Books: The Reds Who Were Not There

A. MITCHELL PALMER: POLITICIAN by Stanley Cohen. 351 pages. Columbia. $7.50.

At a pageant in Washington, D.C., a sailor emptied a pistol at a spectator who refused to rise for The Star-Spangled Banner, and the crowd cheered. In Hammond, Ind., a jury took only two minutes to acquit the assassin of an alien who yelled: “To hell with the U.S.” In Waterbury, Conn., a salesman was sentenced to six months in jail for remarking that Lenin was “one of the brainiest” of the world’s leaders.

Such was the atmosphere of the U.S. during the great Red Scare of 1919-20 when Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer rounded up 4,000 aliens and deported almost 600. Palmer was long held to be the worst Red-baiter of them all until Joe McCarthy came along, but Palmer’s first biographer contends that he did not lead the witch hunt; he merely rode with it.

Hounded by Hysteria. Palmer rose in politics as a progressive Democrat from Pennsylvania. Elected to Congress in 1908, he bravely bucked his state’s powerful industrialists to join the fight for lower tariffs. He was friendly to labor and welfare legislation; his bill to abolish child labor was hailed as the “most momentous measure of the Progressive Era.” When he was beaten in a try for the Senate, President Wilson consoled him with the wartime post of alien property custodian and in 1919 named him Attorney General.

Prices were soaring in the wake of the war, strikes were frequent, and postwar revolutions in Europe were making everybody jittery. Many people were sure the Reds were planning a revolution in the U.S. any day. There was a spate of ugly bombings; a clumsy plot to assassinate many top American officials was uncovered; and one Senator’s maid had her hands blown off when she opened a package containing a bomb.

Since Wilson was ill and inactive, Palmer was forced to deal with the rising hysteria. But even when his own home was bombed, Palmer hesitated to act against the radicals. He stopped prosecutions under the wartime Espionage Act. He urged Wilson to release Socialist Party, Leader Eugene V. Debs, who had been sentenced to ten years in prison for opposing the war. The popular villains were aliens, and there was a widespread demand for their deportation. But as late as October 1919, Palmer said: “We cannot be less willing now than we have always been that the oppressed of every clime shall find here a refuge from disorder and distress.”

Palmer was much too lax for most of the populace. Letters denouncing him poured into the Justice Department. The New York Times sharply rapped him for his “ancient and outworn views” and his softness toward anarchists. Said Palmer later: “I was shouted at from every editorial sanctum in America from sea to sea; I was preached upon from every pulpit; I was urged—I could feel it dinned into my ears—to do something and do it now.”

Unleashing the Sleuths. Palmer, who had ambitions to succeed Wilson as President, finally did something. He ordered a roundup of suspicious aliens, a project partly supervised by the young J. Edgar Hoover. Justice Department agents zealously invaded homes and made many arrests without warrants. They pulled people out of pool halls and other public places and jammed them into overcrowded detention centers. When they raided meeting halls, they sometimes did not bother to find out who was meeting; in one instance, they jailed 39 people who were meeting to form a bakery cooperative. Since the Sedition Act of 1918 allowed alien “anarchists” to be deported, a “Soviet Ark” sailed for Russia in December 1919 with 249 Russian aliens aboard, only a handful of them dangerous criminals. Most of the nation’s press ecstatically hailed its departure and called for many more deportations by Palmer.

By this time, no one was more enthusiastic about deporting people than Palmer, who was at last enjoying favorable publicity. But as quickly as it flared, the Red Scare subsided. Though Palmer’s sleuths kept predicting more terrorism, it never came. When the Justice Department issued somber warnings that May Day 1920 would be marked by unprecedented violence and not a firecracker went off, Palmer was ridiculed in the press. Businessmen began to worry that immigrant labor might dry up, and the press, which only a few months before had been fanning the hysteria, ran sober stories about the importance of immigrants to the nation.

A bit ashamed of themselves, the U.S. people looked for a scapegoat, and Palmer was it.