in the prison. Punishment in the
Heart for Jail took place in four identical rooms. Each
of them were fifty one inches by one hundred and
six inches that's about one point three meters by two
point seven meters in their floor size, and these rooms

(05:25):
were situated over a boiler room, and consequently they would
become unbearably hot. Men suspected of holding anarchist or communist
ideologies were put into such rooms for thirty six to
sixty hours at a time, with one glass of water
and one piece of bread given to them every twelve hours.
Most were unconscious when their time in a punishment room

(05:49):
had ended. According to a later investigation, only one person
in the five months that they were using these rooms
was actually able to walk back to his regular cell
without help. The situation in Hartford lasted, as we just mentioned,
for five months until April nineteen twenty. At that point
a lawyer finally managed to get into the jail and

(06:10):
the conditions were immediately deemed unacceptable, which we will talk
about more in a moment. In December, a number of
the detainees were deported to Russia by ship, which was
nicknamed the Red Arc and Soviet Arc in press reports.
Although this really was done rather quietly and quickly. It's
unclear if there was sufficient paperwork for all of the

(06:32):
people put on that boat. Yeah. Often with an event
as old as this one is, like, it is old
enough that typically I can find a lot of photos
that might be in the public domain, and it's recent
enough that there are a lot of photos. It's not
so old that there are no pictures, not a lot
of pictures of this. No. The response to these initial

(06:53):
raids had been largely positive. Emboldened by the November successes,
A Mitchel Palmer made even plans. On January second, nineteen twenty,
a second mass raid effort was launched, and approximately three
thousand people were arrested over the course of several days
in thirty different cities and towns. On the second, a

(07:14):
chief agent to the Department of Justice in Detroit named
Arthur L. Barkie received an order from Palmer to raid
the suspected headquarters of the Communist Party. Eight hundred men
were captured as they attended classes and dances in the building,
and then they were held for three to six days
in a corridor in the city's federal building in the dark.

(07:37):
The captive men had no beds, They slept on the floor.
All eight hundred of them had to wait in lines
for access to the one drinking fountain and one toilet available.
No food was given to them until family members started
showing up with provisions about twenty hours into their captivity.
They were not allowed to speak to family or legal counsel,

(07:59):
and enforcement eventually started moving them in groups to precinct
police stations with actual holding cells. Between one hundred thirty
and one hundred forty of these men were moved to
the police bullpen, which was intended for keeping people arrested
for petty crimes for a few hours at a time.
It was a cellar room with one window twenty four

(08:21):
by thirty feet that's seven point three by nine point
one meters in length and width, and those men, again
one hundred and thirty to one hundred and forty men
were held in that cramped space for a week with
no beds, relying primarily on food that was brought in
by relatives to survive. Tallies of the men estimated that

(08:42):
approximately three hundred and fifty of them were American citizens
or aliens who could prove that they were in no
way connected to any sort of radicalism. Of the eight
hundred men initially seized, there were eventually warrants issued for
four hundred forty of them ten days after they had
actually been arrested. One hundred and forty of them got
out on bond, and the other three hundred were moved

(09:04):
to an army fort for longer term holding, and they
remained there for several months. We're actually going to discuss
something you might not expect in just a moment, which
is paperwork. But before we do, let's pause for just
a moment, take a break from the palmer rades because
it is a little bit heavy, and talk about one
of our sponsors that keeps the lights on in the

(09:24):
studios so we could talk about these heavy topics. So
if you're wondering how in the world they got the
man power to issue all these warrants for all these arrests.
The answer is they didn't. Most of the people were
rounded up without warrants and with no formal paperwork to

(09:46):
document the arrests. About five thousand people were taking into custody,
most of these people being completely innocent. And when you
consider that these conditions that we talked about in these
two in instances, there were many more than those two
instances that we just talked about. They were being kept
in similar conditions, completely innocent, for weeks and sometimes months

(10:08):
at a time. But the other thing that was interesting
was that not all of the people who were accused
of anti American sentiment during this time were captured in raids.
Some had their lives ruined in more subtle, but no
less damning ways. And one of these was an art
teacher named Julia Pratt, and she had been suspended from
her teaching job abruptly, and when the school board held

(10:31):
a hearing to review her case, a man showed up
named Hermann Bernard, and he testified that he had been
an undercover agent of the Department of Justice and that
in his undercover role he became a secretary of the
Buffalo Communist Party, and he then said that he knew
and had records of Miss Pratt as a member of
that party and the dates on which she paid her dues.

