The bombing took place in June 1919, just a month after the mail bomb plot described earlier. Palmer was home at the time*, and it was obvious that the attack was an attempted personal reprisal for the Attorney General's war on radicals. Palmer had just left his library on the first floor and was getting ready to retire in his upstairs bedroom when he felt the house shake as if it had been hit by a truckload of bricks. He rushed downstairs, to find the front of the house blown in. Had he lingered in the library a few moments longer, he would have been killed or seriously injured. Windows were shattered for blocks around by the force of the blast.
In the street, the police found the blown-to-bits remains of the would-be assassin. Evidentally, the bomb went off prematurely, killing the anarchist before he could leave the danger area. In the dead man's clothing was a copy of Plain Words, a radical publication, hence there was no doubt the deed had been perpetrated by Bolsheviks. Palmer vowed that it would a war to the death from that time forward until they were all eradicated.
He began by terrifying Americans with threats and sinister innuendos. He saw Bolsheviks lurking everywhere ready to steal Liberty Bonds from private homes, blow up capitalist factories and foment strikes. The very government of the United States was in grave danger from all quarters--even from within. The National Security League issued a chart in which three hundred members of Congress were charged with disloyalty. The lawmakers were greatly incensed at this sweeping allegation, and an investigation followed forthwith which, of course, exonerated the legislators.
On the educational front, teachers were required to sign loyalty oaths, and college professors were denounced by their students if they appeared to be anywhere left of center in their pedagogy. Radcliffe, the female version of Harvard College, was subjected to heavy censure for allowing the girls to debate the affirmative of such an obviously un-American question as the right of labor unions to organize. In New York, the Board of Education drew up a creed for school children the essence of which was to make a terrible oath to defend the flag, respect the President, put patriotism over all other loyalties, and to oppose Bolshevism, anarchism and the I.W.W. One New York paper suggested that if such a manifesto were adopted, graduation from New York educational institutions might come to depend more on patriotism than scholastic ability, and at the same time, relatively harmless potential radicals would become confirmed Bolsheviks, since they were left with no other alternative. But the real hotbed of radicalism was Yale. It came under fire for harboring liberal professors who openly spoke out against Palmerism; and, as a consequence, Yale enjoyed the same position in the Twenties as Harvard was to find itself in the during the 1950's when the late Senator McCarthy charged that the institution was a sanctuary for Fifth Amendment Communists.
One the labor front, one hundred and fifty alleged members of the I.W.W. in West Virginia were forced to kiss the flag and were then deported. The laboring class, in fact, was the sorest spot in the country from Palmer's point of view. Prices were high, hours of work unreasonably long--in some cases twelve hours a day for seven days a week--and working conditions left much to be desired. As a result of such conditions strikes were frequent, and every labor dispute was seen by Palmer (and many employers) as a potential revolutionary uprising fomented by Bolsheviks. For much the same reason, every time organized labor unions or socialistic organizations were allowed to march in a parade in a major city there was sure to be trouble. Serious disorders broke out in Cleveland when a May Day parade precipitated a riot which spread through the entire city resulting in one death and scores of injuries. In Centralia, Washington, four were killed outright in an Armistice Day parade in November, and one man was lynched in disorders that followed the riot. As a consequence of these developments every workingman everywhere was suspect. The war cry of the times was S.O.S--"Ship or Shoot."
If the Attorney General's calculations had been correct, one out of every four adult Americans would have been an avowed Bolshevik--a member of a hidden army ready to revolt and overthrow the government at the first opportune moment. More reasonable estimates put the figure at one-tenth of one percent of the total population--this was the "Bolshevik Army" which had the entire nation knocking its knees in terror.
While the laboring man was considered the prime tool of the Bolsheviks, other social groups came in for their share of attention. Anti-Negro and anti-Jewish prejudice, anti-intellectualism and anti-Catholicism ran rampant through the United States and led to a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan of the Reconstruction period following the Civil War. During the next few years, the knights of the white sheet enjoyed a tremendous success terrifying Negroes, down-and-out aliens, hobos and others who were unable or unwilling to fight back. Intellectuals came under heavy fire for discussing the merits of the Bolshevik plan of free love, for reading the Nation and the New Republic, and, in general, for refusing to take Palmer and his Gestapo seriously.
As summer moved into fall and winter, the wave of fear and intolerance reached the proportions of an abject panic which, according to Zechariah Chaffee in his Free Speech in the Untied States, brought about the following state of affairs:
Frederick M.Davenport, in the Outlook for August 1920, gave the following picture of the raids in Utica, New York. Eleven "anarchists" were arrested on the charge that they were guilty of inciting "to riot, disorder, breach of the peace, destruction of property, and general revolutionary activities among the people of the state; and that it is their intention by such means to offend the public decency and to annoy and endanger the life, repose, health, and safety of a considerable number of persons insecure in their life and their property--that it was their intention to incite the breaking of contracts of service or hire, with the intention of endangering human life, causing grievous bodily injury, exposing valuable property to destruction."
The net result of the raid initiated on these formidable charges was exactly nothing. The eleven "anarchists" were hustled out of their beds at midnight, and the total haul from their rooms turned out to be some Red literature and a sinister-looking "ripper" knife. The eleven were mostly young Polish immigrants who were eventually released and subsequently became good citizens.
In Boston, six hundred persons were arrested. The raids consisted of Palmer's storm troopers bursting into meeting halls, ordering everyone present to line up against the wall, and then searching and questioning the victims without the benefits of warrants or provision for defense counsel.
