J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  Hoover accompanied the attorney general and sat next to him, passing him documents when needed and occasionally, at Palmer’s request, confirming some point he’d made.

  Rather than submit to questioning, as had Post, the attorney general chose to read a 209-page statement.

  That Hoover had played at least some part in its composition is possible, for it was peppered with such soon-to-be-famous Hooverisms as “moral rats,” “borers from within,” and “pale pink parlor Bolsheviks,” while one sentence, in which Palmer describes the aliens, at least sounds like pure Hoover: “Out of the sly and crafty eyes of many of them leap cupidity, cruelty, insanity, and crime; from their lopsided faces, sloping brows and misshapen features may be recognized the unmistakable criminal type.”

  Palmer’s statement was a curious mixture of denials and admissions.

  He denied that the recording secretary of a CP local in Buffalo, who’d been especially active in recruiting new members, was a “confidential informant,” as charged by Post; he was, Palmer said, a “special agent of the Bureau of Investigation.” He admitted that arrests had been made without warrants but denied there was anything illegal about this, since police could make warrantless arrests when they observed a crime taking place. He denied that his agents had used force or violence; only radical publications had made this charge, Palmer said, ignoring the articles and photographs which had appeared in the New York Times and other non-radical publications. He admitted that counsel had been denied in the early stages of the proceedings, but when lawyers were present the prosecution “got nowhere.” He denied that his agents had forged a signature on a confession, but later admitted that his agents had added the signature “for identification purposes only.”

  As soon as Palmer finished his statement, the chairman hastily declared the committee in “executive session,” thus cutting off any possible questioning of the attorney general.28

  If the committee was red-faced (it quickly dropped the whole matter), so was the American press. Even Palmer’s surprise disclosure, that the bombings had finally been solved (which he’d saved for the last day of his appearance, June 2, 1920, which also happened to be one year to the day after the bombing of his home), was treated as just another political ploy or, worse, an attempt to explain away a very bizarre, and very embarrassing, recent death.

  Even the New York Times buried the bombing story in its inside pages, unaware that it had already spawned one of the most controversial causes célèbres in American history: the Sacco-Vanzetti case.

  Apparently convinced he’d totally vindicated himself, Palmer returned to his presidential campaign.

  But in late June both his campaign and his Red crusade suffered still another setback, this time in a Boston courtroom, where what had begun three months earlier as a routine motion for a writ of habeas corpus had turned into a devastating examination of the Justice Department’s conduct in the New England raids. Over the government’s strong objections, Federal Judge George W. Anderson had insisted on calling a number of BI agents to the stand. He was particularly interested in the activities of the undercover informants. At least one, he discovered, had founded his own party local, causing Anderson to declare, “What does appear, beyond reasonable doubt, is that the Government owns and operates some part of the Communist Party.”29 And still another man (the party itself believed him to be an agent, which the Justice Department denied) had helped write two key documents used in all the cases: the manifesto and platform of the American Communist party. No one should be deported on such evidence, Anderson decided, and on June 25—three days before the opening of the Democratic National Convention—he ordered the eighteen defendants released.

  Judge Anderson, who at one point in the proceedings had referred with evident contempt to Hoover’s “so-called briefs,” made the enemies list. Three other participants in the case were already on it: Roger Baldwin, Zechariah Chafee, Jr., and Felix Frankfurter. Baldwin’s fledgling American Civil Liberties Union had conducted the background investigations for the “twelve lawyers” pamphlet. The ACLU had also provided counsel in the Boston case, including Chafee and Frankfurter, who had been among the pamphlet’s singers. Hoover developed an especially intense hatred of Frankfurter, which grew even more virulent after he became an FDR confidant and Supreme Court justice, for it was Frankfurter’s cross-examination of the Boston BI chief which forced the Justice Department to make public Burke’s secret instructions to the special agents, in which “Mr. Hoover” figured so prominently.

