SYMHC Classics: Palmer Raids Pt. 1

Part one of this 2016 classic covers the social unrest in the U. S. after WWI. There was a fear that Communist revolutionaries would try to take over the country. Adding fuel to the fear were two bomb plots in 1919. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Holly Frey?

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• 0:47Holly Frey?

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• 1:30Holly Frey?

  are 95% more likely to report a hire than non-sponsored jobs. Spend less time searching and more time interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. We've all tumbled down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose, and it leaves us more anxious than informed. Our feeds are full of wellness trends, but how do we know what's real, what's exaggerated, and what's just wrong? Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association breaks it all down. Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends, not to cancel them, but to understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters.

• 2:15Holly Frey?

  So listen to Health vs. Hype wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:21Holly Frey?

  Happy Saturday. Today's classic is a request from listener Amy, who asked us to replay it because of how applicable it is to current events. This is our episode on the Palmer Raids, which originally came out in 2016. This is a two-part episode, and we haven't been rerunning two-parters as Saturday Classics lately unless the original episodes are so short, like from an earlier time when our episodes tended to run a little shorter, that they could add up into one regular-length episode today. But that's not really the case with these, so we're running the two parts on separate Saturdays. These episodes also each have their own arc, so today's

• 3:03Holly Frey?

  involves some historical context and a series of bombings that were carried out in 1919. And then next week, Part Two on Saturday will cover the federal response to those bombings. So this first part of the Palmer Raids originally came out December 5, 2016.

• 3:24Holly Frey?

  Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.

• 3:35Holly Frey?

  Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frey. And I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Uh, so after World War I, the United States was in the midst of a lot of social unrest. There were a lot of financial issues facing the nation in the form of inflation and unemployment and labor strikes. In 1917, the Bolshevik Revolution, which established the world's first communist nation, terrified Americans. And after the war ended in November of 1918, there was a very pervasive fear, which came to be known as the Red Scare, that radicals in the United States would try to stage a similar revolution. Additionally, the Spanish

• 4:20Holly Frey?

  flu pandemic that had started in 1918 also had people on edge. Additionally, there was a lot of racism that was blowing up in the form of violence. In short, the US was in a state of feeling helpless and uncertain and uneasy all the time. And this is kind of the setting of what we are talking about today. Which is the Palmer Raids. And this is going to be a two-part episode. And there are a lot of moving parts to it. Like, we're kind of jumping around a little bit where we'll talk about one thing for a moment, and then another thing for a moment, and then another. They're sort of in separate sections, but they eventually all become part of this bigger picture.

• 5:03Holly Frey?

  And so the first thing that we're going to talk about is actually the Sedition Act of 1918. On May 16th, 1918, the Sedition Act was passed by the US Congress. And this act expanded on the previously existing Espionage Act of 1917. The Espionage Act had made it a crime to traffic and information with the intention that that sharing would harm the United States in the war effort, or assist any enemies of the United States. And the Sedition Act was both more expansive and more focused. Anti-war activists, pacifists, and socialists were all targeted in its wording. And under the Sedition Act, it became illegal to make false statements that interfered with

• 5:47Holly Frey?

  the war effort. It was illegal to insult or in any way abuse the US government or its representative flag, military, or the Constitution. Agitating against the production of war materials was also covered, as well as teaching or defending any of the actions that were made illegal in the language of the act. The punishments outlined in the Sedition Act were the same as those described in the Espionage Act. If anyone was found guilty of the crimes described, they could be fined up to $10,000 or jailed for 20 years. And both of these punishments could be sentenced at the same time. So keep the Sedition Act and the Espionage Act in mind.

• 6:29Holly Frey?

  But next, we are going to hop to a different thing. And we are going to talk briefly about a postal clerk. And that man was named Charles Kaplan. And he was a postal clerk working in New York City's main post office in 1919. And on April 27th of 1919, over the course of his normal work, he encountered 16 small parcels. And they were all virtually identical, both visually and in the fact that they all had insufficient postage. And Kaplan set these parcels aside to be returned to the sender at the return address on the package, which was an address that was Gimbel Brothers, 32nd Street and Broadway, New York City, and they were marked novelty samples.

• 7:13Holly Frey?

