|
Palmer raids The way was prepared for the Palmer raids by the Deportation Act of 1918. This law provided for the deportation of any non citizen who embraced anarchism, advocated the overthrow of the government by force or belonged to any organization teaching these views. To carry out the Deportation Act, the Bureau of Immigration worked with Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer's Justice Department – especially Palmer's assistant, J. Edgar Hoover – to carry out raids in cities across the country. They arrested thousands of people, seized membership lists of organizations, political pamphlets and other papers, but failed to find hard evidence of criminal activity or revolutionary plots. The detainees were held for days without charge or access to lawyers. Some were eventually brought before an immigration official who asked them about their beliefs and then decided whether or not to deport them. Many more people would have been deported had Assistant Secretary of Labor Louis Post not intervened. There was a call in Congress to impeach him for overruling over a thousand deportation orders, but he stood his ground and the effort to punish him was dropped. Here is how Attorney General Palmer defended the raids that bear his name in his 1920 publication, "The Case Against the Reds": "Like a prairie-fire, the blaze of revolution was sweeping over every American institution of law and order a year ago. It was eating its way into the homes of the American workmen, its sharp tongues of revolutionary heat were licking the altars of the churches, leaping into the belfry of the school bell, crawling into the sacred corners of American homes, seeking to replace marriage vows with libertine laws, burning up the foundations of society. "Robbery, not war, is the ideal of communism. This has been demonstrated in Russia, Germany, and in America. As a foe, the anarchist is fearless of his own life, for his creed is a fanaticism that admits no respect of any other creed. Obviously it is the creed of any criminal mind, which reasons always from motives impossible to clean thought. Crime is the degenerate factor in society. "Upon these two basic certainties, first that the "Reds" were criminal aliens and secondly that the American Government must prevent crime, it was decided that there could be no nice distinctions drawn between the theoretical ideals of the radicals and their actual violations of our national laws. An assassin may have brilliant intellectuality, he may be able to excuse his murder or robbery with fine oratory, but any theory which excuses crime is not wanted in
Read more about A. Mitchell Palmer: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USApalmerA.htm And here is how the anarchist Emma Goldman, who campaigned for women's rights, trade union rights and the right to free speech, wrote about her experience of deportation in her autobiography, Living My Life: "Deep snow lay on the ground; the air was cut by a biting wind. A row of armed civilians and soldiers stood along the roast to the bank. Dimly the outlines of a barge were visible through the morning mist. One by one the deportees marched flanked on each side by the uniformed men, curses and threats accompanying the thud of their feet on the frozen ground. When the last man had crossed the gangplank, the girls and I were ordered to follow, officers in front and in back of us. "We were led to a cabin. A large fire roared in the iron stove filling the air with heat and fumes. We felt suffocating [sic]. There was no air nor water. Then came a violent lurch; we were on our way. I looked at my watch. It was 4:20 A.M. on the day of our Lord, December 21, 1919. "On the deck above us I could hear the men tramping up and down in the wintry blast. I felt dizzy, visioning a transport of politicals doomed to
After her death in 1940, the
Read more about Emma Goldman: http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Goldman/ |