  In addition to their friendship and their mutual passion for civil liberties, Roger Baldwin and Felix Frankfurter would, in the years ahead, have something else in common.

  Each—at a different stage in J. Edgar Hoover’s career—would come to Hoover’s defense, helping him keep his job.

  By June it appeared that the Red scare, if not over, was at least on the wane, while few were any longer defending the hundreds of illegal acts authorized by the nation’s chief law enforcement officer.

  One was John Edgar Hoover. That same month he appeared before Congress to urge the passage of a peacetime sedition act. As late as that October, when he wrote his annual report on the accomplishments of the General Intelligence Division, he was still defending the raids,* and he was still defending them as late as 1921, when they became the subject of still another congressional inquiry, this one by the Senate Judiciary Committee. Again Hoover accompanied Palmer when he was called to testify, only this time the GID head had a bigger supporting role. Repeatedly, when asked a question, Palmer either turned to Hoover for the answer or referred the senators to him, indicating perhaps not so much forgetfulness on the attorney general’s part as the strong possibility that in the preparation and conduct of the raids Hoover hadn’t bothered him with such details but had simply gone ahead and done what he thought necessary.

  It was during this hearing that Hoover denied, among other things, that the Justice Department had played any part in the change of Rule 22 or that he’d personally requested exceptionally high bail in many of the cases.

  Palmer concluded his testimony on a defiant note:

  “I apologize for nothing the Department of Justice has done in this matter. I glory in it. I point with pride and enthusiasm to the results of that work; and if, as I said before, some of my agents out in the field, or some of the agents of the Department of Labor, were a little rough or unkind, or short or curt, with these alien agitators whom they observed seeking to destroy their homes, their religion and their country, I think it might well be overlooked in the general good to the country which has come from it. That is all I have to say.”31

  If Palmer sounded bitter, it was with reason. His “trial” before the Senate, which had begun in January, ended on March 3, 1921. The following day someone else would be sworn in as the twenty-ninth president of the United States.

  Palmer had arrived at the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco in late June of 1920 the favorite of party regulars and with strong financial backing. His strikebreaking and his failure to prosecute many large antitrust cases, as well as certain deals he’d made with the banks while alien property custodian, had given him a sizable number of due bills. He also had, he believed, the support of all “undiluted one hundred per cent Americans.” But organized labor strongly opposed him, as did the “drys,” and President Wilson had declined to endorse him. After forty-four ballots, the Democrats chose Governor James M. Cox of Ohio as their candidate, thus ending the political career of “the Great Red Hunter,” A. Mitchell Palmer, who had, most reluctantly, been forced to drop out after the thirty-eighth ballot.

  The Republican convention had also deadlocked. On June 12, 1920, at about two in the morning, Republican leaders had summoned into a smoke-filled Chicago hotel room a man whom even his biographer would describe as an “amiable, goodhearted mediocrity who was everybody’s second choice,”32 and asked him, on his conscience and before God, if there was anything in his background which might emba
rrass the party or disqualify him as a candidate. He took ten minutes to think about it, before replying there was not. Later that day the Republicans officially chose as their candidate Senator Warren G. Harding of Ohio.

  On November 2 the voters chose “a return to normalcy,” picking Harding over Cox.

  While Hoover fought to keep his job, Palmer spent his last months in office housecleaning and testifying, in probably that order, for when he left, many of the records of his administration left too.

  Although it began with a bang, the Red scare ended not with a whimper but a yawn. A. Mitchell Palmer had cried wolf once too often.

  The antiradical crusade had been, from its inception, an antilabor crusade, but ironically waged as much on behalf of the reactionary, placating American Federation of Labor as on behalf of business and industry. Playing on nativist fears, its perpetrators were most interested in resisting possible change and in maintaining the status quo. All this carried with it a certain amount of risk, and by mid-1920 that risk had become too great. Neutralizing radical dissent was all well and good, but the demand for even tighter immigration quotas threatened to end the supply of cheap European labor.