  A few days later, while riding the train home from work in the wee hours of April 30th, 1919, Kaplan read the paper. And one of the stories he read detailed a small parcel. And the description of this parcel was almost identical to these he had set aside on the 27th. This parcel was delivered to former US Senator Thomas Hardwick in Atlanta, Georgia. And when Hardwick's maid opened the package, it exploded. Both the maid and Hardwick had survived, although the maid had been really injured by the blast. And there was a lot of property damage. Yeah, descriptions of her injuries vary a little bit. They're pretty brief. Some will say that her hands were actually blown off.

• 7:56Holly Frey?

  Others will say that they were crippled in some way. But she was very, very injured. Kaplan immediately exited the train. He jumped off at the next stop. And he ran back to the post office and those 16 brown paper wrapped parcels that were in the storeroom that he had set aside. The parcels, which indeed matched the description that Kaplan had just read in the paper, had not moved on to their next step in the process of being returned. So Kaplan notified postal inspector W. E. Cochrane, and the authorities were immediately called. The New York City Bureau of Combustibles, which is sort of a fabulous name and no longer exists in that particular nomenclature, opened some of the parcels along with Cochrane because he was extremely good at this, apparently.

• 8:41Holly Frey?

  Upon examination by the Combustibles Bureau, these parcels were deemed infernal machines. Another...

• 8:50Holly Frey?

  Kind of great name for something really terrible. They were, today, they would be labeled as incendiary devices. They were addressed to J.P. Morgan Jr., John D. Rockefeller, Mayor John F. Hyland, Police Commissioner Richard Enright, and a number of other well-known businessmen, politicians, and judges. So Kaplan had unwittingly discovered a serial bombing. So after receiving all of this information, Postmaster General Albert Burleson sent out an alert to all postal offices describing these bomb parcels with instructions to be on the lookout for similar packages. The next day, one turned up in Salisbury, North Carolina, addressed to State Senator Lee Slater Overman.

• 9:34Holly Frey?

  Additional parcels that all were identical were identified in Nebraska and Utah. In total, three dozen mail bombs were eventually found and identified. When the bombs were taken apart, they were all identical in construction, and experts were unable to find a single fingerprint on any of the components. Manufacturers of the type of paper that was used to wrap the boxes shared a list of all the dealers who had been sold that type of paper in the preceding 12 months. And the government authorities followed up on all of those leads in an effort to identify who ultimately bought the paper from the dealers. And it was determined as well that an Oliver brand typewriter with a misaligned

• 10:18Holly Frey?

  lowercase "w" key and a defective lowercase "k" key was used to type the address labels on the boxes. The labels with the novelty samples Gimbel Brothers Return Address were determined to be forgeries and not the actual stationery of that company. The investigation next led to a house on West 45th Street where a number of other explosives were cached. But what wasn't clear was who was collecting all this material, although investigations continued.

• 10:49Holly Frey?

  We'll talk more about the mail bombs and their coverage in the press in just a moment, but first, we are going to pause for a word from a sponsor.

• 10:59Speaker 02

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• 11:02Holly Frey?

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• 11:30Holly Frey?

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• 11:54Holly Frey?

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• 12:00Holly Frey?

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• 12:41Holly Frey?

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• 13:07Holly Frey?

  We've all done it, tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeartMedia's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends.

• 13:49Holly Frey?

  Not to cancel them, not to hype them more, but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 14:10Holly Frey?

  Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jess A. have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends proving that queer joy

• 14:55Holly Frey?

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• 15:14Holly Frey?

  The discovery of those bomb parcels, which came to be known as the May Day bomb plot, led to a panic. A front page story in the New York Times on May 4th read, quote, "There are more than 2,000 radical agitators in New York City who have been preaching Bolshevism and the overthrow of the United States government, and every one of these persons is now under investigation by federal and local authorities." According to that same news article, more than 75% of those 2,000 people were, quote, "citizens or subjects of foreign nations." Many were expected to be deported with the process described in the following manner, quote, "It is generally understood that a large number of them are now being considered for deportation

• 15:58Holly Frey?

