Palmer Raids

Spearheaded by U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, the Palmer Raids were a series of mass arrests, conducted simultaneously across the nation, aimed at capturing and deporting anarchists, communists, and other radical leftists in the years immediately following World War I. The Palmer Raids were a prominent feature of the so-called “Red Scare”—a panic-stricken response to Russia's 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in which government officials, fearful that revolution might be stirring in the United States, lashed out at Russian immigrants and anyone associated with the radical left. These raids, carried out by the U.S. Department of Justice in November 1919 and January 1920, produced over 4,000 arrests, in a broad dragnet that pulled in many persons who neither advocated nor committed any crimes. The Palmer Raids are now regarded as a colossal violation of First and Fourth Amendment rights, since they featured thousands of arrests that were based on only the slightest suspicion of Russian heritage or radical beliefs.

The Palmer Raids resulted from a combination of factors that all came to a head in 1919: the pervasive fears generated by the Bolshevik Revolution; the formation of the first communist parties in the United States; tumultuous labor unrest that produced a general strike in Seattle, a police strike in Boston, and major work stoppages across the nation; and dozens of anarchist bombings, including one that killed its deliverer on the doorstep of Attorney General Palmer's house. Urged by Congress to crack down on suspected radicals, Palmer appointed J. Edgar Hoover to lead a new division of the Justice Department—the Bureau of Investigation's “General Intelligence Division”—that would serve as the federal government's principal agency for combating domestic radicalism. Soon Hoover had files on 200,000 individuals; they included virtually anyone who had ever criticized the government. By November 1919, the General Intelligence Division was ready to carry out the first of the Palmer Raids.

On November 7, 1919—a date chosen by federal authorities because it was the two-year anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution—federal agents targeted the Union of Russian Workers with simultaneous raids in twelve cities. They arrested 450 individuals, including 200 at the union's headquarters in New York City. According to its own statement of principles, the union was composed of “atheists, communists, and anarchists” who believed that all governments should be overthrown and all wealth should be confiscated through the violence of social revolution; however, in reality, the Union functioned like a social club for Russian workingmen, who were not even required to read, much less endorse, the union's statement of principles. Many members belonged to the union to attend classes on subjects that ranged from algebra to automobile repair. When federal agents raided the New York City headquarters, they found an algebra class in session; they beat the students with improvised clubs torn from the banisters of the building and threw the fifty-year-old teacher down the stairs.

Shortly after these raids, the U.S. Labor Department declared membership in the Union of Russian Workers to be a deportable offense. On December 21, 1919, the Justice Department deported 249 aliens to Soviet Russia aboard an Army transport ship, the Buford, that reporters dubbed “the Soviet Ark.” Of the 249 deportees, 199 had been apprehended in the Palmer Raids of November 1919. Out of all 249, the vast majority had no criminal record and had never participated in any terrorist act.

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