  When such industry giants as Du Pont, Kresge, and Schwab began criticizing Palmer, the handwriting was on the wall, and the American press—which from the start had never questioned Palmer’s farfetched claims, instead urging him, repeatedly, to take even stronger action against “the menace”—was not slow in reprinting the message of its advertisers.

  The Red scare ended primarily because it was no longer good business.

  This did not mean, however, that the Red hunt itself had come to an end. When Hoover bragged of “wrecking” the two American Communist parties, his boast was at least numerically true. Within a year their combined membership had dropped to ten thousand; within two years, to half that. According to Theodore Draper, “After the January 1920 raids, both the Communist party and the Communist Labor party hastily converted themselves into conspiratorial organizations.”33

  Nor were the CP and the CLP the only ones to go underground. In a very real sense, the GID joined them. Although the General Intelligence Division’s antiradical efforts were now to a large extent unpublicized, because of the public’s current mood, Hoover never for a minute lost interest in the “Reds.” Many of the BI’s informants remained in place. When, in April 1920, the Soviet leaders sent a special courier to the United States, ordering the CP and the CLP to “achieve unity or else,”34 Jacob Spolansky and his Red hunters received the secret directives even before they reached the American Communists.

  And the files remained. The information which Hoover had so patiently collected and collated was not wasted. During the Red scare, many of the states had passed rabid antisyndicalism laws (in California, for example, refusing to salute the flag was punishable with a maximum sentence of twenty years). The GID now supplied information, and often investigators, to help in these prosecutions. Local police “Red squads” (the most durable, in New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles, continued to operate well into the 1970s) also benefited from Hoover’s storehouse of information, as did military intelligence, private detective agencies employed by the corporations, and the American Federation of Labor (the Justice Department secretly supplying Samuel Gompers with lists to help him purge any possible radicals from the AFL’s ranks).

  It was a reciprocal arrangement. In October 1920 there were 150,000 cards in Hoover’s master index; by the fall of 1921 that number had grown to 450,-000; this tripling had occurred long after the Red scare had ostensibly ended.

  But at least the bombings had been solved. Or so Palmer and Flynn claimed.

  Among the clues to the bombing of Palmer’s home was the Plain Words flier which had been found scattered near the scene of the blast. Acting on an informer’s tip that a printshop in Brooklyn had been printing anarchist literature, BI agents arrested two of its employees, Andrea Salsedo and Robert Elia, both admitted anarchists. Although the arrests were made on deportation warrants, the pair were not turned over to the immigration authorities; instead they were illegally detained for eight weeks in the Department of Justice’s Manhattan offices on Park Row. According to a deposition later signed by Elia, Salsedo was tortured and beaten until he “confessed” to BI Chief Flynn that he had printed the flier. According to Flynn, who denied that there had been any duress, Salsedo also signed a statement implicating the actual bombers.

  In the early morning hours of May 3, 1920, Salsedo either jumped, accidentally fell, or was pushed out of a window on the fourteenth floor of the building.

  When the attorney for the pair arrived later that morning, an agent informed him, “Well, your client, Salsedo, is free.”*35

  Some held doubts about Salsedo’s “suicide”—Louis Post, for example, referred to the incident as the “Salsedo homicide”—but there was no further investigation. For some inexplicable reason, Burke arranged to have his only witness, Elia, deported, and there, it appeared, the matter ended.

  But there was a legacy. About a week before Salsedo’s death, another Italian anarchist, a fish peddler from Boston, came to New York to look for his missing friends. Although he didn’t find them, he did learn, after a number of inquiries, that they were being detained. On returning to Boston he and another anarchist friend, who was a shoemaker, began organizing a protest meeting, which they scheduled for the night of May 9. There is reason to believe that both men were under near-constant surveillance by BI agents from at least the time of the New York trip and possibly earlier.