  as persons whose presence in this country is undesirable." All persons recommended for deportation have to be passed upon by the Attorney General and Secretary of Labor in Washington before the recommendation can be carried into effect. An official from the Department of Justice gave statements to the press that it was believed that Bolshevik and industrial workers in the world, IWW papers, were not only circulating in abundance in the United States, but that the Bolshevik movement in North America was being funded directly from the Lenin-Trotzky government. The IWW, for information, was and still is a labor union that was founded in 1906 in Chicago. And the IWW was believed by the Department of Justice to have a large reserve fund of its own

• 16:43Holly Frey?

  to promote an agenda of government sabotage. This brings us around to the Attorney General at the time, Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer, or A. Mitchell Palmer. And he was born on May 4th, 1872, in Moosehead, Pennsylvania. He grew up a Quaker, first attending public schools, and then Merivian parochial school, before moving on to Swatmore College in Pennsylvania. He graduated summa cum laude in 1891 and went on to study law at Lafayette College and George Washington University. Although he didn't finish his law degree, he did pass the bar exam in Pennsylvania and started his law career in 1893 in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania.

• 17:25Holly Frey?

  Early on in his professional career, he also became involved in politics. Palmer was elected to the US House of Representatives in 1905, and he held that role for a number of years. His last reelection bid that he won was 1912. And during that period that he served as a representative, he was instrumental as a steady supporter and campaigner in securing the 1912 Democratic presidential nomination for Woodrow Wilson. Once Wilson was in office, Palmer made the move to run for a seat in the Senate in 1914, but he lost the election. Although he lost that race, he was soon given a different sort of promotion by appointment because Woodrow Wilson appointed him to the US Court of Claims as a judge.

• 18:10Holly Frey?

  But only a few months into that appointment, Palmer changed his mind about the job and decided that instead he wanted to go back into private law practice. Later, Woodrow Wilson offered him another position, that of Secretary of War, but Palmer turned it down, citing his Quaker beliefs as the reason that he could not take that job. Once the United States entered World War I, Palmer was named Alien Property Custodian by President Wilson, and he did take that job. That office was established on October 12th, 1917, under authority of the Trading with the Enemy Act to assume control and dispose of enemy-owned property in the United States and its possessions. So President Wilson ultimately put Palmer into an even higher position in 1919,

• 18:55Holly Frey?

  when he named him Attorney General of the United States. And Palmer started that job on March 5th of 1919. And initially, there was criticism from Republicans that Palmer wasn't aggressive enough in pursuing subversives who might wish to take down the US government. But Palmer, eager to gain favor as he had plans for a presidential bid, would eventually earn the nickname "The Fighting Quaker" for the fervor with which he carried out his duties. On the night of June 2nd, 1919, just a few months into Palmer's time as Attorney General, a man named Carlo Valdinochi approached Attorney General Palmer's Washington DC home. He had a parcel with him, and the parcel contained a bomb. Palmer himself had

• 19:40Holly Frey?

  gone upstairs to retire for the evening about 15 minutes earlier, but Valdinochi's incendiary device went off while he was carrying it, and the front and a significant portion of the bottom level of Palmer's home was damaged. This also killed Valdinochi.

• 19:57Holly Frey?

  Yeah, Palmer had been in office during that May Day plot uncoverry, but people thought he was not very strong about it, about following up on it. However, this suddenly came to his own door and things changed significantly. That bomb had been quite powerful, so it had, in addition to blowing out the bottom floor of his house, it had blown out the windows of the home across the street as well, which was where Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt were living at the time. And it was Roosevelt who had run across the street to offer assistance, and Palmer, who had run downstairs, who found the remains of Valdinochi's body and anarchist literature that he had been carrying, which led to the conclusion that this had been a terrorist plot gone wrong.

• 20:40Holly Frey?

  Also, this bomb at Palmer's home was not an isolated incident. In the 90 minutes that followed Valdinochi's explosion, seven other bombs exploded in New York, Pittsburgh, Boston, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Patterson, New Jersey. And among the targets were three judges, a mayor, a state legislator, legislator, a Catholic priest, and a prominent police officer, along with two businessmen. The coordinated bombings had resulted in the death of a night watchman named William Boehner in New York, although he had not been one of the targets. Yeah, none of the actual targets were killed in those bombings. There are also some accounts that suggest there were some other bystanders that were injured, and some

• 21:22Holly Frey?