(10:53):
But that art teacher told a very different story in
her testimony. She said, on July eighteenth, nineteen nine, team
Miss Harris invited me into her home to meet some
quote interesting intellectual friends of hers. As she put it,
I went out to Kenmore. Herman Bernard came in with
two women friends of his. He constantly injected over drawn

(11:14):
statements against the government into the conversation and outline in
glowing terms the work the Communist Party would perform and
emancipating the oppressed and exploited. Bernard later came to my
house with others of the same group, ate at my table,
and I played the harp for him. It is only
on the testimony of this agent provocateur that the board
has dismissed me. And again that's one example, but there

(11:38):
were others where people had basically sort of like baited
a situation where they would go in and talk about
communism and people would sort of politely nod, and then
they would be like, that's a communist. There were some
very squirrely things going on pretty sure that's called entrapment.
It is indeed. Still other people from Hoover's list were

(11:58):
apprehended at Palmer's orders, often beaten and sometimes taken from
their homes, so where they weren't raiding like big group gatherings,
but they were just going to individual people's homes and
taking them out, often without warrant and with no cause
that they stated. In at least some cases, fake testimonies
were typed up and signed with forged signatures. There's a

(12:21):
report we're going to talk about in a moment that
has one of these instances where it is clearly a
forged signature. There were many, many instances of poor treatment
at the hands of Palmer's agents. So, as I've said
a couple times now, what we have selected here to
detail is just a sampling. While there had been some
unease about the November raids by the public, the January

(12:43):
raids caused real concern, not fear of communists or anarchists,
but fear that the Attorney General had far overstepped his bounds.
In part in response to this rash of raids that
were happening without cause, on January nineteenth, nineteen twenty, the
American Civil Liberties Union was formed, and this was an

(13:04):
effort on the part of a number of concerned citizens,
many of which had already been working in the National
Civil Liberties Bureau, to shift the focus away from that
group's litigation only approach to one that was more action
oriented and focused on education as well as fighting legal battles.
In the spring of nineteen twenty, the tide continued to

(13:24):
turn against Palmer. Assistant Secretary of Labor Lewis F. Post
saw the Palmer raids as one man's ambition spinning rapidly
out of control, with nothing limiting the actions that were
being taken. When Posts found out about the men being
held at Hartford Prison in April of that year, he
had them all transferred immediately to the Immigration station at

(13:45):
Deer Island, Boston, where their conditions were better and their
cases could be evaluated and properly documented. Post went on
to cancel more than fifteen hundred deportations, which was a
slap in the face to Palmer and an act fact
that some people that were really behind Palmer's moves thought
were was treasonous. There was actually an attempt to impeach

(14:07):
Lewis Post, but the Assistant Secretary gave extremely persuasive and
powerful testimony during his appearance before Congress, which caused the
various politicians that had been calling for his impeachment to
back off, and some of them actually started to see
that civil liberties had been outright abused during these raids.
One of the truly heartbreaking effects of the Palmer raids

(14:29):
were the very real, immediate and long lasting effects that
they had in the lives of innocent people who were
taking into custody. Often, they struggled to find work after
their confinement because even if they were released without charges,
there was still a shadow of Bolshevism on them and
employers were unwilling to hire them. And Palmer continued to