  The protest meeting never took place. On May 5, two days after Salsedo’s death, the shoemaker and the fish peddler were arrested for what they presumed to be their anarchist activities. Only later were they told that they were being charged with the murders of a paymaster and a guard, committed during a payroll robbery in South Braintree, Massachusetts, on April 15th.*

  One of the many legacies of the Palmer raids was the case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.

  Despite Flynn’s claim that Salsedo signed a statement implicating the actual bombers—a claim Flynn never repeated, or backed with any evidence, the alleged statement itself having never been made public, if indeed it ever existed—their identity remains a mystery.

  Even more mysterious is why—with extra appropriations of $2.6 million and a huge detective force concentrating on little else, neither the General Intelligence Division nor the Bureau of Investigation was able to discover that in 1919-20 the radical movement in the United States was poorly organized, hopelessly divided, pitifully weak, and largely incapable of carrying out anything more destructive than a few isolated acts of violence, much less a grand conspiracy to overthrow the entire government.

  * * *

  *Anthony Caminetti, the commissioner of immigration, was the first Italian-American elected to Congress and one of the first to attain a high government position. Like that second-generation Irishman Francis Garvan, Caminetti loathed radicals and distrusted recent immigrants, who he felt had yet to earn America’s precious freedoms. To his mind, none of the immigration laws was harsh enough.

  After being appointed head of the GID, Hoover quickly established “very pleasant relations” with Caminetti.1 According to Whitehead, the deportation cases brought Caminetti and Hoover “together almost daily in working out legal problems.”2 Caminetti, who had been informed as early as July that there would be a dragnet, approved so heartily that he willingly interpreted the sometimes ambiguous terminology of the immigration code to fit particular cases.

  *Wilson had no way of knowing that within hours not three thousand but ten thousand persons would be arrested.

  *During a 1921 Senate inquiry, Hoover disputed not the conditions of the corridor but its size, introducing into evidence a report from the Detroit BI chief which gave its area as 4,512 square feet. Skeptical, the Senate committee subpoenaed the assistant custodian of the building, who testified that the actual size was 448 square feet, a little less th
at half a square foot per alien.

  †Palmer later justified these secondary arrests by asking who would be friends with a radical other than another radical.

  *But Hoover was upstaged during his first appearance in the spotlight by none other than Immigration Commissioner Caminetti, who, according to the Times, lent “a spectacular touch” to the hearings by shouting derisive comments at the attorneys for the Communists.

  *The other eight signers were Ernst Freund, professor of jurisprudence and public law at the University of Chicago; Jackson H. Ralston, who had served as attorney for Post in the impeachment hearings and, together with another signer, Swinburne Hale, had done most of the editing of the pamphlet; Frank P. Walsh, a famed New York defense attorney; Tyrrell Williams, professor of law at Washington University, St. Louis; R. G. Brown, of Memphis; David Wallerstein, of Philadelphia; and Alfred S. Niles, of Baltimore.

  †Hoover failed in this, but something far more useful turned up in Washington. The assistant secretary’s secretary had a secret nocturnal job. He was one of the editors of a gossip magazine called the Knot Hole, which purported to be “born in sin and conceived in Washington” and whose every issue managed to offend half of Congress and most of the Cabinet. It had nothing to do with the charges, and apparently even Post was unaware of it, but when Palmer revealed it in his appearance on the Hill, the effect was a momentary sensation.

  *In his report Hoover proudly claimed that the mass arrests and deportations “had resulted in the wrecking of the communist party in this country,” while the radical press was totally suppressed and had “ceased its pernicious activities.” But the dangers of radicalism remained as frightening as ever, Hoover asserted: what was needed now was an expansion of the crusade, in the form of legislation “to enable the federal government adequately to defend and protect itself and its institutions of not only aliens within the borders of the United States, but also of American citizens who are engaged in unlawful agitation.”30