IIITHE RED DELIRIUM

How is all this possible? Why were these men ever convicted in the first place? From the calm of the year of our Lord 1926 it’s pretty hard to remember the delirious year 1920.

On June 3rd 1919 a bomb exploded outside the Washington house of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. In the previous months various people had received bombs through the mail, one of them blowing off the two hands of the unfortunate housemaid who undid the package. No one, and least of all the federal detectives ever seems to have discovered who committed these outrages or why they were committed. But their result was to put a scare into every public official in the country, and particularly into Attorney General Palmer. No one knew where the lightning would strike next. The signing of peace had left the carefully stirred up hatred of the war years unsatisfied. It was easy for people who knew what they were doing to turn the terrors of government officials and the unanalyzed feeling of distrust of foreigners of the average man into a great crusade of hate against reds, radicals, dissenters of all sorts. The Department of Justice, backed by the press, frenziedly acclaimed by the man on the street, invented an immanent revolution. All the horrors of Russian Bolshevism were about to be enacted on our peaceful shores. That fall the roundup began. Every man had his ear to his neighbor’s keyhole. This first crusade culminated in the sailing of the Buford, the “soviet ark” loaded with alien “anarchists” and in the preparation of the famous list of eighty thousand radicals who were to be gotten out of the way.

But that was not enough to satisfy the desire for victims of the country at large, and the greed of the detectives and anti-labor operatives of different sorts who were making a fat living off the Department of Justice. So the January raids were planned.

The following paragraph from Louis F. Post’s book shows that he, seeing the thing from the inside as Assistant Secretary of Labor, felt that the hysteria was being pretty consciously directed:

“The whole red crusade seems to have been saturated with ‘labor spy’ interests—the interests, that is, of private detective agencies which, in the secret service of masterful corporations, were engaged in generating and intensifying industrial suspicions and hatreds. It was under these influences, apparently,that the appropriations authorized by Congress “for the detection and prosecution of crimes” exclusively, were in part diverted to the rounding-up of aliens, not as criminals but as the possible subjects for administrative deportation.”

The January raids were aimed at the “Communists.”

“Hardly had the year nineteen-twenty opened” says the former Assistant Secretary of Labor, “when the Department of Justice entered upon the red crusade for which its raiding of the preceding November had been a tryout. Numerously recruited for the occasion from roughneck groups of the strikebreaking variety and actively supported by local police authorities, the detective auxiliary of the Department of Justice spent the night of the second day in January at raiding lawful assemblages in more than thirty cities and towns of the United States—thirty-three being the number officially reported. Their object was wholesale arrests in furtherance of the plans already outlined for mass deportations of alien members of the Communist and the Communist-Labor parties. The approximate number of arrests officially reported was 2,500.”

The details can be read in the pamphlet onIllegal Practices of the Department of Justiceprepared in May of the same year by a committee of twelve well-known lawyers.

Here is the preface to that pamphlet:

TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE:

For more than six months we, the undersigned lawyers, whose sworn duty it is to uphold the Constitution and Laws of the United States, have seen with growing apprehension the continued violation of that Constitution and breaking of those Laws by the Department of Justice of the United States government.

Under the guise of a campaign for the suppression of radical activities, the office of the Attorney General, acting by its local agents throughout the country, and giving express instructions from Washington, has committed continual illegal acts. Wholesale arrests both of aliens and citizens have been made without warrant or any process of law; men and women have been jailed and heldincomunicadowithout access of friends or counsel; homes have been entered without search warrant and property seized and removed; other property has been wantonly destroyed; workingmen and workingwomen suspected of radicalviews have been shamefully abused and maltreated. Agents of the Department of Justice have been introduced into radical organizations for the purpose of informing upon their members or inciting them to activities; these agents have even been instructed from Washington to arrange meetings upon certain dates for the express object of facilitating wholesale raids and arrests. In support of these illegal acts, and to create sentiment in its favor, the Department of Justice has also constituted itself a propaganda bureau, and has sent to newspapers and magazines of this country quantities of material designed to excite public opinion against radicals, all at the expense of the government and outside the scope of the Attorney General’s duties.

We make no argument in favor of any radical doctrine as such, whether Socialist, Communist or Anarchist. No one of us belongs to any of these schools of thought. Nor do we now raise any question as to the Constitutional protection of free speech and a free press. We are concerned solely with bringing to the attention of the American people the utterly illegal acts which have been committed by those charged with the highest duty of enforcing the laws—acts which have caused widespread suffering and unrest, have struck at the foundation of American free institutions, and have brought the name of our country into disrepute.

