[A hundred years ago, the Palmer Raids imperilled thousands of
immigrants. Then a wily official got in the way.]
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WHEN AMERICA TRIED TO DEPORT ITS RADICALS  
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Adam Hochschild
November 4, 2019
The New Yorker
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_ A hundred years ago, the Palmer Raids imperilled thousands of
immigrants. Then a wily official got in the way. _

The Palmer Raids sought not just to round up “subversives” but to
expel them., Illustration by Anthony Russo

 

On a winter night a hundred years ago, Ellis Island, the
twenty-seven-acre patch of land in New York Harbor that had been the
gateway to America for millions of hopeful immigrants, was playing the
opposite role. It had been turned into a prison for several hundred
men, and a few women, most of whom had arrived in handcuffs and
shackles. They were about to be shipped across the Atlantic, in the
country’s first mass deportation of political dissidents in the
twentieth century.

Before dawn on December 21, 1919, the prisoners were roused from their
bunks to be packed onto a barge and transported to a waiting vessel,
the Buford, which was berthed in Brooklyn. The Buford was an elderly,
decrepit troopship, known by sailors as a heavy “roller” in rough
seas. One of the two hundred and forty-nine people who were deported
that day, Ivan Novikov, described the scene in the island prison:
“It was noisy and the room was full of smoke. Everybody knew already
that we are going to be sent out. . . . Many with tears in their
eyes were writing telegrams and letters.” Many “were in the
literal sense of the word without clothes or shoes,” he went on.
“There was no laughter.” Then, as now, deportations severed
families: “One left a mother, the other a wife and son, one a
sweetheart.”

At 4 _a.m._, with the temperature in the twenties, shouting guards
ordered the captives outside, where a gangplank led to the barge and
an attached tugboat. “Deep snow lay on the ground; the air was cut
by a biting wind,” wrote that day’s most famous victim of what she
called “deportation mania,” the Russian-born anarchist and
feminist firebrand Emma Goldman. “A row of armed civilians and
soldiers stood along the road. . . . One by one the deportees
marched, flanked on each side by the uniformed men, curses and threats
accompanying the thud of their feet on the frozen ground.”

The mass expulsion was so important to the U.S. government that,
despite the hour, a delegation from Washington joined the deportees on
the trip across the harbor to the Buford. The group included several
members of Congress, most notably Representative Albert Johnson, of
Washington State, who was the chair of the House Committee on
Immigration and Naturalization as well as an outspoken anti-Semite, a
Ku Klux Klan favorite, and an ardent opponent of immigration.
Shepherding the party was a dark-haired, twenty-four-year-old Justice
Department official who was quietly respectful toward the dignitaries
he was with but who would, before long, wield far more power than any
of them: J. Edgar Hoover.

Hoover had met Goldman some weeks earlier, in the courtroom where he
made the case for her deportation. Now one of the great American
radicals of her day and the man who would become the country’s
premier hunter of such dissidents encountered each other one last
time, in the galley of the tugboat. She was fifty, more than twice his
age, but they were of similar stature, and would have stood nearly eye
to eye, with Goldman looking at Hoover through her pince-nez. One
admirer described her as having “a stocky figure like a peasant
woman, a face of fierce strength like a female pugilist.” Hoover had
won this particular match, but, according to a congressman who
witnessed the exchange, she got in one last jab.

“Haven’t I given you a square deal, Miss Goldman?” Hoover asked,
as they steamed toward Brooklyn in the darkness.

“Oh, I suppose you’ve given me as square a deal as you could,”
she replied, two hours away from being ejected from the country where
she had lived for thirty-four years and found the voice that had won
her admirers around the world. “We shouldn’t expect from any
person something beyond his capacity.”

That morning’s mass deportation had been preceded by a crescendo of
anti-immigrant rhetoric that will sound distinctly familiar today.
“The surest way to preserve the public against those disciples of
destruction,” Thomas Edward Campbell, the governor of Arizona, told
a conference of newspaper editors on February 22, 1919, “is to send
them back forthwith to lands from which they came.” And if
native-born Americans were acting un-American, why not deport them,
too? Senator Kenneth McKellar, of Tennessee, suggested that they “be
deported permanently to the Island of Guam.”