  will even say they were killed, but I couldn't verify any of those. The night watchman is the only one that consistently comes up over and over. So along with each- Bomb that had been delivered, there were also several copies of flyers with the title, "Plain Words." And I'm going to read part of it. It's quite long, but I'm taking excerpts. And it reads, "The powers that be make no secret of their will to stop here in America, the world wide spread of revolution. The powers that be must reckon that they will have to accept the fight that they have provoked. Do not expect us to sit down and pray and cry. We accept your challenge and mean to stick to our war duties. We know

• 22:04Holly Frey?

  that all you do is for your defense as a class. We know also that the proletariat has the same right to protect itself since their press has been suffocated, their mouths muzzled. We mean to speak for them, the voice of dynamite through the mouth of guns. Do not say that we are acting cowardly because we keep hiding. Do not say it is abominable. It is war, class war, and you were the first to wage it undercover of the powerful institutions you call order, in the darkness of your laws, behind the guns of your boneheaded slave. Our mutual position is pretty clear. What has been done by us so far is only a warning that there are friends of popular liberties still living. Only now are we getting into

• 22:47Holly Frey?

  the fight, and you will have a chance to see what liberty-loving people can do. Do not seek to believe that we are the Germans or the devil's paid agents. You know well, we are class-conscious men with strong determination and no vulgar liability. And never hope that your cops and your hounds will ever succeed in ridding the country of the anarchistic germ that pulses in our veins. We know how we stand with you and how to take care of ourselves. Besides, you will never get all of us, and we multiply nowadays. Just wait and resign to your fate, since privilege and riches have turned your heads. Long live social revolution, down with tyranny. And it is signed, The Anarchist Fighters."

• 23:32Holly Frey?

  So next up, we will detail the bombs and the second attack as compared to those from the earlier incidents we talked about, you know, tying those Together. And before we do, we will take a quick break to talk about one of our fantastic sponsors.

• 23:48Holly Frey?

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• 24:31Holly Frey?

  cancel them, not to hype them more, but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Health Versus Hype on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 24:51Holly Frey?

  Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jess A. have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane, navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter,

• 25:33Holly Frey?

  and decades of perspective from four friends proving that queer joy only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 25:51Holly Frey?

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• 26:35Holly Frey?

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• 27:04Speaker 05

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• 27:36Holly Frey?

  The June bombs were significantly more powerful than the bombs that had been discovered in the late spring. They contained approximately 25 pounds, that's 11.3 kilograms, of dynamite, wrapped in a package, each of them with metal slugs to create destructive shrapnel. As you may recall, one of those springtime bombs maimed but did not kill the woman who opened it. Where is this bomb? That went off while Valdinochi was carrying it, killed him presumably instantly, blew out a significant amount of the building he was in front of and caused minor damage to other structures on that same street. So a significant increase in power. The pink flyers and the plain words writing were traced to a print shop run by two men,

• 28:19Holly Frey?

  typesetter Andrea Salsedo and compositor Roberto Alia. Both men were followers of an anarchist named Luigi Galliani. And Carlo Valdinochi, the man who had had his bomb go off as he approached Palmer's residence, had been an editor of one of Galliani's publications, which advocated the use of violence to effect change. One of the addresses in the Mayday bomb plot had been Raimi Weston Finch, who was an FBI agent who had been investigating Galliani and his followers. So at this point, Galliani was heavily implicated in these bombings. For an incredibly brief overview, just to try to contextualize this connection

• 29:02Holly Frey?

  to Luigi Galliani's tempestuous life. He was from Vrcelle, Italy, and studied law at the University of Turin. During his time in school, he became increasingly interested in politics, and eventually his anarchist beliefs made him a wanted man in Italy. So he fled his home country in 1880 before he was able to finish his degree. He ended up living in France on and off for the next 20 years. He then moved briefly to Switzerland but was deported. He once again went to France but then was deported back to Italy and was ultimately imprisoned. After an escape from confinement on the island Pantelleri Pantelleri, which I may or may not be butchering, he went to England and

• 29:44Holly Frey?

  then he emigrated from there to the United States. And he lived in Patterson, New Jersey, until an indictment for inciting a riot, when he tried to flee to Canada, but he was refused entry. Allegedly, he was literally just pushed back across the border. He found a group of like-minded people eventually in Vermont, and from there, he began publishing an anarchist periodical in 1903, which ran for 15 years from various locations before the US government shut it down. You have probably, as a listener, heard of the more well-known anarchists Sacco and Van Zetti. Galliani and his circle had ties to them as well. As for the men who had made the flyers. Salcedo jumped or fell from the window of his cell in the DOJ's building on Park

• 30:29Holly Frey?

