SYMHC Classics: Palmer Raids Pt. 2

This 2016 continuation of our coverage of the Palmer Raids covers a series of raids on perceived threats to national security by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. Thousands of people were rounded up, many without cause or warrant, and kept in horrifying conditions. 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

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  In military families, service is more than a job. It's a legacy. At American Military University, that legacy can help open new doors through education. If someone in your family served in the military, you could be eligible for reduced tuition. Take the next step with flexible online programs built for real life. Learn more at amu.apus.edu/military.

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• 1:12Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 1:57Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 2:08Holly Frey?

  Happy Saturday. Today's Saturday classic is the conclusion of last Saturday's episode on the Palmer raids, which we are running after getting a request from our listener, Amy. Last week, part one covered some of the historical context, including a series of bombings that took place in 1919. And today's episode is about the series of raids, arrests, incarcerations, and deportations that followed those bombings.

• 2:33Tracy V. Wilson?

  This originally came out on December 7, 2016.

• 2:40Holly Frey?

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

• 2:51Holly Frey?

  Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frey.

• 2:53Tracy V. Wilson?

  And I'm Tracy B. Wilson.

• 2:55Holly Frey?

  So in our last episode, we talked about the fear and unrest that gripped the United States at the conclusion of World War I. Armistice certainly did not put an end to the stresses of financial problems and racial divide and labor strikes that were happening throughout the country. And there was a growing fear that a revolution incited by foreign anarchists or communists was going to change America forever. And after rising through the political ranks to become Attorney General, and after a series of coordinated bomb attacks on prominent US citizens, A. Mitchell Palmer made it his mission to root out what he believed to be a revolutionary threat to national security. So we highly recommend you listen to part one of this two-part episode before this

• 3:40Holly Frey?

  one, so that you have a fuller context for the events that we're about to talk about. Because while there were some legitimate concerning events that happened, this quickly spread and became about one man's hunt to basically get rid of as many immigrants as he could.

• 3:58Speaker 00

  Starting on November 7th, 1919, two years after Russia's Bolshevik Revolution, locations in 12 different cities and towns were raided by Palmer's assembled forces in a coordinated effort.

• 4:12Holly Frey?

  One of the raided locations was the Russian People's House at 133 East 15th Street in New York, and this building housed the office of the Federated Unions of Russian Workers, as well as a cafeteria and classrooms.

• 4:26Speaker 00

  When the agents from the Department of Justice arrived, they had warrants for a few suspects, but they launched a full-scale attack on the entire building and everyone in it. Furniture and property were destroyed, and students from classrooms were violently herded into stairwells, and in many cases shoved, so that they fell down the stairs. Several hundred people in total were beaten with, quote, "blackjacks and stairrails."

• 4:52Holly Frey?

  Those same several hundred people were taken to a nearby Department of Justice office and questioned. Only an estimated one-fifth of those initially taken into custody were held. The rest were released, but many of them were seriously injured. The treatment of the group at the hands of the Department of Justice led to a protest at Madison Square Garden the following night, led by attorney and activist Dudley Field Malone, and a letter was written to the Attorney General by the New York Bar Association that demanded to know if the raid had indeed been under the direction of the Department of Justice, and also requested an investigation into the events. That letter was never acknowledged by Palmer's office.

• 5:34Speaker 00

  The same night of that protest on November 8th, a group of men had gathered to discuss purchasing a vehicle so that everyone in the community to learn how to drive. That meeting in Bridgeport, Connecticut, was raided and 63 arrests were made. 16 people were released over the following two days, but after three days of being held in cramped quarters at the local police station with little to no food, the remaining 47 were moved to the Hartford Jail under the direction of the Department of Justice.

• 6:04Holly Frey?

  And while they were in the Hartford jail, there were additional arrests being made and those individuals were added to the numbers. And people who applied for visitation to the arrested men were also often jailed until the Hartford Group Number 97. They were questioned, they were threatened with suffocation and hanging, and they were beaten. The Department of Labor and the Department of Justice worked in conjunction to file arrest warrants after the fact for all of the men that were held there.

• 6:37Speaker 00

  They were all kept alone in their cells with agents of the Department of Justice as their only visitors. They were allowed no reading materials. Many of the men had no idea what they were even being held for, and when they questioned their jailers, got no information. Most had no idea if there was bail set for them, and if there was, how much it was. They were given two to five minutes per day at a sink outside of their cells to wash their face and hands, and they were allowed five minutes of tub time per month to wash their bodies. Food was often insufficient and also foul, and family and friends were not allowed any contact with these men in the prison.