(14:50):
warn the public that terrorist attacks were coming. He was
making predictions about like, on this day, this will happen.
It's my intelligence tells me this. But none of those
preictions were materializing, and his credibility really suffered for it.
On May twenty eighth, nineteen twenty twelve, lawyers issued a
report on the Palmer raids. They were R. G. Brown

(15:12):
of Memphis, Tennessee, Zechariah Chaffee Junior of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Felix
Frankfurter of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Ernst Freud of Chicago, Illinois, Swinburne
Hail of New York City, Francis Fisher Kane of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
Alfred S. Niles of Baltimore, Maryland, Roscoe Pound of Cambridge, Massachusetts,

(15:34):
Jackson H. Ralston of Washington, d C. David Wallerstein of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
Frank P. Walsh of New York City, and Sorell Williams
of Saint Louis, Missouri. In this report detailed all of
these instances of the Palmer raids, how literally thousands of
alleged radicals had been arrested with no warrants, held in

(15:56):
substandard conditions, and had been denied contact with family member
and legal counsel. And this document was jointly published by
the ACLU and the National Popular Government League. This report was,
I mean, perhaps surprisingly, based on the political climate that
we've been talking about in these two episodes, well received.
It appeared that in the face of the brutal and

(16:17):
illegal behavior of the Department of Justice under the guidance
of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, public attitudes were shifting
away from this fervent blinding fear of the other. And
we're going to go into details about the contents of
that report, but before we do, this is probably a
good place to pause and have a word from one
of our sponsors. So this opening of the report that

(16:47):
we talked about before we went to break is a
letter to the people of the United States, and it
is lengthy, but I want to read a significant portion
of this introductory letter here. It reads to the American people.
For more than six months, we, the undersigned lawyers, whose
sworn duty it is to uphold the Constitution and laws
of the United States, have seen with growing apprehension the

(17:10):
continued violation of that constitution and breaking of those laws
by the Department of Justice of the United States Government.
Under the guise of a campaign for the suppression of
radical activities. The Office of the Attorney General, acting by
its local agents throughout the country and giving express instructions
from Washington, has committed continued illegal acts. Quote. Wholesale arrests

(17:34):
of both aliens and citizens have been made without warrant
or any process of law. Men and women have been
jailed and held in communicado without access of friends or counsel.
Homes have been entered without search warrant, and property seized
and removed. Other property has been wantonly destroyed. Working men
and working women suspected of radical views have been shamefully

(17:56):
abused and maltreated. The Department of Justice have been introduced
into radical organizations for the purpose of informing upon their
members or inciting them to activities. These agents have even
been instructed from Washington to arrange meetings upon certain dates
for the express object of facilitating wholesale raids and arrests

(18:19):
in support of these illegal acts, and to create sentiment
in its favor. The Department of Justice has also constituted
itself a propaganda bureau, and has sent to newspapers and
magazines of this country quantities of material designed to excite
public opinion against radicals, all at the expense of the
government and outside the scope of the Attorney General's duties.

(18:41):
We make no argument in favor of any radical doctrine
as such, whether socialist, communist, or anarchists. No one of
us belongs to any of those schools of thought. Nor
do we now raise any questions as to the constitutional
protection of free speech and a free press. We are
concerned solely with bringing to the attention of the American
people the utterly illegal acts which have been committed by

(19:04):
those charged with the highest duty of enforcing the laws.
Acts which have caused widespread suffering and unrest, have struck
at the foundation of American free institutions, and have brought
the name of our country into disrepute. The report grouped
the various acts of Palmer's efforts into six categories. Cruel

(19:25):
and unusual punishments, arrests without warrant, unreasonable searches and seizures,
provocative agents basically entrapment operatives compelling persons to witness against themselves,
and propaganda by the Department of Justice and by the Numbers.
The report offers a pretty damning assessment of the effectiveness

(19:47):
of Palmer's methods. As of November fourteenth, nineteen nineteen, the
Attorney General had assembled a list of sixty thousand people
by name that were suspected of radicalism of one kind
or another. As of January first, nineteen twenty, two hundred
sixty three of these sixty thousand people had been deported.

