by Tim Weiner
Hoover, as the new chief of the Radical Division, had sixty-one Bureau of Investigation agents and thirty-five undercover informers at his command. He began to fill the Bureau’s files with information from military intelligence, the State Department, and the Secret Service. He enlisted the aid of the immigration and passport services, postmasters, police commissioners, private detectives, and political vigilantes. Teams of lock pickers and safecrackers from the Bureau and the Office of Naval Intelligence broke into foreign embassies and consulates to steal codes and ciphers.
He used the authority granted him as a magnetic force, pulling together fragments of secret information scattered throughout the government, creating classified cases against tens of thousands of political suspects. Americans and aliens alike could land on Hoover’s enemies list by attending a political rally alongside an informant or by subscribing to any of the 222 radical foreign-language newspapers published in the United States.
Hoover’s cache of secrets formed the foundation of a primitive system of central intelligence. Within three months after taking office, he controlled files on more than sixty thousand people; the Bureau compiled at least as many dossiers on the places where these people gathered, the publications they read, and the political groups they joined. Every one of these people had to be weighed as a potential threat to national security. Each might have a role in a secret underground, each might be a camouflaged soldier in what Hoover came to call “the mad march of Red fascism,” dedicated to creating a Soviet America.
Lenin and Stalin were rising to power out of the political chaos in Russia. The fear that their revolution would spread was immense.
On August 12, his second week on the job, Hoover began “a vigorous and comprehensive investigation” of American citizens and aliens “advocating change in the present form of government by force or violence.” The Justice Department wanted evidence “of every nature, whether hearsay or otherwise,” against American Communists. The hearsay evidence could be used in prosecutions under new laws that Palmer was urging upon Congress. Palmer had scoured the statutes searching for new ways to arrest and jail outspoken Americans for sedition in peacetime. In 1919, seventy such bills were introduced in Congress. None passed.
On August 23, Hoover began a series of meetings with the immigration commissioner, Anthony Caminetti, a sixty-five-year-old California politician with a big white handlebar mustache. Hoover had worked closely with Caminetti’s enforcers during the war. Caminetti controlled records on roughly 13 million immigrants—one of every eight people in America, including 1.7 million born in Germany, 1.6 million in Italy, and 1.4 million in Russia. Hoover suspected that the shock troops of Red fascism were among them. Together they began to work out a plan to rid the nation of its enemies. The Anarchist Exclusion Act gave them the power to exile foreigners advocating revolution with only a summary hearing, without indictments or convictions. Hoover proposed winning public acclaim by making two of the most famous rabble-rousers in America their first deportees: Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. Happily for Hoover, both of them were already in jail for agitating against the war, both were due to be released within the month, and both could be charged swiftly and shipped back to their native Russia.
Goldman preached atheism, free love, birth control, and other outlaw doctrines. Hoover called her “the Red Queen of Anarchy.” Berkman, her former lover, had spent half his life in prison for trying to murder the steel magnate Henry Frick. He never claimed to be an American citizen; the case against him was open-and-shut. But Goldman asserted she was an American by marriage, a bar to her deportation. Hoover personally took charge of the challenge.
That same week, late in August 1919, Hoover sent his agents to infiltrate two of America’s leading left-wing organizations. Both were convening in Chicago over the Labor Day weekend.
One was the Socialist Party. The Socialists had tried to work openly within the American political system for years; their candidates had run in state and local elections across the country, sometimes winning. But with their leader, Eugene Debs, in prison, their hierarchy was fractured. Their most radical members revolted, led by the flamboyant John Reed, a secret Soviet agent and the author of a romantic account of the Bolshevik uprising, Ten Days That Shook the World. Reed was joined by his friend Benjamin Gitlow, a radical New York state assemblyman, in a raucous faction calling itself the Communist Labor Party.
