Posted on 01/04/2020 4:06:04 AM PST by gattaca
The raids constituted a horrific, shameful episode in American history, one of the lowest moments for liberty since King George III quartered troops in private homes. Friday, January 3, 2020
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons | Public Domain (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en) Lawrence W. Reed Lawrence W. Reed Politics History Woodrow Wilson First Amendment Communism World War I Police State 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.
The Post Office began destroying certain mail instead of delivering it.
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.
Hostilities in Europe ended in November 1918, but the Wilson administration’s assault on civil rights continued.
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.
“I am confident of what I read even though it is not at hand...Wilson was induced to declare war on Germany by British representations that their enemy was near collapse...was thereby inveigled to declare war in order to shape the peace. In truth, Britain, France, and her allies were in desperate circumstances...American financial support and supplies were of rapid benefit...Germany’s strategists knew...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...” [Rockingham, post 52]
The verbal exchange between then-Deputy State Secretary for Foreign Affairs Arthur Zimmermann and Ambassador James W Gerard is recorded on page 237 of Gerard’s book, _My Four Years in Germany_ (New York: Doran, 1917). Recheck sources, then proclaim confidence.
Are you asserting that in 1917 Americans were so naïve and unschooled in geopolitics that one politician (admittedly, a vaunted Progressive of national repute) was able to bamboozle the public and both houses of the US national legislature in declaring war by stating falsehoods and non-germane trivia? And that the aftermath has warped and skewed US policies toward unhappy goals, to the exclusion of all else, ever since?
To claim such is to elevate propaganda, emotionalism, puerile idealism, pop-culture revisionism, and conspiratorialism above hard-headed reasoning and acknowledgement of facts.
The Allies were near collapse. American industrial firms, financial interests, and many other sectors of the national economy were heavily involved; if the Central Powers had been victorious, it’s most unlikely that the United States could have survived the conflict without severe damage. Complete collapse was not out of the question.
At this late date, asserting that American businesses should have steered clear is meaningless: by the end of 1916, 2 and 1/2 years in, it was too late. Standing aside while invoking a concern for morals and philosophical rectitude, and other vaporous whims might have pleased prissier souls, but would not have improved things. Unless, of course, one believes that being “moral” is preferable to getting livable results.
Here is a generality to toy with: the USA was founded as a trading nation. Trading nations cannot be isolationist.
I know you’re not protecting monsters - but that is exactly who is protected under our “rights” (and they often aren’t even American citizens).
I get the admiration for the aims, results, and, even, methods of the Palmer raids, but as you both point out here, these are powers that betray the purpose and limits of the American federal structure.
The Constitution allows for temporary suspension of certain rights, but Wilson, Palmer and Hoover expected these powers and methods to be permanent and thereby perceived the authority under the Espionage and Sedition acts to have no limits.
The anarchist / communist bombings did justify a strong federal response. But, as with all things progressive, the Wilson admin response was but an excuse for an extension of federal and progressive powers.
Sadly, the next crisis, also pumped by progressives, Prohibition, actually did set many of those powers permanently.
I’d also add to the list of abuses of the progressives the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during WWII.
The factors leading to US entry into WW I were numerous and mutually reinforcing: the Zimmerman telegram; Allied propaganda; the sinking of the Lusitania; unrestricted submarine warfare; the provocations like Black Tom that German subversion and sabotage in the US served up; and yes, our predominant trade and financial ties to the Allies. Yet I do not see American nonintervention as risking the dire effects that you do.
Germany's high command realized that America was poised to enter the war but judged that Germany nevertheless had an opportunity to win decisively on the Western Front in 1917 using new weapons and tactics and formations released due to victories in the East. In the event, Germany cam close, but American intervention saved the Allies and put Wilson and the US in a position to impose terms.
Sadly, instead of trying to stitch a badly wounded Europe back together, the resulting Versailles Treaty contained an unworkable mixture of revenge and idealism. This set the stage for another, more destructive world war. The UN and other post-WW II international institutions were designed as a second try by Wilson's intellectual and political heirs.
Judged by aspirations, the UN and other such organizations are failures. Slyly, the most successful American leaders like Eisenhower and Reagan have used them as camouflage for American power. Less successful leaders like Jimmy Carter thought that we should defer to the UN instead of exercising American power, and the inept George W. Bush got the exercise of American power in war wrong.
On the whole, I tend to think that America and the world would do better with less Wilsonian idealism but closer attention to the elements of national power, to history, to how wars are won and lost -- and better yet, avoided when possible. I think Trump is of a similar mind, or at least that is what is implied by his statement that killing Soleimani is intended to prevent a war, not start one.
We should have demanded Britain stop their naval blockade of Germany, that is what endangered our ships more than anything.
FEE ignores Imperial German terrorism in America and is now anti-anti-communist
WOW! Tremendous posts. Read all here and at the source. I’d heard of The Palmer Raids, but never looked any deeper.