And why not go one step further and strip objectionable people of U.S.
citizenship, to make them more deportable? In 1919, alarmed by the
growing presence of “peoples of Asiatic races,” the Anti-Alien
League called for a constitutional amendment “to restrict
citizenship by birth within the United States to the children of
parents who are of a race which is eligible for citizenship”—i.e.,
whites. Senator Wesley Jones, of Washington State, promised to
introduce such a measure—a proposal not unlike today’s calls to
end birthright citizenship. That May, a cheering convention of the
American Legion demanded the deportation not only of immigrants who
evaded military service during the First World War but of _any_ men
who evaded service.

What made high-ranking government officials so passionate about
deportations that they would get up in the middle of the night to ride
through freezing wind across New York Harbor? One factor was the
Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia in November, 1917, which
political and corporate leaders feared might incite militant
labor unionists in the U.S., who had already shaken the country with
a stormy, decade-long wave of strikes. Lenin had written a “Letter
to American Workingmen” declaring “the inevitability of the
international revolution.” Postwar economic turmoil promised to make
the country more vulnerable than ever to radical doctrines.

For these officials, the most worrisome left-wing group was the
Industrial Workers of the World, known as the Wobblies. The I.W.W. had
more flash than breadth—the number of members probably never
exceeded a hundred thousand—but the Wobblies caught the public
imagination with their colorful posters, stirring songs, and flair for
drama.

The Justice Department began a nationwide crackdown in September,
1917, raiding all four dozen I.W.W. offices and the homes of many
activists. In sealed boxcars, Wobblies from around the country were
brought to Chicago’s Cook County Jail. When they received news of
the Bolshevik takeover in St. Petersburg, they celebrated by singing
and banging tin cups on their cell bars. A hundred and one leading
Wobblies were charged with violating a long list of federal laws as
part of a mass trial—still the largest in American history—that
ran through the spring and summer of 1918. The jury took a mere
fifty-five minutes to render its verdict, finding all the defendants
guilty on all counts. They were sentenced to an average of eight years
in prison. Tons of I.W.W. records, which the Justice Department had
seized in the raids, were later burned.

Fear of bolshevism blended with a long-standing hostility toward
certain classes of immigrants. By 1890, those coming ashore at Ellis
Island were no longer from places like Britain and Germany; the great
bulk were now from Italy, Eastern Europe, or the Russian Empire, and
they were Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Jewish. There were a lot of
them, too: by 1900, the majority of men in Manhattan over the age of
twenty-one were foreign-born.

Many Americans shared the resentment voiced in a book published in
1902: “Throughout the [nineteenth] century men of the sturdy stocks
of the north of Europe had made up the main strain of foreign blood
which was every year added to the vital working force of the
country . . . but now there came multitudes of men of the lowest
class from the south of Italy and men of the meaner sort out of
Hungary and Poland, men out of the ranks where there was neither skill
nor energy nor any initiative of quick intelligence; and they came in
numbers which increased from year to year, as if the countries of the
south of Europe were disburdening themselves of the more sordid and
hapless elements of their population.” The writer of these words was
a young Princeton professor, who, a decade later, would become the
President of the United States: Woodrow Wilson.

His feelings were echoed widely among the American establishment. The
Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge was a prominent political
enemy of the President’s, but he completely shared Wilson’s
attitude on this score. In a speech to the Senate about the need to
restrict “undesirable immigrants” who came from the “races” he
found “most alien,” he invoked Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s poem
“Unguarded Gates,” which compared such people to the “thronging
Goth and Vandal [who] trampled Rome.” For Lodge and others anxious
to restrict immigration, Eastern European Jews were definitely among
the undesirables. The historian Henry Adams, a friend of Lodge’s,
declared that “the Jew makes me creep” and wrote of a “furtive
Yacoob or Ysaac still reeking of the Ghetto, snarling a weird
Yiddish.” The novelist Henry James was disgusted by the people he
saw “swarming” on New York’s heavily Jewish Lower East Side, who
reminded him of “small, strange animals . . . snakes or worms.”

These immigrant swarms, politicians claimed, were not just unseemly;
with their affinity for radical movements, they were a threat to
national security. Many leftists, like Goldman, were Jewish, and the
most violent anarchists were largely Italian-American. In June, 1919,
one of them managed to blow himself up as he was planting a bomb at
the Washington, D.C., home of Wilson’s Attorney General,
A. Mitchell Palmer, and among the items he left at the scene was an
Italian-English dictionary. The Socialist Party had a high proportion
of foreign-born members, and the pro-Socialist press included
newspapers like New York’s _Robotnik Polski_ and
Chicago’s _Parola Proletaria_.