(20:09):
From January first to the report's release in late May,
there had been eighteen more people deported, with another five
hundred and twenty nine ordered to deport by Palmer. Another
one thousand, five hundred forty seven warrants for deportation were
canceled during that time. By post. Of those sixty thousand suspects,
the Attorney General had only deported eight hundred and ten,

(20:31):
and as the report points out, that left more than
fifty one thousand people to be dealt with by Palmer's
own records. So in inflating the numbers of potential dangers,
he basically stacked the deck against his own forces because
they wound up looking pretty unineffective. And in concluding that
introduction to the report, the lawyers who worked on it wrote, quote,

(20:52):
it is a fallacy to suppose that, any more than
in the past, any servant of the people can safely
arrogate to himself unlimited authority. To proceed upon such a
supposition is to deny the fundamental American theory of the
consent of the governed. Here is no question of a vague,
threatened menace, but a present assault upon the most sacred

(21:13):
principles of our constitutional liberty. One of the testimonies included
in this report is from an immigrant named Alexander Bukowetski,
who had come to the United States from Russia and
had been captured in the November raids. One section of
his statement reads quote, when I came to America, I
came with a thought that I was coming to a
free country, a place of freedom and happiness, and I
was anxious to come to get away from the Zaristic

(21:35):
form of government. As much as I was anxious to
come here to America, I am a hundred times more
anxious to run away from Americanism and return to Soviet Russia,
where I will at least be able to live. Bukowetski's
testimony also mentions the fact that while he and men
like him were confined for months on end, their families

(21:56):
really suffered. Their wives and children often went hungry. They
had to depend on the kindness of other people in
their communities just to survive. Another statement included in the
report is from Bukowetski's twelve year old daughter, Violet, who
witnessed her mother being beaten by prison officials when the
family attempted to visit her father. Her father jumped in

(22:19):
front of his wife to shield her and was also
beaten badly for doing so. Shots were fired by one
of the guards, hitting another imprisoned man in the knee.
Missus Bukowetski was deeply shaken by this incident and confined
to her bed for an extended period of time, diagnosed
by her doctor as having a nervous breakdown. In August

(22:39):
of nineteen twenty, the ACLU published an informational pamphlet about
the Red Scare titled Seeing Red Civil Liberty in the
Law in the period following the war, and it really
outlined for people the conditions of fear and governmental overstepping
that led to the climax of the Red Scare, the
Palmer Raids, And in the pamphlet's conclusion, it reads, civil

(23:00):
liberty is more important today than it was in the
stagnant period when we had it, because no one troubled
to abridge it. The world is rising upon one of
the periodic waves which carry it onward towards civilized adjustment
for human welfare. Despite all of the bad press around
the raids, Palmer still ran for the Democratic Party's presidential
nomination of nineteen twenty as he had planned, and he lost.

(23:24):
In March nineteen twenty one, he returned once again to
private practice as a lawyer. Palmer, for his part, was
never remorseful about what had taken place in any public statement,
at least that he made. In nineteen twenty one, he
testified to the Investigative Senate Committee on the Raids, and
he defended the entire enterprise, saying, quote, I apologize for

(23:46):
nothing the Department of Justice has done. I glory in it.
I point with pride and enthusiasm to the results of
that work. And if agents of the Department of Labor
were a little rough and unkind with these alien agitators,
I think it might well be overlooked in the general
good to the country. In September nineteen twenty one, FBI
Director William J. Flynn abruptly resigned, claiming a need to

(24:09):
attend to a private business matters a very troubling time
in America's history that we don't talk about very much.
I had not heard much about it at all before
you brought up wanting to do it as an episode. Yeah.
I mean, you see how fear can really like emboldened
situations like that, and that it is troubling. I want

(24:34):
to say a lot more, but it will not be cool.
So thanks so much for joining us. On this Saturday.
If you'd like to send us a note, our email
addresses History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can
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(24:57):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.