by Tim Weiner
The Buford slipped out of New York Harbor, its prisoners bound for Soviet Russia. Hoover boarded the first train back to Washington. Over the next ten days he perfected his plans for the war on communism.
Hoover marked his twenty-fifth birthday at home—his mother’s home, where he still lived—on New Year’s Day. Then he went back to work. He made sure that the war began on time.
5
“WHO IS MR. HOOVER?”
ON THE AFTERNOON of December 30, 1919, the chief of the Communist Party of America, Charles E. Ruthenberg, went to lunch in New York with seven of his closest comrades. One of them was an undercover spy whose reports went to the Justice Department marked “Attention—Mr. Hoover.”
Ruthenberg was rail-thin and balding; he looked much older than his thirty-seven years. He had run for high office on the Socialist ticket in Ohio, winning a fair number of votes. He had gone to prison in 1918, convicted under the Espionage Act for opposing the war, and he had come out a hard-core Communist. He had just been arraigned on a charge of criminal anarchy for publishing the Party platform in New York. Now he was afraid a new wave of arrests was coming. “The Communist Party is practically busted,” he said, according to the secret agent’s report to Hoover. “Most of the leaders are either in jail, in hiding, or afraid.” If the federal government struck anew, he feared, the Party would have to go underground or die.
At that moment, Hoover was counting down the hours until the crackdown.
Hoover had the names of 2,280 Communists at hand, and he was adding hundreds more to the list on the morning of December 31. His men had worked nonstop for six weeks gathering the names. The Bureau had identified at least 700 Communists in New York alone. Hoover had enlisted help from undercover informers inside the Communist ranks, military intelligence officers, state and local police, business executives, private detectives, vigilantes from the American Protective League and veterans from the newly founded American Legion. By nightfall on New Year’s Eve, Hoover had won the approval for roughly 3,000 arrest warrants from the acting secretary of labor, who oversaw the immigration department, and he had convinced the immigration authorities to change their rules of procedure, in order to deny the arrested suspects the right to see a lawyer.
“Arrange with your undercover informants to have meetings of the Communist Party and the Communist Labor Party held on the night set,” read the orders to the Bureau’s agents in charge of the crackdown across twenty-three states. The agents were told not to bother with search warrants unless they were absolutely needed. They were instructed to break into homes and offices, probe ceilings and walls for hiding places, ransack records, and take “literature, books, papers, and anything hanging on the walls.”
“Communicate by long distance to Mr. Hoover any matters of vital importance or interest which may arise during the course of the arrests,” said the orders, signed by Frank Burke, Hoover’s immediate superior. “Forward to this office by special delivery marked for the ‘Attention of Mr. Hoover’ a complete list of the names of the persons arrested.” Agents were reminded that secrecy was paramount: “in order that no ‘leak’ may occur,” they were to tell no state or local police about the planned attack until a few hours beforehand.
A final set of orders went out under Hoover’s initials. “All instructions previously issued to you for carrying out arrests of Communists should be executed in detail,” they read. “Bureau and Department expect excellent results from you in your territory.” The orders authorized the thirty-three special agents in charge to tell reporters that “arrests are nationwide in scope and being directed by Attorney General.”
The biggest mass arrests in American history began at 9:00 P.M. on Friday, January 2, 1920. They went down in history as the Palmer raids. But Palmer neither organized nor directed them. Hoover did.
“A HUMAN NET NO OUTLAW CAN ESCAPE”
The Bureau broke into political meetings, private homes, social clubs, dance halls, restaurants, and saloons across America. Agents hauled people out of bookstores and bedrooms. Hoover worked around the clock, answering the ringing telephones and reading the urgent telegrams as his squads checked in from across the country.
Not all the raids went off smoothly. “About 25 aliens were apprehended in the course of the night on suspicion and while in a number of cases we were satisfied that they were members of the Communist Party, we were in possession of no evidence to prove it,” the special agent in charge in Buffalo, New York, reported to Hoover. “As they denied it, they were released.”
The Bureau took 2,585 prisoners on Friday night and Saturday morning, but their job was only half done. The raids went on into the next week. Agents sought at least 2,705 new warrants. In addition, hundreds of people, perhaps thousands, were arrested without warrants. All told, somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 people were swept up in the raids. No one will ever know precisely how many were arrested and imprisoned, how many questioned and released. No official accounting ever took place.
The raids sent the Communist Party reeling. Charles Ruthenberg and his inner circle survived by going underground, taking false names, communicating in code, living clandestine lives. A few of Ruthenberg’s handwritten reports turned up in the Comintern archives at the end of the century. “The attack upon our organization,” he wrote, had made it “impossible for the party to function on a national scale.” He spent the next and last seven years of his life on the run, under indictment, on trial, in prison, or fleetingly free on bail.
By Wednesday, January 7, roughly five thousand captives crowded county jails and federal detention centers across the country. Ellis Island was overflowing. Chicago’s prisons were jammed. In Detroit, eight hundred suspects filled a corridor on the top floor of the post office; the mayor protested the lockup, and a prominent citizen compared it to the Black Hole of Calcutta. In Boston Harbor, more than six hundred huddled in the unheated prison on Deer Island.