The second group under surveillance was the little-known Union of Russian Workers. Hoover’s eye had fallen on a report about the union filed by an enterprising Bureau of Investigation agent named Edgar B. Speer. Once a newspaper reporter in and around Pittsburgh, Speer had good sources among the coal and steel bosses of the Midwest; his son grew up to be the chairman of the U.S. Steel Corporation. The bosses had alerted Speer to the presence of the Union of Russian Workers among the miners of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia. He had studied a cache of documents seized from the union’s headquarters in Manhattan. He concluded that the Russian Workers constituted a conspiracy of thousands of immigrants—atheists, Communists, anarchists—preparing to rise up against America. They were “terrorists,” he reported, “ready for any sort of work when the time came for a Revolution.”
Hoover began to prepare for an American counterrevolution.
4
COMMUNISTS
THE COMMUNIST PARTY of the United States of America was born at the Russian Federation hall in Chicago on September 7, 1919. At least five government agents attended its birth. Their reports went directly to J. Edgar Hoover. They are among the first dispatches of the Cold War in America.
The hall was festooned with red ribbons, red streamers, and red flags, reported Bureau special agent August H. Loula. The Chicago police tore the decorations down before the delegates were called to order, though they left hanging a seventy-five-foot red muslin banner that read, LONG LIVE THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT.
The 137 official delegates at the convention were zealots with a talent for machine politics. Over the summer, they had siphoned off thousands of card-carrying, dues-paying Socialists, many of them members of the Union of Russian Workers.
The delegates included the Bureau of Investigation’s Confidential Informant No. 121, a Russian native from the steel town of Gary, Indiana, listed on the roster as N. Nagorowe. He was assigned to spy on “secret sessions of the heads of the Communist movement or any other secret procedure that may be contemplated by the radicals” outside of the convention hall, as Agent Loula reported.
The meeting was open to the public; mimeographed minutes were distributed in the hall. But Confidential Informant No. 121 reported that “the whole game has been played behind closed doors,” run by “the Russian Steam Roller, as the American delegates later referred to it.”
While the police were tearing down the red ribbons on the first floor, the Russians and their Slavic allies were meeting secretly on the second floor. They vowed that “this party must be made an exact copy of the Russian original.” They would incite rebellion among American workers and “train them in the tactics of the Bolsheviks for the overthrow of the government and the seizure of the state by the Communist Party.”
On September 7, Confidential Informant No. 121 sent the Bureau’s Russian-speaking special agent Jacob Spolansky a draft version of the new group’s constitution.
“The name of this organization shall be THE COMMUNIST PARTY of America,” it read. “Its purpose shall be the education and organization of the working class for the establishment of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, the abolition of the capitalist system, and the establishment of the Communist Society.”
“TO OVERTHROW THE GOVERNMENT”
By September 8, 1919, Hoover had studied dozens of reports from Chicago—the speeches and tracts denouncing lawmen as “cutthroats and pimps,” calling for nationwide strikes, a workers’ revolution, and the creation of a Soviet America.
Hoover thought the nation faced an insurrection unlike any since the
Civil War. He concluded that the Reds in Chicago were controlled by the Communist International in Moscow. He wrote in a report to Congress that their aims were one: “to overthrow the Government of the United States by force and violence.”
Hoover correctly intuited a Moscow connection. Soviet archives exhumed after the Cold War ended show that the Comintern was trying to underwrite its American allies with smuggled gold and diamonds—and that John Reed was one of the smugglers. How much money actually arrived in the coffers of the American Communists from revolutionary Russia is another question. It could have been tens of thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousands, or more; many middlemen were involved, not all of them honest brokers. The Comintern also sent a secret communiqué to its American allies that summer, calling on them to incite strikes and strife across the country. Though its effect cannot be measured, the facts were clear. American workers rose up against their bosses in a new wave of protest after Labor Day 1919.
On September 9, three-quarters of the Boston police department walked out when their commissioner rejected their call for a union. The cops were no more Communist than Woodrow Wilson, but the president called them criminals, and Massachusetts governor Calvin Coolidge called out the National Guard and fired every one of the 1,117 protesting policemen.
