Document A: “The Case Against the "Reds" (ORIGINAL)
In 1917, Russia became a Communist country. Also, right after WWI, the country
experienced high inflation, high unemployment, and a number of labor strikes.
Against this backdrop, the United States began arresting and deporting anyone
suspected of “radical” thinking (e.g., Communism, socialism, anarchism, prolabor). These arrests became known as the “Palmer Raids” after the Attorney
General of the United States, A. Mitchell Palmer.
In this brief review of the work which the Department of Justice has undertaken,
to tear out the radical seeds that have entangled American ideas in their
poisonous theories, I desire not merely to explain what the real menace of
communism is, but also to tell how we have been compelled to clean up the
country almost unaided by any virile legislation. Though I have not been
embarrassed by political opposition, I have been materially delayed because the
present sweeping processes of arrests and deportation of seditious aliens should
have been vigorously pushed by Congress last spring. The failure of this is a
matter of record in the Congressional files.
The anxiety of that period in our responsibility when Congress, ignoring the
seriousness of these vast organizations that were plotting to overthrow the
Government, failed to act, has passed. The time came when it was obviously
hopeless to expect the hearty cooperation of Congress in the only way to stamp
out these seditious societies in their open defiance of law by various forms of
propaganda.
Like a prairie-fire, the blaze of revolution was sweeping over every American
institution of law and order a year ago. It was eating its way into the homes of the
American workmen, 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, burning up the foundations of society.
Robbery, not war, is the ideal of communism. This has been demonstrated in
Russia, Germany, and in America. As a foe, the anarchist is fearless of his own
life, for his creed is a fanaticism that admits no respect of any other creed.
Obviously it is the creed of any criminal mind, which reasons always from
motives impossible to clean thought. Crime is the degenerate factor in society.
Upon these two basic certainties, first that the "Reds" were criminal aliens and
secondly that the American Government must prevent crime, it was decided that
there could be no nice distinctions drawn between the theoretical ideals of the
radicals and their actual violations of our national laws. An assassin may have
brilliant intellectuality, he may be able to excuse his murder or robbery with fine
oratory, but any theory which excuses crime is not wanted in America. This is no
Palmer Raids and the Red Scare
place for the criminal to flourish, nor will he do so so long as the rights of
common citizenship can be exerted to prevent him.
OUR GOVERNMENT IN JEOPARDY
It has always been plain to me that when American citizens unite upon any
national issue they are generally right, but it is sometimes difficult to make the
issue clear to them. If the Department of Justice could succeed in attracting the
attention of our optimistic citizens to the issue of internal revolution in this
country, we felt sure there would be no revolution. The Government was in
jeopardy; our private information of what was being done by the organization
known as the Communist Party of America, with headquarters in Chicago, of
what was being done by the Communist Internationale under their manifesto
planned at Moscow last March by Trotzky, Lenin and others addressed "To the
Proletariats of All Countries," of what strides the Communist Labor Party was
making, removed all doubt. In this conclusion we did not ignore the definite
standards of personal liberty, of free speech, which is the very temperament and
heart of the people. The evidence was examined with the utmost care, with a
personal leaning toward freedom of thought and word on all questions.
The whole mass of evidence, accumulated from all parts of the country, was
scrupulously scanned, not merely for the written or spoken differences of
viewpoint as to the Government of the United States, but, in spite of these things,
to see if the hostile declarations might not be sincere in their announced motive
to improve our social order. There was no hope of such a thing.
By stealing, murder and lies, Bolshevism has looted Russia not only of its
material strength but of its moral force. A small clique of outcasts from the East
Side of New York has attempted this, with what success we all know. Because a
disreputable alien ‹Leon Bronstein, the man who now calls himself Trotzky‹can
inaugurate a reign of terror from his throne room in the Kremlin, because this
lowest of all types known to New York can sleep in the Czar's bed, while
hundreds of thousands in Russia are without food or shelter, should Americans
be swayed by such doctrines?
Such a question, it would seem, should receive but one answer from America.
My information showed that communism in this country was an organization of
thousands of aliens who were direct allies of Trotzky. Aliens of the same
misshapen caste of mind and indecencies of character, and it showed that they
were making the same glittering promises of lawlessness, of criminal autocracy
to Americans, that they had made to the Russian peasants. How the Department
of Justice discovered upwards of 60,000 of these organized agitators of the
Trotzky doctrine in the United States is the confidential information upon which
the Government is now sweeping the nation clean of such alien filth....
