1919 ★^771writs of assistance against which James Otis had eloquently protested as
being destructive of liberty in 1761. The Palmer Raids were overseen by the
twenty- four- year- old director of the Radical Division of the Justice Depart-
ment, J. Edgar Hoover. More than 5,000 persons were arrested, most of them
without warrants, and held for months without charge. The government
deported hundreds of immigrant radicals, including Emma Goldman. Hoover
also began compiling files on thousands of Americans suspected of holding
radical political ideas, a practice he would later continue as head of the Federal
Bureau of Investigation.
The abuse of civil liberties in early 1920 was so severe that Palmer came
under heavy criticism from Congress and much of the press. Secretary of Labor
Louis Post began releasing imprisoned immigrants, and the Red Scare col-
lapsed. Even the explosion of a bomb outside the New York Stock Exchange in
September 1920, which killed forty persons, failed to rekindle it. (The perpetra-
tors of this terrorist explosion, the worst on American soil until the Oklahoma
City bombing of 1995, were never identified.) The reaction to the Palmer Raids
planted the seeds for a new appreciation of the importance of civil liberties that
would begin to flourish during the 1920s. But in their immediate impact, the
events of 1919 and 1920 dealt a devastating setback to radical and labor organi-
zations of all kinds and kindled an intense identification of patriotic American-
ism with support for the political and economic status quo. The IWW had been
effectively destroyed, and many moderate unions lay in disarray. The Socialist
Party crumbled under the weight of governmental repression (the New York
legislature expelled five Socialist members, and Congress denied Victor Berger
the seat to which he had been elected from Wisconsin) and internal differences
over the Russian Revolution.
Wilson at Versailles
The beating back of demands for fundamental social change was a severe
rebuke to the hopes with which so many Progressives had enlisted in the war
effort. Wilson’s inability to achieve a just peace based on the Fourteen Points
compounded the sense of failure. Late in 1918, the president traveled to France
to attend the Versailles peace conference. Greeted by ecstatic Paris crowds, he
declared that American soldiers had come to Europe “as crusaders, not merely
to win a war, but to win a cause... to lead the world on the way of liberty.”
But he proved a less adept negotiator than his British and French counterparts,
David Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau.
Although the Fourteen Points had called for “open covenants openly
arrived at,” the negotiations were conducted in secret. The resulting Versailles
Treaty did accomplish some of Wilson’s goals. It established the League of
Nations, the body central to his vision of a new international order. It applied
Why was 1919 such a watershed year for the United States and the world?