September 10 brought a call for a national strike by iron and steel workers. Immigrant Russians and Slavs worked many of the hardest steel mill shifts, laboring seventy hours a week under killing conditions for less than a living wage. At least 275,000 steelworkers walked out, seeking an eight-hour day, a six-day week, and the right to bargain collectively. Attorney General Palmer and the Justice Department worked to blame the steelworkers’ strike on Communists, in particular a labor organizer named William Z. Foster, later a secret leader of the American Communist movement. Hoover would be hunting Foster for the next forty years. The nation’s steel executives called on soldiers, police, private detectives, and local militias to crush the workers. The War Department granted requests from states and cities to put down the steel strikes; the army imposed martial law where it was warranted.
No one sought President Wilson’s approval. The president had fallen silent.
On September 25, while campaigning for his League of Nations, on a train outside Pueblo, Colorado, the president had turned to his doctor and said he could not breathe. He took to his berth, but he could not rise at the next stop, in Wichita, Kansas. “I seem to have gone to pieces,” he muttered. The train sped back to Washington. Wilson collapsed at the White House a week later. On October 2, a catastrophic stroke took him to the edge of death.
The president lay on the Lincoln bed, his left side paralyzed, his speech gone. The press and the public were told he was exhausted, nothing more. His stroke was kept a secret from all but his inner circle. In this hour of crisis, the country had no leader. The president remained invisible, locked away in the White House, as his power slipped away.
“DOOMED TO SIBERIA”
Attorney General Palmer saw himself as the president-in-waiting. He needed a swift political success to seize national attention.
The pressure on Palmer was growing. Congress was demanding action. On October 17, the Senate passed a resolution pointedly asking Palmer if he had done anything to fight the forces trying to overthrow the government—“and if not, why not.” His Justice Department had convicted no revolutionaries, the nationwide bomb plots remained unsolved, and the Communist Party chiefs in Chicago openly taunted Bureau agents who confronted them, saying they could say and write what they pleased under the Constitution.
Palmer turned to J. Edgar Hoover for results.
On October 27, Hoover was in New York, eyeball to eyeball with Emma Goldman in a small room off the great main hall of the immigrant center on Ellis Island; the Statue of Liberty stood a half mile away in the harbor, lifting her lamp. Hoover had spent days in the city preparing the deportation case; in a spare moment, he had watched mounted police clubbing Russian demonstrators during a pro-Soviet march on Fifth Avenue.
Hoover, at the government’s table, sat before stacks of Goldman’s speeches and writings, anarchist diatribes dating back a decade. He used her own words against her. The ruling by the immigration inspector was never in doubt: he asked Goldman if she was an anarchist; she declined to answer. The inspector determined that she was; she thus could be deported to Russia. The only remaining question was how. Hoover solved that problem. Working with the War Department and the State Department, he requisitioned an army troop transport ship, the Buford, decommissioned only days before. The ship was just shy of thirty years old, she leaked and rolled, but she was still seaworthy enough to have brought 4,700 American soldiers home from France that year.
The Buford would carry hundreds of America’s most despised radicals back where they came from.
On October 30, Hoover ordered his agents to prepare for their first pitched battle: a mass arrest of members of the Union of Russian Workers. “It is the desire of the Bureau of Investigation to shortly have taken into custody the leaders of each of the locals of the Union of Russian Workers,” Hoover wrote to the immigration chief Caminetti on November 3. He requested “the cooperation of the immigration inspectors at the time when the round-up of these persons will be made.” Caminetti gave the go-ahead. The raids were set for Friday evening, November 7, 1919—the second anniversary of the Russian Revolution. It was no secret that supporters of the Soviets were planning to mark the day with speeches and rallies in cities across America.
