When the United States tried to get rid of their radicals

In the night between 7 and 8 November 1919, thousands of police officers throughout the United States participated in a series of violent operations in which hundreds of foreigners and registered American citizens or only sympathizers of the labor movement were beaten and arrested. During those who were nicknamed "Palmer raids" in the following three months, from the name of the head of the US Department of Justice who had organized them, ten thousand people were arrested, almost all of them foreigners, and hundreds more were deported to their countries of origin. Although Palmer was eventually defeated and his strategy abandoned, his raids marked a turning point in the history of a country that built an important piece of its identity on inclusion and openness.

As Adam Hochschild said in an article published this week on New Yorker, it had long been in reality that the United States had set out on the road to closure and nativism. The prohibitionist movement, which in those years had succeeded in imposing its vision on the whole country, had its basis precisely in the growing feeling of alienation experienced by the Americans who lived in rural areas with respect to the cities, increasingly rich and central in the country life, but also increasingly cosmopolitan and international. Politicians, columnists and newspapers rode these feelings, fueling suspicion and intolerance. It was what historians have called the first "populist" period in US history.

This type of hostility had not always had a strictly political matrix. It was, above all, a racial and religious issue. The foreigners and the "non-Americans" against whom the controversy was concentrated were Italian, Polish, Orthodox, Russian and Jewish Catholics. Blacks, freed from slavery by little more than a generation, were an equally frequent target. But with the passage of time, economic and political issues became increasingly central. Foreigners, in fact, were generally inhabitants of the suburbs of large centers, almost always they were industrial workers and very often they were part of trade unions or other organizations of the workers' movement. The fear that foreigners wanted to overthrow, in addition to customs and religion, even the economic system of "real Americans", became more and more widespread. After the victory of the Bolshevik communists in Russia in 1917, the fear of a social insurrection scaled the hierarchies of the concerns of the newspapers and conservative politicians.

Thus began the first "Red Scare", the period of paranoia for an imminent socialist revolution in the United States (before to distinguish it from the second, and more famous, started after the Second World War and historically associated with Senator Joseph McCarthy). Woodrow Wilson, the former rector of the prestigious Harvard University, elected president of the United States with the Democratic Party, was also a spokesman. "Lenin's disciples are among us," he said in 1919, shortly before he was paralyzed by a stroke: "They are like poison in the veins of the free American people." A few years earlier he had eloquently described who had brought that poison: men of the "lower classes" from Italy, Hungary and Poland, men "without skill, energy, initiative or intelligence".

To feed the paranoia there was the fact that they were years of very strong tensions in the workplace. The workers basically had no rights and the abuses, accidents and violence in the flourishing industry of the country were very frequent. The trade union movement was taking shape, and strikes often ended in clashes between protesters and armed militias of the large industrial groups, sometimes supported by the police and the regular army. When the first economic difficulties started due to the demobilization of the war industry, the clashes became even more difficult. The anarchists, very often Italian, began a campaign of attacks against politicians held responsible for the repression. In 1919 alone there were more than a dozen explosive attacks and nearly 40 bomb letters were sent.

With the presidential elections of 1920 approaching, numerous Republican and Democratic politicians chose foreign workers affiliated with labor organizations, accused of wanting to subvert the traditional American social order, as a scapegoat for their presidential campaigns. Alexander Mitchell Palmer, the head of the Justice department, thought about it in the Democratic Party. His young right hand man, Edgar J. Hoover, took charge of putting his words into practice, and in later years he would climb the American political hierarchy becoming the first FBI chief and the biggest enemy of American radicals for a whole generation.

Palmer's plan was relatively simple: throughout the year that preceded the elections he intended to use his powers to make a series of massive and spectacular operations with which to hit the gathering places of the workers' movement. The raids should have been highly publicized and should have ended with the expulsion of thousands of foreign workers and "fake Americans".

The first operation of this kind took place on the night of 7 November, a day chosen not by chance: it was the second anniversary of the October Revolution. The target was the offices of the Union of Russian Workers, a small organization of anarchist inspiration, composed of about ten thousand Russian emigrants. Over the course of the night, thousands of policemen and agents of the Justice Department attacked the headquarters of the organization in twelve cities. More than 1,182 people were arrested and interrogated, but an even greater number were beaten, briefly detained and then released. The newspaper New York World who also supported Palmer and his raids like most of the press, wrote that after the attack a night school for workers appeared as if "a bomb had burst inside it". Chairs, desks and furniture lay shattered everywhere, pieces of torn paper scattered around the building were stained with blood, while most of those arrested had left the building with their heads wound and bandaged.

Not all the people involved were militants or activists. The police attacked dance halls, vegetarian restaurants and funeral collections. And not only foreigners were involved. Russian-born feminist activist Emma Goldman saw her citizenship withdrawn thanks to a quirk and was expelled along with hundreds of other workers. THE Palmer raids, says Hochschild in his article, reached its climax on 2 January 1920, with operations in more than 30 cities. This time, the two American communist parties, which together did not reach 40 thousand members, 90 percent of whom were immigrants, were targeted.

Just when the operations seemed to be proceeding without pause, a reaction arrived. In a series of coincidences, the post of Secretary of Labor was taken over by Louis F. Post, a labor rights activist with a bizarre resemblance to Soviet leader Leon Trotsky. As head of the Ministry of Labor Post, an experienced administrator who knew all the intricacies of US bureaucracy, had responsibility for immigration and therefore also for expulsions. From his position of strength, he began to thwart the policies of Palmer and Hoover at every turn.

Post was able to block most of the expulsions and provided Congress with the information necessary to prepare a long report in which the anti-constitutional methods of its rivals were accused, complete with photographs and testimonies of the violence. Palmer and Hoover responded by accusing Post of being a Bolshevik and raising the tone of the controversy even more. The labor movement, they said, was preparing for a mass uprising for the May Day party in 1920.

When the party was just a few days away, the United States was at the height of tension. Hochschild reports that the New York police were put on alert 24 hours a day, machine guns were set up in key locations in Boston while the Chicago police carried out 360 preventive arrests against activists and militants of the movement. When the May Day celebrations took place without significant incidents across the country, Palmer and Hoover's campaign suffered a blow from which they would never recover. Palmer lost the Democratic Party primaries, as did the three Republicans who supported his campaign. The winner of the elections in the end was Warren Harding, a moderate Republican who said "too much has been said about Bolshevism" and that he believed a "return to normality" was necessary.

Despite moles Palmer raids a total of about ten thousand people had been arrested, also thanks to the efforts of men like the Post the number of expelled was less than 600. But if the progressives had won the battle against deportations, another clash ended up being lost. In 1924 the Johnson-Reed Act was approved, a law that established a strict quota system for admissions in the United States, designed with the aim of maintaining the ethnic and national composition that the country had at that time. Ten years later, it was the Johnson-Reed Act that made the escape of thousands of Jews from Europe seeking salvation from Nazi persecution in the United States impossible.