• 7:17Holly Frey?

  Punishment in the Hartford jail took place in four identical rooms. Each of them were 51 inches by 106 inches. That's about 1.3 meters by 2.7 meters in their floor size. And these rooms were situated over a boiler room, and consequently, they would become unbearably hot. Men suspected of holding anarchist or communist ideologies were put into such rooms for 36 to 60 hours at a time, with one glass of water and one piece of bread given to them every 12 hours. Most were unconscious when their time in a punishment room had ended. According to a later investigation, only one person in the five months that they were

• 8:01Holly Frey?

  using these rooms was actually able to walk back to his regular cell without help.

• 8:07Speaker 00

  The situation in Hartford lasted, as we just mentioned, for five months until April 1920. At that point, a lawyer finally managed to get into the jail, and the conditions were immediately deemed unacceptable, which we will talk about more in a moment.

• 8:22Holly Frey?

  In December, a number of the detainees were deported to Russia by ship, which was nicknamed the Red Ark and Soviet Ark in press reports. Although this really was done rather quietly and quickly, it's unclear if there was sufficient paperwork for all of the people put on that boat.

• 8:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, often with an event as old as this one is, like, it is old enough that typically I can find a lot of photos that might be in the public domain, and it's recent enough that there are a lot of photos. It's not so old that there are no pictures. Not a lot of pictures of this, no. The response to these initial raids had been largely positive. Emboldened by the November successes, A. Mitchell Palmer made even bigger plans. On January 2, 1920, a second mass raid effort was launched, and approximately 3,000 people were arrested over the course of several days in 30 different cities and towns.

• 9:19Holly Frey?

  On the 2nd, a chief agent to the Department of Justice in Detroit named Arthur L. Barky received an order from Palmer to raid the suspected headquarters of the Communist Party. 800 men were captured as they attended classes and dances in the building, and then they were held for three to six days in a corridor in the city's federal building in the dark.

• 9:43Speaker 00

  The captive men had no beds. They slept on the floor. All 800 of them had to wait in lines for access to the one drinking fountain and one toilet available. No food was given to them until family members started showing up with provisions about 20 hours into their captivity. They were not allowed to speak to family or legal counsel, and law enforcement eventually started moving them in groups to precinct police stations with actual holding cells.

• 10:12Holly Frey?

  Between 130 and 140 of these men were moved to the police bullpen, which was intended for keeping people arrested for petty crimes for a few hours at a time. It was a cellar room with one window, 24 by 30 feet, that's 7.3 by 9.1 meters in length and width.

• 10:32Tracy V. Wilson?

  And those men, again, 130 to 140 men, were held in that cramped space for a week with no beds, relying primarily on food that was brought in by relatives to survive.

• 10:46Speaker 00

  Tallys of the men estimated that approximately 350 of them were American citizens or aliens who could prove that they were in no way connected to any sort of radicalism. Of the 800 men initially seized, there were eventually warrants issued for 440 of them, 10 days after they had actually been arrested. 140 of them got out on bond, and the other 300 were moved to an army fort for longer term holding, and they remained there for several months.

• 11:16Tracy V. Wilson?

  We're actually going to discuss something you might not expect in just a moment, which is paperwork. But before we do, let's pause for just a moment, take a break from the Palmer raids because it is a little bit heavy, and talk about one of our sponsors that keeps the lights on in the studio so we can talk about these heavy topics.

• 11:36Speaker 01

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• 11:59Speaker 04

  First thought is like, wow, how are we going to do all this?

• 12:02Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 12:30Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 12:54Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 13:00Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 13:43Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 14:07Holly 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.

• 14:49Holly 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.

• 15:13Speaker 00

  So if you're wondering how in the world they got the manpower to issue all these warrants for all these arrests, the answer is they didn't. Most of the people were rounded up without warrants and with no formal paperwork to document the arrests. About 5,000 people were taken into custody, most of these people being completely innocent.

• 15:35Holly Frey?

