“Out of the sly and crafty eyes of many of them leap
cupidity, cruelty, insanity, and crime; from their lop-
sided faces, sloping brows, and misshapen features may
be recognized the unmistakable criminal type.”
In August 1919, Palmer established within the
Department of Justice the General Intelligence Division,
headed by J. Edgar Hoover, to collect information
about clandestine radical activities. In November, Justice
Department agents in a dozen cities swooped down on
the meeting places of an anarchist organization known
as the Union of Russian Workers. More than 650 per-
sons, many of them unconnected with the union, were
arrested but in only forty-three cases could evidence be
found to justify deportation.
Nevertheless, the public reacted so favorably that
Palmer, thinking now of winning the 1920 Democratic
presidential nomination, planned an immense roundup
of communists. He obtained 3,000 warrants, and on
January 2, 1920, his agents, reinforced by local police
and self-appointed vigilantes, struck simultaneously in
thirty-three cities.
About 6,000 persons were taken into custody,
many of them citizens and therefore not subject to the
deportation laws, many others unconnected with any
radical cause. Some were held incommunicado for
weeks while the authorities searched for evidence
against them. In a number of cases, individuals who
went to visit prisoners were themselves thrown behind
bars on the theory that they too must be communists.
Hundreds of suspects were jammed into filthy
“bullpens,” beaten, and forced to sign “confessions.”
The public tolerated these wholesale violations of
civil liberties because of the supposed menace of com-
munism. Gradually, however, protests began to be
heard, first from lawyers and liberal magazines, then
from a wider segment of the population. No revolu-
tionary outbreak had taken place. Of 6,000 seized in
the Palmer raids, only 556 proved liable to deporta-
tion. The widespread ransacking of communists’
homes and meeting places produced mountains of
inflammatory literature but only three pistols.
Palmer, attempting to maintain the crusade,
announced that the radicals planned a gigantic terror-
ist demonstration for May Day, 1920. In New York
and other cities thousands of police were placed on
round-the-clock duty; federal troops stood by anx-
iously. But the day passed without even a rowdy
meeting. Suddenly Palmer appeared ridiculous. The
red scare swiftly subsided.The Election of 1920
Wilson still hoped for vindication at the polls in the
presidential election, which he sought to make a “great
and solemn referendum” on the League. He wouldThe Election of 1920 635Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. Although the
terrorists were anarchists and anarchism had little in
common with communism, many citizens lumped all
extremists together and associated them with a mon-
strous assault on society.
What aroused the public even more was the fact
that most radicals were not American citizens. Wartime
fear of alien saboteurs easily transformed itself into
peacetime terror of foreign radicals. In place of
Germany, the enemy became the lowly immigrant, usu-
ally an Italian or a Jew or a Slav and usually an industrial
worker. In this muddled way, radicalism, unionism, and
questions of racial and national origins combined to
make many Americans believe that their way of life was
in imminent danger. That few immigrants were radicals,
that most workers had no interest in communism, and
that the extremists themselves were faction-ridden and
irresolute did not affect conservative thinking. From all
over the country came demands that radicals be ruth-
lessly suppressed. Thus the “red scare”was born.
Attorney General Palmer was the key figure in the
resulting purge. He had been a typical progressive, a
supporter of the League of Nations and such reforms
as woman suffrage and child labor legislation. But pres-
sure from Congress and his growing conviction that
the communists really were a menace led him to join
the “red hunt.” Soon he was saying of the radicals,
The “red scare” that followed the Great War caused panic and new
racial violence throughout the nation. Paranoid delusions of
“dangerous aliens” and “foreign subversives” were prevalent, as this
cartoon demonstrates.