The tenor of the deportation frenzy was heightened by the upcoming
1920 Presidential election. Several of those hoping to succeed Wilson
saw great potential in promising to deport troublemakers. A leading
Republican contender was Major General Leonard Wood, a dashing hero of
the Indian Wars and a former Rough Rider, who captured headlines in
1919 for leading military forces against strikes and race riots in the
Midwest, and who at one point put Gary, Indiana, under martial law.
“Deport these so-called Americans who preach treason,” he told an
audience in Kansas City.

Another Republican candidate, the president of Columbia University,
Nicholas Murray Butler, said in a speech, “Today, we hear the hiss
of a snake in the grass, and the hiss is directed at the things
Americans hold most dear.” He called for deporting “Reds” to the
Philippines. The Republican senator Miles Poindexter, of Washington
State, also eying the Presidential nomination, called on the
government “to deport every alien Bolshevist and to punish rather
than protect those who practice their savage creed in this country.”
Poindexter suggested that Attorney General Palmer was pursuing the
deportation of these savages with insufficient vigor: “The
government had positively refused in many cases to allow them to
go.”

But Palmer, a Democrat, had his own hopes for the Presidency. An
imposing-looking man with a shock of gray hair who wore three-piece
suits crossed by a watch chain, he was not about to let anyone
outflank him in enthusiasm for deportations. And, unlike the
out-of-power Republicans, he had the authority to back up his words.
Raised as a Quaker, Palmer had declined the position of Secretary of
War, when Wilson had offered it, in 1913, but, when he accepted an
appointment as Attorney General, in 1919, his faith did not prevent
him from waging a kind of domestic war the likes of which the United
States has seldom seen.

The bombing of Palmer’s house, which was clearly intended to kill
him, his wife, and their ten-year-old daughter, understandably left
him terrified. Eight other bombs went off the same night, mostly at
the homes of prominent politicians or judges. Some five weeks earlier,
a mail bomb had exploded in the home of a former U.S. senator from
Georgia, blowing off the hands of his maid, and thirty-five additional
mail bombs addressed to Cabinet members, judges, and business moguls
were intercepted before they could go off.

Immediately after the spate of bombings, Palmer founded the Radical
Division of the Justice Department to track subversive activities of
all kinds, and he put J. Edgar Hoover in charge. This post, as
Kenneth D. Ackerman shows in his biography “Young J. Edgar,” was
a key step on this precocious man’s path to power. Hoover, during an
earlier job at the Library of Congress, had come to love the great
information-management technology of the day: file cards. Within two
and a half years in his new job, he would amass a database of four
hundred and fifty thousand cards on people and organizations,
carefully linking them to documents in the Radical Division’s files.

To those in power, signs of a simmering revolution were everywhere.
Two rival Communist parties each promised to reproduce on American
soil the Bolshevik takeover. In 1919, amid the largest strike wave in
U.S. history, one in five workers walked off the job—everyone from
telephone operators to stage actors. An unprecedented general strike
briefly brought Seattle to a halt. In September of that year, most
Boston police officers went on strike. If even those sworn to defend
law and order were in rebellion, what could come next? Senator Henry
Myers, of Montana, warned that if America did not hold firm it would
“see a Soviet government set up within two years.”

At the same time, agents provocateurs played a significant role in the
turbulence. Many came from the ranks of private detectives; the three
biggest such firms had a hundred and thirty-five thousand employees.
In July, 1919, the U.S. attorney in Philadelphia wrote to Palmer to
tell him that many of the most extreme agitators were undercover
operatives “actively stirring up trouble” because “they know on
which side their bread is buttered.” Justice Department officials in
Los Angeles concluded that private detectives, in order to create more
business, had planted bombs in nearby oil fields. But none of this
deterred Palmer, who was now on an anti-dissident crusade, with mass
deportations as his main goal. Ninety per cent of Communist and
anarchist agitation, he maintained, “is traceable to aliens.”

Millions of immigrants, even if they had arrived decades earlier, had
never bothered to become American citizens. The bureaucracy of doing
so could seem intimidating, especially for those who didn’t speak
English well, and naturalization hadn’t seemed important at a time
when the country professed to welcome newcomers. Now, however, lacking
citizenship became an enormous liability. Emma Goldman, a prime
target, was under close surveillance—her mail was opened, her phone
calls were tapped, and her secretary, unbeknownst to her, was a
government informer. Goldman believed that she had become a citizen
thirty-two years earlier, by marrying a naturalized immigrant, Jacob
Kershner. But Hoover contended that the rabbi who performed the
ceremony was not properly ordained; moreover, two decades after their
divorce, Kershner’s citizenship had been revoked, because he had
falsified something on his original application. It was deemed that
Goldman had thus lost her status as a U.S. citizen as well, and could
be duly shipped off on the Buford.