  And when you consider that these conditions that we talked about in these two instances, there were many more than those two instances that we just talked about, they were being kept in similar conditions, completely innocent, for weeks and sometimes months at a time. But the other thing that was interesting was that not all of the people who were accused of anti-American sentiment during this time were captured in raids. Some had their lives ruined in more subtle, but no less damning ways. And one of these was an art teacher named Julia Pratt. And she had been suspended from her teaching job abruptly. And when the school board held a hearing to review her case, a man showed up named Herman Bernard.

• 16:16Holly Frey?

  And he testified that he had been an undercover agent of the Department of Justice, and that in his undercover role, he became a secretary of the Buffalo Communist Party. And he then said that he knew and had records of Ms. Pratt as a member of that party and the dates on which she paid her dues. But that art teacher told a very different story in her testimony.

• 16:37Speaker 00

  She said, "On July 18th, 1919, Ms. Harris invited me into her home to meet some, quote, 'interesting intellectual friends of hers,' as she put it. I went out to Kenmore. Herman Bernard came in with two women friends of his. He constantly injected overdrawn statements against the government into the conversation, and outlined in glowing terms the work the Communist Party would perform in emancipating the oppressed and exploited. Bernard later came to my house with others of the same group, ate at my table, and I played the harp for him. It is only on the testimony of this agent provocateur that the board has dismissed me."

• 17:16Holly Frey?

  And again, that's one example, but there were others where people had basically sort of like baited a situation where they would go in and talk about communism and people would sort of politely nod and then they would be like, "That's a communist." There were some very squirrely things going on.

• 17:32Speaker 00

  Pretty sure that's called entrapment.

• 17:33Holly Frey?

  It is indeed. Still, other people from Hoover's List were apprehended at Palmer's orders, often beaten and sometimes taken from their homes. So where they weren't raiding like big group gatherings, but they were just going to individual people's homes and taking them out, often without warrant and with no cause that they stated. In at least some cases, fake testimonies were typed up and signed with forged signatures. There's a report we're going to talk about in a moment that has one of these instances where it is clearly a forged signature. There were many, many instances of poor treatment at the hands of Palmer's agents. So as I've said a couple of times now, what we have selected here to detail is just a sampling.

• 18:17Speaker 00

  While there had been some unease about the November raids by the public, the January raids caused real concern, not fear of communists or anarchists, but fear that the Attorney General had far overstepped his bounds.

• 18:33Holly Frey?

  In part, in response to this rash of raids that were happening without cause, on January 19th, 1920, the American Civil Liberties Union was formed. And this was an effort on the part of a number of concerned citizens, many of which had already been working in the National Civil Liberties Bureau, to shift the focus away from that group's litigation-only approach to one that was more action-oriented and focused on education as well as fighting legal battles.

• 19:01Speaker 00

  In the spring of 1920, the tide continued to turn against Palmer. Assistant Secretary of Labor Louis F. Post saw the Palmer raids as one man's ambition spinning rapidly out of control, with nothing limiting the actions that were being taken. When Post found out about the men being held at Hartford Prison in April of that year, he had them all transferred immediately to the immigration station at Deer Island, Boston, where their conditions were better and their cases could be evaluated and properly documented.

• 19:33Holly Frey?

  Post went on to cancel more than 1,500 deportations, which was a slap in the face to Palmer and an act that some people that were really behind Palmer's moves thought was treasonous. There was actually an attempt to impeach Louis Post, but the Assistant Secretary gave extremely persuasive and powerful testimony during his appearance before Congress, which caused the various politicians that had been calling for his impeachment to back off. And some of them actually started to see that civil liberties had been outright abused during these raids.

• 20:06Speaker 00

  One of the truly heartbreaking effects of the Palmer raids were the very real, immediate, and long-lasting effects that they had on the lives of innocent people who were taken into custody. Often, they struggled to find work after their confinement because even if they were released without charges, there was still a shadow of Bolshevism on them, and employers were unwilling to hire them.

• 20:29Holly Frey?

  And Palmer continued to warn the public that terrorist attacks were coming. He was making predictions about, like, "On this day, this will happen. It's my intelligence tells me this." But none of those predictions were materializing, and his credibility really suffered for it.