These acts may be grouped under the following heads:

The Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides:

“Excessive bail shall not be required nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”

Punishments of the utmost cruelty, and therefore unthinkable in America, have become usual. Great numbers of persons arrested, both aliens and citizens, have been threatened, beaten with blackjacks, or actually tortured * * *

The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution provides:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

Many hundreds of citizens and aliens alike have been arrested in wholesale raids, without warrants or pretense of warrants. They have then either been released, or have been detained in police stations or jails for indefinite lengths of time while warrants were being applied for. This practice of making mass raids and mass arrests without warrant has resulted directly from the instructions, both written and oral, issued by the Department of Justice at Washington.

The Fourth Amendment has been quoted above.

In countless cases agents of the Department of Justice have entered the homes, offices, or gathering places of persons suspected of radical affiliations, and, without pretense of any search warrant, have seized and removed property belonging to them for use by the Department of Justice. In many of these raids property which could not be removed or was not useful to the Department, was intentionally smashed and destroyed.

We do not question the right of the Department of Justice to use its agents in the Bureau of Investigation to ascertain when the law is being violated. But the American people have never tolerated the use of undercover provocative agents or “agents provocateurs,” such as have been familiar in old Russia or Spain. Such agents have been introduced by the Department of Justice into the radical movements, have reached positions of influence therein, have occupied themselves with informing upon or instigating acts which might be declared criminal, and at the express direction of Washington have brought about meetings of radicals in order to make possible wholesale arrests at such meetings.

The Fifth Amendment provides as follows:

“No person * * * shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

It has been the practice of the Department of Justice and its agents, after making illegal arrests without warrant, to question and to force admission from him by terrorism, which admissions were subsequently to be used against him in deportation proceedings.

(6)Propaganda by the Department of Justice:

The legal functions of the Attorney General are: to advise the Government on questions of law, and to prosecute persons who have violated federal statutes. For the Attorney General to go into the field of propaganda against radicals is a deliberate misuse of his office and a deliberate squandering of funds entrusted to him by Congress. * * *

Since these illegal acts have been committed by the highest legal powers in the United States, there is no final appeal from them except to the conscience and condemnation of the American people. American institutions have not in fact been protected by the Attorney General’s ruthless suppression. On the contrary these institutions have been seriously undermined, and revolutionary unrest has been vastly intensified. No organizations of radicals acting through propaganda over the last six months could have created as much revolutionary sentiment in America as has been created by the acts of the Department of Justice itself.

Even were one to admit that there existed any serious “Red menace” before the Attorney General started his “unflinching war” against it, his campaign has been singularly fruitless. Out of the many thousands suspected by the Attorney General (he had already listed 60,000 by name and history on November 14, 1919, aliens and citizens) what do the figures show of net results? Prior to January 1, 1920, there were actually deported 263 persons. Since January 1 there have been actually deported 18 persons. Since January 1 there have been ordered deported an additional 529 persons and warrants for 1,547 have been cancelled (after full hearings and consideration of the evidence) by Assistant Secretary of Labor Louis F. Post, to whose courageous re-establishment of American Constitutional Law in deportation proceedings are due the attacks that have been made upon him. The Attorney General has consequently got rid of 810 alien suspects, which, on his own showing, leaves him at least 59,160 persons (aliens and citizens) still to cope with.

It has always been the proud boast of America that this is a government of laws and not of men. Our Constitution and laws have been based on the simple elements of human nature. Free men cannot be driven and repressed; they must be led. Free men respect justice and follow truth, but arbitrary power they will oppose until the end of time. There is no danger of revolution so great as that created by suppression, by ruthlessness, and by deliberate violation of the simple rules of American law and American decency.

It is a fallacy to suppose that, any more than in the past, any servant of the people can safely arrogate to himself unlimited authority. To proceed upon such a supposition is to deny the fundamental American theory of the consent of the governed. Here is no question of a vague and threatened menace, but a present assault upon the most sacred principles of our Constitutional liberty.

The foregoing report has been prepared May, 1920, under the auspices of the National Popular Government League, Washington, D. C.

R. G. Brown, Memphis, Tenn.Zecheriah Chafee, Jr., Cambridge, Mass.Felix Frankfurter, Cambridge, Mass.Ernst Freund, Chicago, Ill.Swinburne Hale, New York CityFrancis Fisher Kane, Philadelphia, Pa.Alfred S. Niles, Baltimore, Md.Roscoe Pound, Cambridge, Mass.Jackson H. Ralston, Washington, D. C.David Wallerstein, Philadelphia, Pa.Frank P. Walsh, New York City.Tyrrell Williams, St. Louis, Mo.