The crackdown at the time of Goldman’s deportation came to be known
as the Palmer Raids, although they were planned and closely supervised
by the much younger Hoover. The first big raid rounded up members of
the Union of Russian Workers, an avowedly anarchist organization that
also offered classes and social activities. Offices of the union in
more than a dozen cities were raided during the night of November 7,
1919—pointedly, the second anniversary of the Bolshevik coup—and
1,182 people were arrested and interrogated. A far larger number were
roughed up, briefly detained, and then let go. Hoover’s agents were
helped by local police. A raid of offices near New York’s Union
Square, where members of the anarchist group had been attending
night-school classes in mathematics and auto repair, left the building
looking “as if a bomb had exploded in each room,” the New
York _World_ reported. “Desks were broken open, doors smashed,
furniture overturned and broken, books and literature scattered, the
glass doors of a cabinet broken, typewriters had apparently been
thrown on the floor and stamped on,” and there were “bloodstains
over floor, papers, literature &c.” The _Times_, although it backed
the arrests, acknowledged that “a number of those in the building
were badly beaten by the police during the raid, their heads wrapped
in bandages.” The raids, which were recorded by newsreel-makers for
greater impact, produced the outcome that Hoover and Palmer wanted:
foreign-born radicals began filling immigration prisons like the one
on Ellis Island. President Wilson, incapacitated by a stroke at the
time, never publicly addressed the raids, but just before falling ill
he had spoken of the “disciples of Lenin in our own midst,” from
whom “poison has got in the veins of this free people.”

The Palmer Raids reached their climax on January 2, 1920, with night
sweeps in more than thirty cities and towns. Their professed targets
were the two Communist parties, whose combined membership was no more
than forty thousand but was ninety per cent immigrant. Many of those
arrested had only a tangential connection, if any, to the Communists,
including, in Nashua, New Hampshire, a hundred and forty-one
Socialists. In nearby Manchester, it was everyone dancing at the
Tolstoi Club; in Chicago, all the patrons at the Tolstoy Vegetarian
Restaurant; in Lynn, Massachusetts, thirty-nine bakers, a third of
them American citizens, in the middle of a meeting to discuss forming
a coöperative; in New Jersey, a group of Polish-Americans soliciting
money for a funeral; in Philadelphia, the members of the Lithuanian
Socialist Chorus, mid-rehearsal. There are no complete records of how
many people were seized, but a careful study by the Danish scholar
Regin Schmidt estimates the total arrested in the Palmer Raids at ten
thousand.

More than five hundred of those arrested were jammed into quarters at
Ellis Island, which ran out of cots and bedding. Several inmates died
of pneumonia. In Detroit, some eight hundred men and women were held
for up to six days in a narrow, windowless corridor of a federal
building, with a bare stone floor to sleep on and one toilet and one
drinking fountain. They were without food for twenty hours, and then
could eat only what their families and friends brought them. In
Boston, a hundred and forty prisoners in chains and leg irons were
marched through the city’s streets, then locked up in an unheated
prison on an island in the harbor. One despairing prisoner committed
suicide by jumping from a window.

A. Mitchell Palmer, with one eye on justifying these mass arrests and
the other on his Presidential campaign, issued a series of press
releases. One was headed “_warns nation of red peril_—U.S.
Department of Justice Urges Americans to Guard Against Bolshevism
Menace.” The department’s press office distributed photographs of
prisoners, taken after they had been jailed for days without the
chance to shave or wash, captioned “Men Like These Would Rule
You.” And Palmer published a magazine article warning that Communism
“was eating its way into the homes of the American workman, its
sharp tongues of revolutionary heat were licking the altars of the
churches, leaping into the belfry of the school bell, crawling into
the sacred corners of American homes, seeking to replace marriage vows
with libertine laws.” (In fact, a survey by a church organization
found that a large majority of the arrested men—eighty per cent of
whom had lived in the United States for at least six years—were
married.)

The arrests continued, and Palmer promised that deportations by the
thousands would follow. New Yorkers would soon find, he told an
audience in the city, a “second, third, and fourth” ship like the
Buford, “sailing down their beautiful harbor in the near future.”
Hoover personally led a raid in New Jersey in February, 1920, and
Palmer began predicting that a nationwide Communist uprising would
erupt on May Day of that year.