  Row in New York. He had been held there secretly for eight weeks and there were rumors that he died by suicide to keep himself from giving up names of collaborators. Aleyo was offered a deal where his deportation would be canceled if he testified about the anarchists and their organization, but he refused. So, two days after Salcedo's death, Aleyo was given up to the Department of Labor and moved to Ellis Island. The Department of Justice contended that the men had both turned state's evidence and then had been held secretly for their own protection. The investigation into this second set of bombings was led by Todd Daniel, who is a special agent of the FBI, as well as the acting head of the FBI, William Flynn.

• 31:13Holly Frey?

  Flynn, who had been chief of the Secret Service, was lauded by Attorney General Palmer as, quote, "the leading organizing detective in America." Flynn is an anarchist chaser, the greatest anarchist expert in the United States. But just days after the June 2 bombings, a number of people were being tracked as suspects and active participation in the attacks. Over the next several months, Palmer invoked both the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 that we talked about at the top of the show to assemble a special team, led by a lawyer from the Justice Department named J. Edgar Hoover. This team would go on to work closely with the Immigration Bureau, both to investigate existing suspects and identify others.

• 31:58Holly Frey?

  Hoover and his team went after every possible scrap of intelligence they could find to identify persons that they felt were the most likely to take violent action. So, at this point, they were not just tracking who had possibly participated in this bombing act, but anyone that they thought might one day think that doing something similar was a course of action they would try. So when all of their research was collected, Palmer was utterly convinced that there was a communist plot to overthrow the US government and that there were tens of thousands of people in the US working to that end. And he had compiled a list of them that he was going to go after.

• 32:41Holly Frey?

  In the next episode, we will talk about the steps that Palmer and his team took to address this perceived communist threat. But for now, this is where we are going to leave the story. Yeah. So at this point, there's a lot of fear that there are communists literally lurking everywhere in your neighborhoods, trying to slowly overtake the entire US way of life. Like, these two bombing plots are legitimately cause for concern, to be very clear. We're not saying, you know, we're not saying they shouldn't have investigated the bomb plots. Obviously, that was a big deal. But like, this took on a much, much greater scope. For sure. Like I said, it really did transition to, I think you might be shady.

• 33:27Holly Frey?

  Onto the list you go. Yeah, there's, there's an episode in the archive already about McCarthy and the Red Scare and how that ties together. I feel like this, this part is not as well known as that. Like, today, I feel like the McCarthy era is a lot better known than the Palmer raids that we're going to talk about. Yeah. And part of that is just a matter of documentation. Like, there is a lot of documentation on the Palmer raids, but then the McCarthy era stuff was later enough that there were more forms of communication that were more common. So more people knew about it instantly. Yeah. The Palmer raids are, are one of those points in history that does not often get a lot of attention. Yeah.

• 34:14Holly Frey?

  Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email address is [email protected]. And you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 34:37Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx, listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You ever show up late to the game and your friends already saved your seat, your drink, even a plate? That's looking out. That's having your back. And that's exactly what AT&T does with the AT&T Guarantee. They know staying connected matters, so they

• 35:20Holly Frey?

  actually guarantee a network that comes through when it counts. AT&T has connectivity you can depend on, or they'll proactively make it right, just like that friend who takes care of things before you even ask. AT&T: Connecting changes everything. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.com/guarantee for details.

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  Livright, publishers of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, The Gales of November, a chronicle of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 shipwreck. "Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book," writes John J. Miller of The Wall Street Journal, while author Hampton Sides proclaims that it's destined to be a classic. The Gales of November, now in paperback.

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  Long hours, work deadlines, family commitments. You give so much to everyone else. Isn't it time to invest in yourself? The University of Arizona Global Campus is built for working adults with flexible online degree programs designed to fit your life. Your previous education, training, and eligible experience may even help you earn college credit. At UAGC, you can take one accelerated course at a time, helping you move toward your goals in five and six-week class formats. Visit uagc.edu today.

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  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.