Thanks for the ping; post. Thanks to every historian, educator, poster. GREAT thread. BUMP!
Wilson was the closest thing to an American Hitler we have had to date...
Him and The Kingfish.
“We should have demanded Britain stop their naval blockade of Germany, that is what endangered our ships more than anything.” [dfwgator, post 66]
You have it backwards.
The blockade by Britain’s Royal Navy was an annoyance and an inconvenience, which did some injury to the bottom line of Americans; at least one commentator at the time likened it to a hair shirt.
German submarines actually killed American nationals.
If isolationists cannot tell the difference, the rest of us ought to be wary of taking their advice in the sphere of international relations.
“...I do not see American nonintervention as risking the dire effects that you do.
Germany’s high command realized that America was poised to enter the war but judged that Germany nevertheless had an opportunity to win decisively on the Western Front in 1917...
...the resulting Versailles Treaty contained an unworkable mixture of revenge and idealism. This set the stage for another, more destructive world war. The UN and other post-WW II international institutions were designed as a second try by Wilson’s intellectual and political heirs.
Judged by aspirations, the UN and other such organizations are failures...
On the whole, I tend to think that America and the world would do better with less Wilsonian idealism but closer attention to the elements of national power, to history, to how wars are won and lost — and better yet, avoided when possible...” [Rockingham, post 65]
There were many more American lives lost than just the 130 or so who died when RMS Lusitania was attacked, a couple miles off Ireland’s coast. More indicative of a pattern of behavior by Imperial Germans, not a fluke nor an isolated incident. The US government protested formally, more than once.
Britain’s situation was more serious than propaganda admitted to, more serious than the UK public understood. Days after the United States declared war in 1917, RADM William S Sims, USN, sat down for his first meeting with ADM John Jellicoe, then First Sea Lord. Sims was told that only six months’ supply of wheat was in country. The Admiralty estimated that the British would have to capitulate by 1 November. King George V agreed with this assessment; Prime Minister David Lloyd George was more optimistic.
Nobody really in the know had confidence that any response would be successful.
The Imperial German government was not unanimous on unrestricted submarine warfare; Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg argued against it, predicting it would provoke American entry on the Allied side; ultimately, Paul von Hindenburg & Erich Ludendorff decided to go ahead with it (Kaiser William - officially Supreme War Lord and commander of all Imperial German armed forces - was himself ambivalent, but had by this point been reduced to a figurehead).
Can’t disagree on the flaws of T Woodrow Wilson, a man of outsize ego, unrealistic in his idealistic notions, and (worst of all) his infatuation with Progressivism. But none of that can inform us as to the strategic utility of this or that action on the world stage, nor of the usefulness in general of supranational organizations. Measurement of these proceeds along different axes. An assertion after the fact that course-of-action “X” was tougher than we expected, therefore we never should have tried in the first place, is puerile.
Railing against the 1919 Treaty of Versailles is empty noise. From the beginning of European history, warring nations concluded treaties that fixed blame and assessed reparations; the one that formally ended World War One was nothing unusual in either respect. Germans claiming otherwise were merely playing the victim card. The Allies were not at fault for being “mean” to them, but for not convincing them they had been defeated. Subsequent Allied weakness and irresolution convinced them they could get away with bad behavior if they tried a second time.
(1) Suppose if, instead of a declaration of war that was weakened by lack of military preparedness, the US had prepared for the possibility of war beginning in say, early 1915. We would then have had the muscle to back up our demands as a neutral.
Of course, that would more or less require that the GOP had been in power instead of Wilson and his Progressives. So I am more or less arguing that the country and the world would have been better off without Wilson as President.
(2) In the event, suppose if, instead of the lengthy, remake-the-world Versailles Treaty as it was, we had instead a traditional, less ambitious European peace treaty. Reparations from Germany, but no insulting war guilt clause, and no lack of genuine negotiations with the German delegation. No requirement for the radical downsizing of the German Army that unleashed millions of unemployed, demobilized veterans to make trouble. And no French occupation of the Rhineland.
Such a treaty at Versailles, backed by a traditional great power Concert of Europe approach to enforcement and new issues, might well have removed the tinder that led to World War II. Again, this would mostly require that Wilson not have a major role in the peace treaty, agreeing to bad provisions for the sake of founding the League of Nations. And the simplest ways to such an alternative outcome would be that the GOP have the Presidency and pursued traditional GOP foreign policy animated by realism and restraint, or that Wilson's VP Thomas R. Marshall have succeeded him and followed the same approach.
As that formula suggests, I am not an isolationist but am an advocate for realism and restraint. Sometimes that means staying out of fights that can be avoided so that one does not assume the costs and burdens of being a combatant. Our current era though is a departure from history in that the US has obligations as a superpower that require a large military establishment and interventions around the world.
So, no, I am not an isolationist, but I am an advocate in this era for the US to carry out its superpower obligations and get the benefits of being the global superpower. Simply put, we do not want to live in a world with China in charge or that suffers the turmoil of ambitious regional powers preying on their neighbors.