In Lynn, Massachusetts, thirty-nine people holding an innocent meeting for the purpose of discussing the formation of a co-op were jailed. All but nine had to be released the following day for lack of any evidence of wrongdoing.
In Chelsea, Massachusetts, the mother of three children was arrested during the night and taken with her thirteen-year-old daughter to the police station. A short time later the child was sent home alone to a remote part of the city. The mother was lodged in jail overnight and taken the next morning to a wharf were she and another "Bolshevik" were held in a dirty toilet for six hours. They were finally conveyed to Deer Island and imprisoned for an additional thirty-three days.
In Nashua, New Hampshire, a raid brought in thirteen women, five of whom were held incommunicado for over twenty-four hours in a cell without so much as a mattress to sleep on.
In Washington, Edward J. Irvine, a member of the Workers' Party of America, was arrested at a meeting. Detectives rushed to his home looking for radical literature. They informed his mother that he was making a speech in which he expressed the desire to see the streets running with blood. When he was subsequently brought to trial and asked how he had become a radical, he replied through reading the Harvard Classics, the life of Jesus, and the writings of Thomas Jefferson.
In Detroit, one hundred men were imprisoned for a week in a bull pen whose dimensions were twenty-four by thirty feet and which was maintained under such filthy conditions that even the mayor of the city was moved to protest.
Nor were those suspected of Bolshevism the only victims of Palmer's ferocity. In Boston, Minnie Federman, a witness, was asleep in her bedroom at 6:00 a.m. when several of Palmer's minions entered her chambers. They showed no warrant or subpoena, but peremptorily commanded her to dress and accompany them to the station. When the men refused to leave the bedroom, she had to dress in a closet. While she was getting ready her room was searched for "literature."
The persons arrested in these raids were, in most cases, harmless working people. They were ignorant aliens recently of the European peasant class who had no idea of their rights and were therefore afraid to protest at being handcuffed, chained and then thrown into dirty jails, there to be held incommunicado with no charges leveled against them. All together this "Army of Bolsheviks," presumably armed to the teeth with bombs, daggers and other such un-American weapons, were found to have a total of three pistols in their possession. Some were jailed, some deported--including a few American citizens who eventually got reinstated when they proved their citizenship--but most were eventually released for lack of evidence of criminal activity or intent.
During the new year, the hysteria went on apace. The "Fighting Quaker" promised to keep up an "unflinching war" against Bolshevism no matter how it was "disguised or dissembled." In January, he got out a long letter to mass-circulation magazines warning editors of the dangers of radicalism and, in effect, urging them to propagandize their readers against every shade of Red. It seemed Palmer was trying to edit the nation's magazines from Washington. With this form of suppression the Attorney General had come full circle, since he was now subscribing to every method employed by the very Russians he anathemized: censorship, raids and seizures without warrants, persecution of opinions, and deportation. Some of the temper of the nation in the first month of 1920 can be judged by a quotation delivered in a church by Secretary of State Langtry of Massachusetts. He said: "If I had my way I would take them [radicals] out in the yard every morning and shoot them, and the next day would have a trial to see whether they were guilty."
In addition to Palmer's fulminations and pogroms, two events which turned out to be highly significant had their origin that year. One of these occured on the educational front; the other was largely political in nature. By an ironic twist of fate it was the political development which spelled the doom of the Red hysteria.
The first case involved a New York educational institution known as the Rand School. The latter was a college established in 1906 by the American Socialist Society. By 1920, it boasted approximately 5,000 students. None of its activities had ever been held to be illegal; however, a state legislative committee, known as the Lusk Committee, set up a fearful agitation in 1920-1921 charging that the institution had too many radicals on its staff. The committee's agents seized letters from the institution's administrative files and offered in evidence incendiary passages from these communications to prove that the school was a veritable breeding ground for Bolsheviks. Some of the letters, incidentally, had been written to the school by extremists and in no sense reflected the institution's purposes or teachings. The investigation almost resulted in legislation which would have put all New York educational institutions at the mercy of licensing boards such as those certifying plumbers, barbers, beer wholesalers and gas-fitters. Fortunately, when Al Smith became governor he vetoed the bill, and the whole thing collapsed. In the Thirties, when the school was about to close for lack of funds, such outstanding Americans as Helen Keller, Elmer Davis, Charles Beard, Stuart Chase, and John Dewey supported a drive for donations to keep it in operation.
The political incident involved five duly elected members of the New York State Legislature who were denied their seats by more or less Star Chamber proceedings. They were members of the Socialist Party, which was neither an illegal nor subversive group. Nevertheless, it was asserted that the elected representatives could not be Socialists and still remain loyal to the Constitution. While the Socialists remained unseated, the unprecedented result was that a segment of the American people was being deprived of its legal representation in the state legislature. They were, in effect, disenfranchised. During the battle that followed, it became apparent that the witch hunt had gone too far. Even conservative elements began to decry the excesses to which postwar hysteria had carried the Republic. The distinguished Charles Evans Hughes, among others, took up the cudgels for the New York Socialists. Public opinion began to move slowly at first, then in an avalanche against Palmerism. The wholesale cancellation of deportation warrants followed, and once more the voice of the liberal could be heard throughout the land.
**Since the raids were on aliens who were under the jurisdiction of the Department of Labor, Palmer's warrants were illegal.