the palmer raid (11. 980)

Occurring in the background of the First Red Scare in America, a nationwide campaign against the real and perceived divided loyalties of immigrants and ethnic groups settling in the US after World War I and the Bolshevik revolution—President Woodrow Wilson rallying against “hyphenated Americans” pouring “the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our nation life” who must be crushed as agitators and anarchists, the first of the surprise onslaughts organised by Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer took place on this day in 1919 (the date picked as it coincided with the second anniversary of the storming of the Winter Palace). After a failed attempt to suppress a labour revolt in Buffalo, the Attorney General, who named one young J Edgar Hoover to head the Justice Department’s investigation bureau, convinced the Congressional Appropriations Committee to give him a budget of one and half million dollars to undertake his plan, saying there was a coordinated effort by radicals to rise up and “destroy the government in one fell swoop. The bureau worked with local authorities to conduct violent raids on the Union Russian Workers with several by-standers also injured and apprehended. While only a few hundred individuals were eventually deported of the ten-thousand arrested, the measure was nonetheless terrorising and many with no affiliation to these groups had their lives ruined. The following year, with the police actions happening at a regular pace, the American Civil Liberties Union (ALCU) was established to combat entrapment, warrantless searches and seizures and unlawful detention.