7-25-07, 9:57 am
Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America, 1919 Ann Hagedorn New York, Simon and Schuster, 2007
It's a familiar story. Thousands of people rounded up – mostly immigrants, but some citizens. The people deemed a threat 'looked' like purveyors of a foreign ideology intent on destroying us, our freedom, our way of life. Maybe they wrote a letter to the editor, or joined a club that was critical of the government. They gave money to charities to help people they felt were imprisoned for political reasons. They spoke out against racist violence. A handful were even members of political parties or organizations at odds with capitalism.
In the end, of thousands rounded up, detained with out warrants or access to their attorneys, only a handful were found to have violated the law – immigration violations not terrorism or conspiracy to overthrow the government. These events didn't only take place in 2001 and 2002 under the Bush administration. It was the summer of 1919, and these were the Palmer raids.
In her recent book Savage Peace, award-winning journalist Ann Hagedorn examines the year following the end of World War I. Though it outwardly seemed to be a year of hope, idealism, and peace, 1919 was a year of terror, fear, violence, and government repression.
By the end of 1918, almost 800,000 Americans had died from war or the flu epidemic that swept the globe. Europe had been decimated. The Bolsheviks and the Soviets seized power in a crumbling Russia. Republicans took control of the US Congress and immediately set about attacking President Wilson's plans for peace. Labor unrest surged as workers saw the cost of living skyrocket and recalcitrant employers refuse to share the profits they accumulated during the war. Lynchings of African Americans, including and often especially of returning Black veterans of the war, spread throughout the South and into the Plains States.
Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, a Quaker with aspirations for the presidency, sought to expand the power of the Justice Department, gain new funding from Congress, and to make a name for himself. To do so, he helped turn social turmoil and protest into one of the biggest menaces of the 20th century: Bolshevism.
There were indeed a handful of organizations intent on using violence to make political statements and ferment revolt. Some such groups built and distributed bombs, either through the mail or in person to prominent persons. One bomb even destroyed Palmer's own home. But, as Hagedorn shows, these events had no connections to the Soviet Union. Socialists and future Communists (the party would be founded in the late summer of 1919) rejected isolated acts of terrorism as politically futile and unconscionable. These political activists saw mobilizing the whole population of workers and progressive people into action to forge social change.
For its part, the Soviet Union sought to open up relations on a friendly and business basis with the US and was hurt by the fact that about $300 million worth of trade deals with American companies were disrupted by Palmer's drive to uproot Bolshevism. (Until Palmer's 'red scare,' many US companies were eager to do business with the Soviet Union,)
Federal law enforcement officials, in fact, knew that the political violence orchestrated by anarchist groups in the spring of 1919, the labor strikes, and African American armed resistance to white-led race riots or lynchings were not Soviet-inspired, funded, or ordered. The government's own network of spies, the more thoughtful ones anyway, reported that dire social conditions fueled the worst actions. Justice Department investigators even had solid evidence that Italian anarchists plotted the bombing of Palmer's home.
But Palmer knew that funds for his departments and his presidential ambitions could not be satisfied by hauling in a handful of anarchists. Thus, a greater threat had to be manufactured, nationwide plots exposed, culprits punished. In June of 1919, just weeks after the bombing of his house rattled him into a daze that thwarted the peaceful nature of his religious beliefs, Palmer told the public that he had a gut feeling that the Bolshevist terrorists were planning a major summer offensive. Set for July 4th, Justice Department officials promised, this wave of violence would be the first major attempt at overthrowing the government and our whole way of life.
Thousands were rounded up, but no Bolshevik plots (or even anarchistic ones) were uncovered. The July 4th terror never took place. But the US would never be the same again. Outspoken activists like John Reed, Helen Keller, and William Monroe Trotter were spied on, and thick files about their activities were compiled at the Justice Department. J. Edgar Hoover was appointed to head up the government's new domestic surveillance division aimed at spying on American's and residents it deemed 'dangerous.'
Combining the journalist's writing style and nose for investigation with the professional historian's archival skills, Hagedorn weaves a tale that encompasses a wide social, cultural, and political scope that really sets a new bar for historical writing. Parallels to our own times aren't explicitly drawn, but the current relevance of Hagedorn's work is unavoidable.
If there is a short-coming in this otherwise brilliant book, it is that Hagedorn presents President Wilson far too sympathetically and as detached from Palmer's nefarious activities. Palmer relied on policies passed by Wilson and the Democratic Congress during the war to suppress criticisms of the government. Wilson had approved the imprisonment of hundreds who openly spoke out against the war, treating them as spies and traitors. And one cannot find any indication that Wilson made much effort to halt the insanity which Palmer fostered after the war.
In the end, however, much like Sen. Joseph McCarthy's efforts a generation later, and Ashcroft's in 2001, Palmer's lofty ambitions amounted to naught. While his attempt to build a career on imprisoning political activists and stirring up hysteria resulted in his eventual political irrelevance and the historical disdain of lovers of civil liberties, Palmer and his ilk could not stop the people and the organizations who sought a measure of social justice and transformation.