“The Department of Justice of the United States is today a human net that no outlaw can escape,” Attorney General Palmer wrote. His aides sent every major newspaper and magazine in America sheaves of press releases and political cartoons and photographs of disheveled detainees. Palmer declared that he was “sweeping the nation clean of such alien filth,” inspired by “the hope that American citizens will themselves become voluntary agents for us in a vast organization.”
“What will become of the United States Government if these alien radicals are permitted to carry out the principles of the Communist Party?” Palmer asked. “There wouldn’t be any such thing left. In place of the United States Government we should have the horror and terrorism of Bolshevik tyranny.… The Department of Justice will pursue the attack of these ‘Reds’ upon the Government of the United States with vigilance, and no alien advocating the overthrow of existing law and order in this country shall escape.”
Congress now seriously debated the sedition statutes Palmer had proposed, new laws that would imprison Americans for politically charged speech in peacetime. The House of Representatives voted to bar its lone Socialist member from holding his seat. The New York legislature expelled its five elected Socialist assemblymen. Public acclaim for Palmer poured in. Politicians pronounced him a clear choice for the next president of the United States.
Hoover bathed in the reflected glory. He was now a public figure, quoted across the country as the Justice Department’s top authority on communism.
The first pictures of Hoover in office show an element of his pride. He is fit and trim, snappily dressed. His suit is stylish and his necktie slightly rakish. The tie is tightly knotted beneath a slightly jutting chin. He has the barest hint of a smile, but his eyes are dead serious. He signs an order with a fountain pen. He looks astonishingly young.
He began to cultivate reporters as his superiors did. He kept a bulging scrapbook of his newspaper clippings. (He was sometimes misidentified as J. A. Hoover or J. D. Hoover. Not for long.)
He worked to promote his reputation inside
and outside the government with regular bulletins on Reds and radicals in America. The first went out a few days after the January 1920 raids. He contended that all the threats of the past year—the terrorist bombings, the nationwide strikes—arose from a master plot hatched in the Kremlin.
“The revolutionary conspiracy is international, it is being fiercely pushed, and most cunningly led,” read one of his first reports to Congress, a warning of a threat to America’s existence. “Civilization faces its most terrible menace of danger since the barbarian hordes overran West Europe and opened the dark ages.” He theorized that the Communists might organize secret cells in Mexico, stockpile arms from Germany and Japan, cross the border, and plant the seeds of revolution among black men in the American South. He believed that he was in a battle with the world in the balance.
Hoover went on his first counterterrorism raid on February 14, 1920. The Bureau and the local police swept into the tenements and industrial warehouses of Paterson, New Jersey, and found seventeen members of an Italian anarchist gang called L’Era Nuova. The Bureau had placed an undercover informant inside the group four weeks before. TERRORISTS CAUGHT IN PATERSON RAIDS, read the headline in The New York Times. The Bureau announced that reams of blank pink paper seized in the raid resembled those used in the broadside “Plain Words,” which had been found near Attorney General Palmer’s shattered home in June 1919—“the first clue to the origin of the bomb outrages which stirred the nation,” the newspaper said.
But it was not a clue that Hoover had time to pursue. He was called to a federal courthouse in Boston to defend the Bureau’s conduct in the war on communism.
“DEMOCRACY NOW SEEMS UNSAFE”
Political revulsion had been rising against the raids, a public reaction Hoover had not imagined possible.
The chief federal prosecutor in Philadelphia, U.S. Attorney Francis Fisher Kane, had resigned in an open letter to the president. “I am strongly opposed to the wholesale raiding of aliens that is being carried on throughout the country,” he wrote. “The policy of raids against large numbers of individuals is generally unwise and very apt to result in injustice.” The chief federal immigration officer in Seattle reported to his superiors in Washington, D.C., that the Bureau had swept up uncounted innocents to find a handful of suspects. And in Boston, a federal judge named George W. Anderson, addressing two hundred people gathered at a banquet convened by the fledging Harvard Liberal Club, issued an open invitation for a legal challenge to the raids.
Judge Anderson contended that the government was concocting conspiracies. “As an aftermath of our ‘war to make the world safe for democracy,’ real democracy now seems unsafe in America,” he said. “The same persons and newspapers that for two years were faking pro-German plots are now promoting ‘The Red Terror’ …
“I cannot say there will not be some bomb thrower. There are Reds—probably there are dangerous Reds. But they are not half as dangerous as the prating pseudo-patriots.…
“Real Americans, men who believe in law, order, liberty, toleration of others’ views on political and religious subjects, are not given to advertising themselves and their patriotism. They have too much respect for Americanism and for patriotism to disgrace these fine words as they are being daily disgraced by those using them for personal or political notoriety.”