Palmer and Hoover had assumed that they could deport most of those
seized in the raids. A high proportion were non-citizens, and a law
passed in 1918, during the martial fervor of the First World War and
the anti-Bolshevik hysteria, said that any alien who advocated
anarchism or violent revolution, or who belonged to an organization
that did so, could be expelled. There was, however, one considerable
roadblock: although it was Palmer’s Justice Department that had the
power to arrest people, deportations were under the authority of the
Immigration Bureau, which was part of the Labor Department.

Then something happened that neither Hoover nor Palmer anticipated.
Two and a half months after the Buford had sailed, and just as the two
men were hoping to deport many more shiploads of newly arrested
“undesirables,” the Secretary of Labor went on leave, to tend to
an illness in the family; his replacement resigned; and a
seventy-year-old man named Louis F. Post became the acting Secretary
of Labor.

Post was no typical bureaucrat. His wire-rimmed glasses, Vandyke
beard, and thick head of dark hair combined to give him a striking
resemblance to the man then commanding Soviet Russia’s Red Army,
Leon Trotsky. As far as Palmer and Hoover were concerned, he was just
as dangerous.

He was born on a New Jersey farm in 1849 and, though too young to
serve in the Civil War, was imbued with abolitionist zeal. As a boy,
he talked to the free black handyman who worked for his grandfather
and noticed that the man had to eat at a separate table. As a young
man, Post spent two years working in the South during Reconstruction
and saw how white Southerners foiled all possibility of advancement
for the former slaves who hoped for equal rights at last. He served as
a court reporter in a series of South Carolina trials in which Ku Klux
Klansmen were convicted of murder—only to see President Ulysses S.
Grant pardon most of the Klansmen several months later. He returned
North, where he became a prosecutor and then a private attorney in New
York City. The work left him uninspired, but he acquired a keen sense
of the law that he was able to put to extraordinary use decades later.

Journalism, first on the side but eventually full time, became
Post’s calling. While running the opinion pages of a lively
pro-labor daily, the New York _Truth_, he supported the campaign that
established Labor Day. Along the way, he became a convert to Henry
George’s single-tax movement, which advocated a land tax meant to
discourage speculators from getting rich by acquiring land and leaving
it idle, impoverishing those who could have put it to good use. A
friend of George’s, Post in effect became the leader of the
single-tax movement after George’s death, in 1897, and toured North
America lecturing on the subject. As the editorial writer for the
Cleveland _Recorder_, Post crusaded against industrial monopolies and
in favor of workers’ rights. By the turn of the century, he and his
wife had started a Chicago-based magazine, _The Public_, which
denounced American colonization of the Philippines, the power of big
business, and racial discrimination while supporting women’s rights
and unrestricted immigration. Post had been impressed by the promises
of reform that helped Woodrow Wilson first get elected President, and,
in 1913, when offered a position in the brand-new Department of Labor,
he happily accepted.

Post knew, and had published, many of the leading reformers and
radicals of the day. Indeed, Emma Goldman had been a dinner guest in
his home, and he had managed, in 1917, to prevent her from being
deported, although he was powerless to do so two years later, when the
laws had been tightened. Being in government did not tame him: as the
Assistant Secretary of Labor, he had boldly written to President
Wilson suggesting a blanket pardon for jailed draft resisters. As for
anarchists, Post knew that some practiced violence, like the man who
had bombed Palmer’s home, but he argued that anarchist ranks also
included “apostles of peace,” like the followers of Tolstoy, who
were “supremely harmless.” It was “perverted,” he wrote, to
lump them all together as people to be deported.

Now, in charge of the Department of Labor, Post proved a shrewd
investigator and decisive reformer. When he discovered that many of
the raids had been made without warrants, or with warrants based on
faulty information, he invalidated nearly three thousand of the
arrests. He found that prisoners had been questioned without being
informed that their answers could be used as evidence against them and
without being given access to lawyers. In response, he ruled that any
alien subjected to the deportation process was entitled to full
constitutional safeguards. Post learned that many people taken in the
raids hadn’t known that one of the Communist parties listed them as
members; these factions had seceded from the Socialist Party and were
intent on claiming as large a membership as possible. He ordered the
release of many of those still held in immigration prisons like the
one on Ellis Island; he slashed the amount of bail for others. Palmer
and Hoover were furious.