Palmer Raids and the Red Scare
WILL DEPORTATION CHECK BOLSHEVISM?
Behind, and underneath, my own determination to drive from our midst the
agents of Bolshevism with increasing vigor and with greater speed, until there are
no more of them left among us, so long as I have the responsible duty of that
task, I have discovered the hysterical methods of these revolutionary humans
with increasing amazement and suspicion. In the confused information that
sometimes reaches the people they are compelled to ask questions which
involve the reasons for my acts against the "Reds." I have been asked, for
instance, to what extent deportation will check radicalism in this country. Why not
ask what will become of the United States Government if these alien radicals are
permitted to carry out the principles of the Communist Party as embodied in its
so-called laws, aims and regulations?
There wouldn't be any such thing left. In place of the United States Government
we should have the horror and terrorism of bolsheviki tyranny such as is
destroying Russia now. Every scrap of radical literature demands the overthrow
of our existing government. All of it demands obedience to the instincts of
criminal minds, that is, to the lower appetites, material and moral. The whole
purpose of communism appears to be a mass formation of the criminals of the
world to overthrow the decencies of private life, to usurp property that they have
not earned, to disrupt the present order of life regardless of health, sex or
religious rights. By a literature that promises the wildest dreams of such low
aspirations, that can occur to only the criminal minds,, communism distorts our
social law....
It has been inferred by the "Reds" that the United States Government, by
arresting and deporting them, is returning to the autocracy of Czardom, adopting
the system that created the severity of Siberian banishment. My reply to such
charges is that in our determination to maintain our government we are treating
our alien enemies with extreme consideration. To deny them the privilege of
remaining in a country which they have openly deplored as an unenlightened
community, unfit for those who prefer the privileges of Bolshevism, should be no
hardship. It strikes me as an odd form of reasoning that these Russian
Bolsheviks who extol the Bolshevik rule should be so unwilling to return to
Russia. The nationality of most of the alien "Reds" is Russian and German.
There is almost no other nationality represented among them.
It has been impossible in so short a space to review the entire menace of the
internal revolution in this country as I know it, but this may serve to arouse the
American citizen to its reality, its danger, and the great need of united effort to
stamp it out, under our feet, if needs be. It is being done. 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 arrest and prompt deportation.
Palmer Raids and the Red Scare
It is my belief that while they have stirred discontent in our midst, while they
have caused irritating strikes, and while they have infected our social ideas with
the disease of their own minds and their unclean morals we can get rid of them!
and not until we have done so shall we have removed the menace of Bolshevism
for good.
Source: Excerpt from an essay written by A. Mitchell Palmer called "The Case
Against the ‘Reds,'” 1920.
Palmer Raids and the Red Scare
Document B: Emma Goldman Deportation Statement
(ORIGINAL)
At the very outset of this hearing I wish to register my protest against these star
chamber proceedings, whose very spirit is nothing less than a revival of the
ancient days of the Spanish Inquisition or the more recently defunct Third Degree
system of Czarist Russia.
This star chamber hearing is, furthermore, a denial of the insistent claim on the
part of the Government that in this country we have free speech and a free press,
and that every offender against the law--even the lowliest of men--is entitled to
his day in open court, and to be heard and judged by a jury of his peers.
If the present proceedings are for the purpose of proving some alleged offense
committed by me, some evil or anti-social act, then I protest against the secrecy
and third degree methods of this so-called "trial." But if I am not charged with any
specific offense or act, if--as I have reason to believe--this is purely an inquiry
into my social and political opinions, then I protest still more vigorously against
these proceedings, as utterly tyrannical and diametrically opposed to the
fundamental guarantees of a true democracy.
Every human being is entitled to hold any opinion that appeals to her or him
without making herself or himself liable to persecution. Ever since I have been in
this country--and I have lived here practically all my life--it has been dinned into
my ears that under the institutions of this alleged Democracy one is entirely free
to think and feel as he pleases. What becomes of this sacred guarantee of
freedom of thought and conscience when persons are being persecuted and
driven out for the very motives and purposes for which the pioneers who built up
this country laid down their lives?
And what is the object of this star chamber proceeding, that is admittedly based
on the so-called Anti-Anarchist law? Is not the only purpose of this law, and of
the deportations en masse, to suppress every symptom of popular discontent
now manifesting itself through this country, as well as in all the European lands?