• 20:44Speaker 00

  On May 28, 1920, 12 lawyers issued a report on the Palmer raids. They were R.G. Brown of Memphis, Tennessee, Zecharia Chaffee Jr. of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Felix Frankfurter of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Ernst Freud of Chicago, Illinois, Swinburne Hale of New York City, Francis Fisher Kane of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Alfred S. Niles of Baltimore, Maryland, Roscoe Pound of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Jackson H. Ralston of Washington, D.C., David Wallerstein of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Frank P. Walsh of New York City, and Terrell Williams of St. Louis, Missouri.

• 21:25Holly Frey?

  And this report detailed all of these instances of the Palmer raids, how literally thousands of alleged radicals had been arrested with no warrants, held in substandard conditions, and had been denied contact with family members and legal counsel. And this document was jointly published by the ACLU and the National Popular Government League.

• 21:47Speaker 00

  This report was, I mean, perhaps surprisingly, based on the political climate that we've been talking about in these two episodes, well-received. It appeared that in the face of the brutal and illegal behavior of the Department of Justice under the guidance of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, public attitudes were shifting away from this fervent, blinding fear of the other.

• 22:09Holly Frey?

  And we're going to go into details about the contents of that report. But before we do, this is probably a good place to pause and have a word from one of our sponsors.

• 22:21Speaker 01

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• 22:45Holly 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, not to cancel them, not to hype them more,

• 23:29Holly Frey?

  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.

• 23:48Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 24:32Tracy V. Wilson?

  find people who can help drive results. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. Get your $75 sponsored job credit today at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now, then this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. 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.

• 25:14Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 26:02Holly Frey?

  So this opening of the report that we talked about before we went to break is a letter to the people of the United States, and it is lengthy, but I want to read a significant portion of this introductory letter here. It reads, "To the American people, for more than six months, we, the undersigned lawyers, whose sworn duty it is to uphold the Constitution and laws of the United States, have seen with growing apprehension the continued violation of that Constitution and breaking of those laws by the Department of Justice of the United States government. Under the guise of a campaign for the suppression of radical activities, the Office of the Attorney General, acting by its local agents throughout the country and giving express instructions

• 26:46Holly Frey?

  from Washington, has committed continued illegal acts. Quote, "Wholesale arrests of both aliens and citizens have been made without warrant or any process of law. Men and women have been jailed and held incommunicado without access of friends or counsel. Homes have been entered without search warrant and property seized and removed. Other property has been wantonly destroyed. Working men and working women suspected of radical views have been shamefully abused and maltreated. Agents of the Department of Justice have been introduced into radical organizations for the purpose of informing upon their members or inciting them to activities. These agents have even been instructed from Washington to arrange meetings upon certain

• 27:31Holly Frey?

  dates for the express object of facilitating wholesale raids and arrests. In support of these illegal acts and to create sentiment in its favor, the Department of Justice has also constituted itself a propaganda bureau and has sent to newspapers and magazines of this country quantities of material designed to excite public opinion against radicals, all at the expense of the government and outside the scope of the Attorney General's duties." We make no argument in favor of any radical doctrine as such, whether socialist, communist, or anarchist. No one of us belongs to any of those schools of thought, nor do we now raise any question as to the constitutional protection of free speech and a free press.

• 28:15Holly Frey?

  We are concerned solely with bringing to the attention of the American people the utterly illegal acts which have been committed by those charged with the highest duty of enforcing the laws. Acts which have caused widespread suffering and unrest have struck at the foundation of American free institutions and have brought the name of our country into disrepute.

• 28:36Speaker 00

  The report grouped the various acts of Palmer's efforts into six categories: cruel and unusual punishments, arrests without warrant, unreasonable searches and seizures, provocative agents, basically entrapment operatives, compelling persons to witness against themselves, and propaganda by the Department of Justice.

• 28:59Holly Frey?

  And by the numbers, the report offers a pretty damning assessment of the effectiveness of Palmer's methods. As of November 14, 1919, the Attorney General had assembled a list of 60,000 people by name that were suspected of radicalism of one kind or another.

• 29:17Speaker 00

  As of January 1, 1920, 263 of these 60,000 people had been deported. From January 1 to the report's release in late May, there had been 18 more people deported, with another 529 ordered to deport by Palmer. Another 1,547 warrants for deportation were canceled during that time by post. Of those 60,000 suspects, the Attorney General had only deported 810. And as the report points out, that left more than 51,000 people to be dealt with by Palmer's own records. So in inflating the numbers of potential dangers, he basically stacked the deck against his own forces.