Hoover’s men struck the first blow around eight o’clock that night. The Bureau’s agents, accompanied by the New York police, surrounded the Union of Russian Workers’ national headquarters on East 15th Street. They took everyone out of the building, more than two hundred people in all, beating some of them with blackjacks and broken banisters and a steel crowbar, cracking skulls and bones, sacking the building so thoroughly that the rooms looked like they had been dynamited. The New York police executed seventy-one search warrants across the city and arrested every card-carrying Communist they could find. The Bureau’s men worked long and hard all across the country. They meted out rough justice in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and a dozen more cities and towns. Hoover worked furiously to pump the newspapers full of the incendiary Communist propaganda his agents seized that night.
The publicity was tremendous. Palmer was hailed as a conquering hero. The acclaim from politicians and the press grew. The Palmer for President bandwagon began rolling. Filled with pride and the intoxicating spirit of self-promotion, Palmer proclaimed that the arrests had destroyed a Communist plot against America.
But the aftermath was hidden from public view. The Bureau’s men had seized many more people than they had planned to arrest; Hoover had obtained far fewer warrants than were needed. The Bureau’s files would show that 1,182 suspects had been arrested in eighteen cities and towns across eight states—nearly one thousand more people than Palmer publicly acknowledged. In the days to come, 199 among them were found worthy of deportation under the law. That left nearly one thousand detainees in limbo. Some disappeared into city and county jails for months; the unluckiest suffered beatings and torture by Bureau agents and local police.
The raids on the Union of Russian Workers were only the beginning. Hoover planned a far bigger crackdown in a few weeks.
He was preparing legal briefs holding that every member of a Communist group was a criminal engaged in a conspiracy against the United States. “They would destroy the peace of the country and thrust it into a condition of anarchy and lawlessness and immorality that passes imagination,” he wrote. He held this belief all his life.
On November 18, Hoover sent fresh orders to all the Bureau’s field agents, marked “personal and confidential” and bearing his initials, JEH. He wanted legal affidavits naming anyone and everyone in America who was “prominent in Communist activities.” The affidavit would serve as proof that a person was a card-carrying Communist; party membersh
ip alone justified deportation under the Anarchist Exclusion Act. The scope of the assignment was breathtaking: New York City alone had seventy-nine local branches of the Communist Party and the Communist Labor Party, each with its own set of leaders. “To gather a correct, up-to-date list of these would entail quite some investigation by both undercover and open investigators,” a daunted Bureau special agent, M. J. Davis, warned headquarters on December 4. But Hoover wanted immediate results. He alerted Caminetti on December 16 that he was ready to send over “a considerable number of affidavits.” He did not say how many.
On the night of December 20, Hoover took a cutter across New York Harbor, accompanied by five congressmen and a contingent of reporters. Ice drifted down the Hudson and a cold wind swept snowdrifts against the barracks at Ellis Island. Inside the walls, 249 alien anarchists awaited—the rabble of the Russian Workers and the renowned rebels Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman among them. Midnight passed. The deportees filed out toward a docked barge.
“The crowd was very cocky,” Hoover recounted, “full of sarcasm.” Hoover sparred with them. He came face-to-face again with Emma Goldman, the emblem of radical America. “Haven’t I given you a square deal, Miss Goldman?” Hoover asked. “Oh,” she replied, “I suppose you’ve given me as square a deal as you could. We shouldn’t expect from any person something beyond his capacity.”
The barge took the Reds to the edge of the harbor at Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island, the oldest military site in the United States, where the Buford was docked. Emma Goldman was among the last to board.
“It was 4:20 A.M. on the day of our Lord, December 21, 1919,” she wrote years later. “I felt dizzy, visioning a transport of politicals doomed to Siberia.… Russia of the past rose before me.… But no, it was New York, it was America, the land of liberty! Through the port-hole I could see the great city receding into the distance, its sky-line of buildings traceable by their rearing heads. It was my beloved city, the metropolis of the New World. It was America, indeed America repeating the terrible scenes of tsarist Russia! I glanced up—the Statue of Liberty!”