Public opinion, however, slowly turned in Post’s favor. Quoting an
unnamed commentator, Representative George Huddleston, of Alabama,
said that some of the supposedly dangerous “Reds” targeted for
expulsion probably didn’t know the difference between bolshevism and
rheumatism. A federal judge in Boston ordered a group of immigrants to
be released from custody, declaring that “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.” Despite the estimated ten thousand arrests made amid the
Palmer Raids and the 6,396 deportation cases that Hoover’s Radical
Division prepared during this period, Palmer succeeded in deporting
fewer than six hundred radical immigrants.

The Attorney General condemned Post’s “habitually tender
solicitude for social revolution and perverted sympathy for the
criminal anarchists.” Privately, Palmer suggested that Post was “a
Bolshevik himself.” Palmer and Hoover sought to discredit Post and
get him impeached by Congress. A three-hundred-and-fifty-page file on
Post attempted to tarnish him with evidence about everything from
contacts with I.W.W. members to his advocacy of divorce reform. The
House Rules Committee, supplied with this file, called Post in for ten
hours of testimony. But he acquitted himself brilliantly, and the
committee could find no grounds for impeachment.

Palmer’s Justice Department continued to issue dire warnings, almost
daily, of the nationwide Communist uprising predicted for May Day,
1920. As the date approached, New York City’s police force was put
on twenty-four-hour duty; Boston stationed trucks with machine guns at
strategic locations. In Chicago, three hundred and sixty local
radicals were arrested and put in preventive detention.

May Day came and went. Nothing happened. Yet the silence turned out
to be an event in itself. It deflated the national hysteria about
arresting and deporting “Reds,” and helped kill Palmer’s
campaign for the Presidency. Nor did any of the three Republicans who
had thundered about deportation become his party’s choice. The
eventual candidate and victor was Warren Harding, a Republican who
declared that “too much has been said about bolshevism in
America,” and campaigned for a “return to normalcy.” The
Republican Party platform that year rebuked the “vigorous
malpractice of the Departments of Justice and Labor.”

Owing in part to Post’s courage, normalcy did not include mass
deportations on the scale that people like Hoover and Palmer had hoped
for. But a larger battle was lost, since pressure for deportations has
always been linked to another cause: keeping people out in the first
place. In 1924, Congress passed a law that, for the next four decades,
slammed the door on all but a tiny trickle of immigrants. It barred
Asians from entering the United States and assigned country-by-country
quotas, set to reflect the American population as it had been in
1890—when the proportion of Eastern Europeans, Italians, and Jews
was small. The law bore the name of its principal author,
Representative Albert Johnson, one of the men who, along with Hoover,
had seen off the Buford and its cargo of deportees from New York
Harbor. It was the Johnson-Reed Act that, years later, would prevent
untold numbers of people trying to flee the Holocaust from finding
shelter in the United States.

Post did not live to see that shame; he died at the age of
seventy-eight, in 1928. But he died proud. He had entered the Wilson
Administration expecting to fight for workers’ rights, but ended up
fighting a very different battle. When faced with a challenge he had
never anticipated, he rose to it magnificently, saving thousands of
people from being expelled from the country. Moreover, his example
emboldened others to speak out. It was only after Post had spent
several months publicly stopping deportations that a group of a dozen
distinguished attorneys, law professors, and law-school deans,
including the future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, issued a
report denouncing the Justice Department’s many violations of the
Constitution in carrying out the Palmer Raids. The report was
accompanied by sixty pages of material, from sworn statements of
witnesses to photographs of bruised and beaten prisoners.

The report had a big impact on members of Congress and the press. Few
were aware that two of the people who had helped prepare it were close
allies of Post, and that Post almost certainly supplied much of the
information in it. Post was both a man of high principle and a master
of bureaucratic maneuvering—a rare combination. “He struggled
without ceasing to preserve our liberties and to enlarge them,” the
Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote after Post’s death. “He
resisted the clamor of stupid intolerance. He exposed its shameful,
ruthless lawlessness.” 

ADAM HOCHSCHILD  is an American author, journalist, historian and
lecturer. His best-known works include _King Leopold's Ghost
[[link removed]]_ (1998), _To
End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion,
1914–1918_ (2011), _Bury the Chains
[[link removed]]_ (2005), _The Mirror
at Midnight_ (1990), _The Unquiet Ghost_ (1994), and _Spain in Our
Hearts [[link removed]]_ (2016).

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