It requires no great prophetic gift to foresee that this new Governmental policy of
deportation is but the first step towards the introduction into this country of the old
Russian system of exile for the high treason of entertaining new ideas of social
life and industrial reconstruction. Today so-called aliens are deported, tomorrow
native Americans will be banished. Already some patrioteers are suggesting that
native American sons to whom Democracy is not a sham but a sacred ideal
should be exiled. To be sure, America does not yet possess a suitable place like
Siberia to which her exiled sons might be sent, but since she has begun to
acquire colonial possessions, in contradiction of the principles she stood for over
a century, it will not be difficult to find an American Siberia once the precedent of
banishment is established.
Palmer Raids and the Red Scare
The Anti-Anarchist law confuses the most varied social philosophies and isms in
order to cover with the same blanket, so to speak, every element of social
protest, so that under the guise of this single law, striking steel workers, railroad
men, or any other class of workers, may be corralled wholesale and the most
active of the strikers hurried out of the country, in order to serve the interests of
our industrial kings.
Collective bargaining for the workers is now an admitted right, recognized by the
highest officials of the land and accepted by the most reactionary elements. Yet
when the steel workers of this country, after a quarter of a century of desperate
struggle for the right to bargain collectively, have mustered enough spirit and
cohesion to enter into a struggle with the steel barons for that fundamental right,
the entire machinery of government, State and Federal, is put in operation to
crush that spirit and to undermine the chance of establishing humane conditions
in the industry where conditions have been worse than those that existed under
the most brutal feudalism. The workers in the steel industry have expressed no
particular social philosophy. They are certainly not on strike to "overthrow the
government by a force or violence," yet the Anti-Anarchist law is used as a
means to reach out for these simple, hard-driven and hard-pressed human
beings, who have endangered life and limb to build up this devouring monster-the Steel Trust. A reign of terror has been established in the strike region.
American Cossacks, known as the State Constabulary, ride over men, women
and children; deputies of the Department of Justice break into the strikers'
homes, violating the sacred Anglo-Saxon tradition that a man's home is his castle
and may not be entered except by due warrant of law; and to add the finishing
touch to this picture of American "freedom," the Immigration authorities, the men
of your department, take the strikers off secretly and order them deported by
such proceedings as I am being subjected to today, without having committed
even the slightest offense against American institutions, save the one that is the
greatest crime today--the right of the workers to life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness--a right that was made in America, and not imported by these hated
aliens.
A commission, appointed by your department, finds that eighty per cent of the
wealth in this country is produced by these aliens themselves or the sons of
these aliens. In return for this, they are hounded and persecuted as criminals and
enemies.
Under the mask of the same Anti-Anarchist law every criticism of a corrupt
administration, every attack on Governmental abuse, every manifestation of
sympathy with the struggle of another country in the pangs of a new birth--in
short, every free expression of untrammeled thought may be suppressed utterly,
without even the semblance of an unprejudiced hearing or a fair trial. It is for
these reasons, chiefly, that I strenuously protest against this despotic law and its
star chamber methods of procedure. I protest against the whole spirit underlying
it--the spirit of an irresponsible hysteria, the result of the terrible war and of the
Palmer Raids and the Red Scare
evil tendencies of bigotry and persecution and violence which are the epilogue of
five years of bloodshed.
Under these circumstances it becomes evident that the real purpose of all of
these repressive measures--chief among them the Anti-Anarchist law--is to
support the capitalist status quo in the United States. Vain is the pretence that
the safety of the country or the well-being of the American people demands these
drastic Prussian methods. Nay, indeed, the people can only profit by a free
discussion of the new ideas now germinating in the minds of thinking men and
women in society. The free expression of the hopes and aspirations of a people
is the greatest and only safety in a sane society. In truth, it is such free
expression and discussion alone that can point the most beneficial path for
human progress and development. But the object of deportations and of the AntiAnarchist law, as of all similar repressive measures, is the very opposite. It is to
stifle the voice of the people, to muzzle every aspiration of labor. That is the real
and terrible menace of the star chamber proceedings and of the tendency of
exiling and banishing everyone who does not fit into the scheme of things our
industrial lords are so eager to perpetuate.
With all the power and intensity of my being I protest against the conspiracy of
imperialist capitalism against the life and the liberty of the American people.
Emma Goldman
New York, October 27, 1919
Source: Excerpt from the statement Emma Goldman gave at her deportation
hearings. Goldman was an anarchist and socialist who sympathized with the
working poor. She was deported during the Palmer Raids.
Palmer Raids and the Red Scare