R. G. Brown, Memphis, Tenn.

Zecheriah Chafee, Jr., Cambridge, Mass.

Felix Frankfurter, Cambridge, Mass.

Ernst Freund, Chicago, Ill.

Swinburne Hale, New York City

Francis Fisher Kane, Philadelphia, Pa.

Alfred S. Niles, Baltimore, Md.

Roscoe Pound, Cambridge, Mass.

Jackson H. Ralston, Washington, D. C.

David Wallerstein, Philadelphia, Pa.

Frank P. Walsh, New York City.

Tyrrell Williams, St. Louis, Mo.

The raids were particularly intense and violent in the industrial towns round Boston and culminated in the captives being driven through the streets of Boston chained together in fours. There were raids in Boston, Chelsea, Brockton, Bridgewater, Norwood, Worcester, Springfield, Chicopee Falls, Lowell, Fitchburg, Holyoke, Lawrence and Haverhill. Unfortunate people after being beaten up and put through the third degree were concentrated at Deer Island under the conditions that have become public through U. S. Circuit Judge Anderson’s decision on the cases that came up before him.

Now it is this ring of industrial towns round Boston that furnish the background of the Sacco-Vanzetti case. There is no doubt that the American born public in these towns on the whole sympathizes with the activities of the detectives. The region has been for many years one of the most intense industrial battlegrounds in the country. People slept safer in their beds at the thought of all these agitators, bombsters, garlic-smellingwops, and unwashed Russians being under lock and key at Deer Island.

Eastern Massachusetts has a threefold population living largely from manufacturing of textiles and shoes and other leather goods. With the decline of shipping and farming the old simonpure New England stock, Congregationalist in faith, Republican in politics, has been pretty well snowed under by the immigration first of Irish Catholics, congenital Democrats and readers of Hearst papers, now assimilated and respectable, and then of Italians, Poles, Slovaks, transplanted European peasants tenderly known to newspaper readers as the scum of the Mediterranean or the scum of Central Europe. There’s no love lost between the first two classes, but they unite on the question of wops, guineas, dagoes. The January raids, the attitude of press and pulpit, howling about atrocities, civilization (which usually means bank accounts) endangered, women nationalized, put the average right-thinking citizen into such a state of mind that whenever he smelt garlic on a man’s breath he walked past quickly for fear of being knifed. A roomful of people talking a foreign language was most certainly a conspiracy to overturn the Government. Read over the articles in theBoston Transcripton the soviet conspiracy at that time and you will see what kind of stuff was being ladled out even to the intelligent highbrow section of the entrenched classes.

It was into this atmosphere of rancor and suspicion, fear of holdups and social overturn that burst the scare headlines of the South Braintree murders. Pent-up hatred found an outlet when the police in Brockton arrested Sacco and Vanzetti, wops who spoke broken English, anarchists who believed neither in the Pope nor in the Puritan God, slackers and agitators, charged with a peculiarly brutal and impudent crime. Since that moment these people have had a focus for their bitter hatred of the new, young, vigorous, unfamiliar forces that are relentlessly sweeping them on to the shelf. The people of Norfolk county and of all Massachusetts decided they wanted these men to die.

Meanwhile the red delirium over the rest of the country had slackened. Something had happened that had made many people pause and think.

About dawn on May 3rd the body of Andrea Salsedo, an anarchist printer, was found smashed on the pavement of Park Row in New York. He had jumped or been thrown from the offices of the Department of Justice on the fourteenth floor of the Park Row building, where he and his friend Elia had been secretly imprisoned for eight weeks. Evidently they had continually tortured him during that time; Mr. Palmer’s detectives were “investigating” anarchist activity. A note had been smuggled out somehow, and a few days before Vanzetti had been in New York as the delegate of an Italian group to try to get the two men out on bail. After Salsedo’s death Elia was hurried over to Ellis Island and deported. He died in Italy. But from that time on the holy enthusiasm for red-baiting subsided. That tortured body found dead and bleeding in one of the most central and public spots in New York shocked men back into their senses.

When Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested in the trolley car in Brockton the night of May 5th, Sacco had in his pocket the draft of a poster announcing a meeting of protest against what they considered the murder of their comrade. They were going about warning the other members of their group to hide all incriminating evidence in the way of “radical” books and papers so that, in the new raid that they had been tipped off to expect, they should not be arrested and meet the fate of Salsedo.

Don’t forget that people had been arrested and beaten up for distributing the Declaration of Independence.

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