The next day, a petition for a writ of habeas corpus arrived at the federal courthouse in Boston, filed on behalf of prisoners held at Deer Island. Judge Anderson had engineered the petition, secretly arranging to hear the case himself, after consulting a young Harvard law professor and Liberal Club stalwart named Felix Frankfurter. Boston’s federal immigration commissioner, Henry J. Skeffington, who was named as the lead defendant, was outraged. “I’ll take great pleasure in getting some of these Harvard Liberal Clubs myself,” he exclaimed. “If I have a warrant in my pocket I’ll take pleasure in getting them.”
Attorney General Palmer, preparing to announce himself as a candidate for president, did not wish to be burdened with the details of the case. He told Hoover to handle it.
The Justice Department would have to defend the Bureau’s arrests and the Deer Island deportations before a hostile judge in an open court. Hoover knew this posed a problem. The Bureau had overstepped its authority. Its conduct could not withstand close scrutiny.
At dawn on Wednesday, April 7, 1920, Hoover arrived in Boston on the sleeper train from Washington to face his first legal challenge. In Judge Anderson’s court, Felix Frankfurter, representing the prisoners, quickly offered into evidence the telegram that had gone out to the Bureau’s agents: eschew search warrants, seize anything they laid their hands on, and report directly to Hoover. Seated at the government table, whispering to the U.S. attorney, Hoover had good reason to wonder how his secret orders from headquarters—marked “strictly confidential” and carrying his name—had wound up in the hands of radical suspects. He listened as Frankfurter questioned George Kelleher, Hoover’s ranking agent in New England:
Q: It is a fact, is it not, Mr. Kelleher, that men and women were picked up that night without any warrant in your possession for their custody? Objection. Overruled.
A: That is so.
Q: Did your men search the bodies and the homes and the halls at which the various men and women were arrested? Objection. Overruled.
A: Yes.
Q: And they made seizure, did they not, of papers, documents, books and what not? Objection. Overruled.
A: Pursuant to the Department’s instruction …
Q: Searches were made by the arresting officers irrespective of the production of a search warrant? Objection. Overruled.
A: … That was left to the discretion of the various officers.
Q: What did you do with those whom the warrant did not fit, or who did not fit the warrant? Objection. Overruled.
A: They were detained at the station or brought to Boston and taken down to Deer Island.
The testimony turned to the government’s use of undercover informers. “Somebody who is employed to go around under an alias or pseudonym, or some kind of disguise, to pretend to be a Communist or Socialist or Anarchist.… [T]hat is an exceedingly dangerous thing, isn’t it?” said the judge. “I wonder that there have been no witches hung in the past six months.”
The judge himself then questioned Henry J. Skeffington, the Boston immigration commissioner:
Q: Were these arrests for what you call the “raids” made by your forces, or by the Department of Justice?
A: Department of Justice, your Honor.…
Q: Can you point out any rule or any statute under which the Department of Justice agents have power to arrest?
A: No, I don’t know anything about that, Judge.…
Q: Did you have instructions as to this procedure?
A: We had an understanding.
Q: Written instructions?
A: No. We had a conference in Washington … with Mr. Hoover.…
Q: Who is Mr. Hoover?
A: Mr. Hoover is an officer in the Department of Justice.
Hoover was not eager to testify about the raids under oath. After sitting through a day and a half of damning testimony, he left the courthouse and packed his bags.
“This case seems to have been conducted under the modern theory of statesmanship: Hang first and try later,” Judge Anderson wrote in a ruling freeing thirteen Deer Island prisoners on $500 bail. In a final judgment, he called the Bureau’s conduct lawless and unconstitutional. The government had created a “spy system” that “destroys trust and confidence and propagates hate,” he concluded. “A mob is a mob whether made up of government officials acting under instructions from the Department of Justice, or of criminals, loafers and the vicious classes.”
The Justice Department never challenged Judge Anderson’s ruling.
“SEEING RED”
Hoover returned to Washington to confront a new nemesis: Louis F. Post, the seventy-one-year-old assistant secretary of labor. On April 10, thre
e days after Hoover’s disastrous trip to Boston, Post threw out more than a thousand of the remaining deportation cases.
Post was a lifelong liberal who had known and admired Emma Goldman. As the Labor Department official overseeing the federal immigration system, he also had signed the order deporting her. Now he had used his administrative powers to review the files of some 1,400 people who had been arrested in the Red raids. He found that in about three out of four cases the Bureau had violated the law. Many hundreds of the detainees were not members of the Communist Party: their names had been copied off Socialist Party rolls, they had wandered into a Communist meeting hall out of curiosity, or they had simply been swept up by mistake. Post also dismissed cases where prisoners had been denied counsel or had been judged by illegally seized evidence. He was proceeding by the letter of the law, not the spirit of the times. At the rate he was going, four or five thousand of the Red raid cases would be lost.
Hoover mounted a furious counterattack. This marked the start of an American institution: the political surveillance of his prominent opponents.
He compiled a dossier on Post’s political associations with leftists and sent it to key members of Congress. His goal was to remove Post from office and reverse his rulings. His first foray into political warfare at the highest levels of the government met with an initial success. The House Rules Committee accepted the petition for a formal inquiry into Louis Post’s conduct and set hearings to begin in four weeks.