In practice, this means having the world's largest fleets of aircraft carriers and nuclear missiles and submarines, lots of bombers, fighters, and drones, and the ability to deploy ground forces around the globe. These keep the world mostly at peace as America holds the worst nogoodniks in check. In return, American dollars are highly prized as the world's trade and reserve currency, the world finances our out of balance Medicare and other social welfare programs, and Americans are usually safe and welcomed around the world.
Call me a braggart, but that seems like a remarkable position for a relatively young country that owes its formation to angry farmers with muskets.
1. Hoover is not a homo, that was left-wing disinformation.
2. By your logic, the Founding Fathers by exiling Citizen Genet when he tried to stir up the same crap that was going on in France here in America violated the constitution and free speech. Then again, you sang praises for the French Revolutionaries despite their objectively being worse than the monarchy and literally inspired communism. Actually, you know what? Want an example of unfettered free speech? Look at France, where King Louis XVI and his court were downright TERRIFIED of suppressing Voltaire and Diderot’s freedom of speech, and they exploited that to engineer an anti-Christian genocide attempt that result in the French Revolution.
So no, what Palmer and Wilson did was absolutely NO different from what Washington did with Genet. Otherwise, Washington would have been spineless and let Genet reduce America into 24/7 rioting due to fear of violating free speech.
Unfortunately, if we go by the constitution, that technically means ideological exclusion of any matter is unconstitutional, and yet the Founding Fathers more than practiced that with, say, Citizen Genet especially after he attempted to spread France’s crap here in America, which essentially means that, technically, the Founding Fathers violated their own constitution.
No, what Palmer and the others did was well within the constitution. If it was within the constitution when the Founding Fathers evicted Genet, it’s the same here.
Honestly, I’m pretty sure Palmer would be completely disgusted with Clinton (and with Sanders, for that matter). And just as an FYI, the founding fathers engaged in their own version of the palmer raids when they exiled Citizen Genet after he tried to stir up France’s crap here in America when France was undergoing its own revolution, and they formed the constitution, so unless you want to claim the founding fathers violated their own constitution at inception, I suggest laying off against the Palmer Raids. Unless you believe in the Voltaire version of free speech where the government is too terrified to stop you even when you are using your free speech to stab it and Christians in the back.
You may want to reconsider this line of argument since Genet was never actually exiled. And as the French ambassador, the proper term would be “recalled”, i.e. sent home with his diplomatic credentials revoked, “persona non grata”.
“Genet arrived in Philadelphia on May 18 and first met with Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, whom he knew was sympathetic to the French cause. Although Jefferson was pro-French and disagreed with Washington's neutrality policy, he was upset with Genet’s violation of American laws. Genet was discouraged by Jefferson but persisted nonetheless, apparently with a serious misunderstanding of the American political system, as he believed Congress possessed all diplomatic powers. After deliberating with Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, Washington reaffirmed American neutrality to Genet, and demanded that he not hire more privateers, cancel his plans to invade British and Spanish territory, and return the goods privateered by his ships. Washington asserted that these actions were in violation of American neutrality, yet Genet insisted that privateering and selling the goods in American ports was within his rights by the 1778 Treaty of Amity and Commerce. Washington's advisors John Jay and Rufus King publicly denounced Genet for his actions in August 1793. Genet then wrote personally to Washington to explain his intentions and clear his name: "Certain persons, actuated by views which time will develope, despairing to attack my principles, have descended to personal abuse—In hopes of withdrawing from me that esteem which the public feel and avow for the representative of the French republic."1 In Genet’s mind, anti-French members of Washington's cabinet were seeking to sabotage him.”
“After consulting with his cabinet, Washington asked the French to recall Genet. It was feared that Genet would incite a pro-French coup against the government by appealing directly to the people. The French acquiesced because they feared losing American favor when they needed access to American ports and goods. Washington wrote of Genet in a 1793 address to the Senate: "It is with extreme concern, I have to inform you, that the proceedings of the person whom they have unfortunately appointed their minister . . . here have breathed nothing of the friendly spirit of the nation which sent him; their tendency has been to involve us in war abroad, discord and anarchy at home."2 Washington's response caused a divide in his cabinet along pro-British and pro-French lines. Genet was recalled in January 1794 but was granted political asylum by Washington when Genet’s Jacobin replacement called for his arrest and deportation to France.”
“Genet married New York Governor George Clinton's daughter Cornelia on November 6, 1794, and retired to her farm on the Hudson River. After her death in 1810, he married Martha Osgood, the daughter of Washington's postmaster general. He lived the rest of his life out of the public eye as a farmer in New York. The couple remained married until his death in 1834.”
Well, okay, my mistake, but I do know that they had to do a lot of crackdowns on Democratic/Republican societies during that time.
It sure would be nice to see Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton running for the hills... 8-)
Spain is still fighting it...
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