• 30:02Speaker 00

  Because they wound up looking pretty ineffective.

• 30:05Holly Frey?

  And in concluding that introduction to the report, the lawyers who worked on it wrote, quote, "It is a fallacy to suppose that any more than in the past, any servant of the people can safely arrogate to himself unlimited authority. To proceed upon such a supposition is to deny the fundamental American theory of the consent of the governed. Here is no question of a vague threatened menace, but a present assault upon the most sacred principles of our constitutional liberty."

• 30:33Speaker 00

  One of the testimonies included in this report is from an immigrant named Alexander Bukowetsky, who had come to the United States from Russia and had been captured in the November raids. One section of his statement reads, quote, "When I came to America, I came with the thought that I was coming to a free country, a place of freedom and happiness. And I was anxious to come, to get away from the czaristic form of government. As much as I was anxious to come here to America, I am 100 times more anxious to run away from Americanism and return to Soviet Russia, where I will at least be able to live."

• 31:06Holly Frey?

  Bukowetsky's testimony also mentions the fact that while he and men like him were confined for months on end, their families really suffered. Their wives and children often went hungry. They had to depend on the kindness of other people in their communities just to survive.

• 31:24Speaker 00

  Another statement included in the report is from Bukowetsky's 12-year-old daughter Violet, who witnessed her mother being beaten by prison officials when the family attempted to visit her father.

• 31:36Speaker 00

  Her father jumped in front of his wife to shield her and was also beaten badly for doing so. Shots were fired by one of the guards, hitting another imprisoned man in the knee. Mrs. Bukowetsky was deeply shaken by this incident and confined to her bed for an extended period of time, diagnosed by her doctor as having a nervous breakdown.

• 31:56Holly Frey?

  In August of 1920, the ACLU published an informational pamphlet about the Red Scare titled "Seeing Red: Civil Liberty and the Law in the Period Following the War." And it really outlined for people the conditions of fear and governmental overstepping that led to the climax of the Red Scare, the Palmer Raids. And in the pamphlet's conclusion, it reads, "Civil liberty is more important today than it was in the stagnant period when we had it because no one troubled to abridge it. The world is rising upon one of the periodic waves which carry it onward towards civilized adjustment for human welfare."

• 32:32Speaker 00

  Despite all of the bad press around the raids, Palmer still ran for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination of 1920, as he had planned, and he lost. In March 1921, he returned once again to private practice as a lawyer.

• 32:47Holly Frey?

  Palmer, for his part, was never remorseful about what had taken place in any public statement, at least, that he made. In 1921, he testified to the investigative Senate Committee on the Raids, and he defended the entire enterprise, saying, quote, "I apologize for nothing the Department of Justice has done. I glory in it. I point with pride and enthusiasm to the results of that work. And if agents of the Department of Labor were a little rough and unkind with these alien agitators, I think it might well be overlooked in the general good to the country."

• 33:21Speaker 00

  In September 1921, FBI Director William J. Flynn abruptly resigned, claiming a need to attend to a private business matter.

• 33:30Holly Frey?

  It's a very troubling time in America's history that we don't talk about very much.

• 33:35Speaker 00

  Mm-mm. I had not heard much about it at all before you brought up wanting to do it as an episode.

• 33:41Holly Frey?

  Yeah. I mean, you see how fear can really, like, embolden situations like that, and that it is troubling.

• 33:52Holly Frey?

  I want to say a lot more, but it will not be cool, so.

• 34:02Holly 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.

• 34:25Speaker 01

  In military families, service is more than a job. It's a legacy. At American Military University, that legacy can help open new doors through education. If someone in your family served in the military, you could be eligible for reduced tuition. Take the next step with flexible online programs built for real life. Learn more at amu.apus.edu/military.

• 34:47Tracy V. Wilson?

  Whether you're calling the wise women in your life, video calling your girlfriends across the country, or checking out on someone who always knows how to make you smile, staying connected matters. Those small conversations, shared laughs, and quick hellos are what keep relationships strong even when life gets busy. Some of the most life-giving conversations start with just a phone call. That's why AT&T guarantees the network you can rely on, so you can focus on the moments and people that matter most. That's the AT&T Guarantee. AT&T: Connecting changes everything. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.com/guarantee for details.

• 35:23Holly 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 iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 35:54Speaker 07

  Livrite, 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.

• 36:24Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.