A Treasury of Great American Scandals (24 page)

The horrors of the Civil War were manifold, and Henry Wirz seemed to have been set up by the victors to pay for them all. His trial before a military tribunal was a joke, the verdict preordained. A long parade of prosecution witnesses presented what William Marvel, author of
Andersonville: The Last Depot,
calls “some of the most absurd hearsay that any American judge ever permitted to stand.” Tales of Wirz stomping prisoners to death, torturing them unmercifully, and shooting them for pleasure were laid before the court and accepted without a shred of evidence to back them up. The defense was stymied at every turn. The few witnesses allowed to testify about Wirz's efforts on behalf of the prisoners were dismissed as Southern sympathizers, and those who dared contradict the allegations of the prosecution's witnesses were denounced as traitors. In desperation, Wirz's attorney, Louis Schade, appealed to President Andrew Johnson for justice. “The testimony for the prosecution is loose, indefinite, and in the most part contradictory,” Schade wrote. “Before any other court but that military commission it would have been an easy matter to uncover and bring to light a tissue of perjuries [such] as the world has seldom seen. Time will show that this assertion is no empty one.”

Schade's efforts on behalf of his client were all for naught. Wirz was sentenced to hang. On November 5, 1865, he was taken to the gallows erected in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol. Amid shouts from the gathered spectators of “Remember Andersonville,” Wirz sat on a stool, the instrument of his death dangling above him, as the charges were read. The noose was then fastened around his neck, the trap sprung, and the commandant of Andersonville dropped to his doom. “And thus ended,” wrote one unfriendly correspondent, “the career of a faithful servant of the Devil and Jeff. Davis.”

Now Henry Wirz has his place in the annals of infamy, though obscurity would probably have been a better fit.

A. Mitchell Palmer: Seeing Red

 

 

 

A. Mitchell Palmer proved that giving the people what they want is not always such a good idea. In answering the call for drastic action during the Red Scare of 1919-20, Woodrow Wilson's attorney general temporarily soothed a sweeping hysteria by arresting thousands of suspected alien agitators to great acclaim. But with his Gestapo tactics he spit on the Bill of Rights and reduced the U.S. government to the status of a second-rate police state.

After the Great War, the nation was deeply troubled. Fierce political partisanship had been reawakened following a wartime lull, especially over the peace treaty President Wilson had brought back from Versailles and U.S. participation in the League of Nations. Race riots broke out, lynching swept the country, and a crippling recession was exacerbated by explosive labor disputes. By the end of 1919, there were 3,600 different strikes, many violent. For many Americans, the labor unrest had a sinister Red tint about it. “Outside of Russia,” the widely respected
Literary Digest
warned, “the storm center of Bolshevism is in the United States.” And so it seemed.

The unrest of 1919 was punctuated by a series of bomb attacks on public figures that were popularly attributed to leftist radicals. The first intended victim was Seattle mayor Ole Hanson, an outspoken opponent of such radical groups as the International Workers of the World, whose slogan was, “Every strike is a little revolution and a dress rehearsal for the big one.” Fortunately, the bomb mailed to the mayor—big enough he said, “to blow out the side of the County-City Building”—failed to detonate. Another effort, this time directed at Senator Thomas Hardwick of Georgia, was more successful. The senator was uninjured, however, because he was not home when his maid opened the lethal package and had both her hands blown off. A postal worker reading a newspaper description of the package intended for Senator Hardwick recalled seeing sixteen similar packages set aside for insufficient postage. A subsequent examination revealed that each contained a bomb intended for such prominent persons as John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., and Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. Though the identity of the sender was never discovered, many believed the bomb-laden packages were part of a Red plot.

The parcel meant to kill Attorney General Palmer was not the last attempt on his life. On June 1, 1919, a month after the sixteen packages were discovered (along with sixteen more after further investigation), seven explosions rocked five cities across the eastern United States. That night in Washington, D.C., the attorney general's home was targeted. Palmer, who had been reading in the first-floor library, had retired to bed with his wife around 11 P.M. Soon after, they heard a thump on the front porch, followed by an enormous explosion that shattered windows throughout the quiet neighborhood. Miraculously, the Palmers emerged unharmed, although the front of their home, including the library, was in ruins. The inept assassin had apparently tripped on the front porch, dropped his bomb, and blown himself to bits. Scattered about the wreckage—along with what was described in one report as “great chunks of human being”—were copies of
Plain Words,
an anarchist pamphlet that promised death to government officials. “There will have to be murder,” the tract read, proclaiming the triumph of revolution; “we will kill. . . .” Palmer was convinced that an insidious movement was well underway, and that it would be up to him to save the day.

Palmer had only been attorney general for three months when his home was bombed. President Wilson had not really wanted him for the job. He didn't trust Palmer, but he was too busy in Paris trying to negotiate a peace settlement after the Great War to give the appointment much attention. As a result, Palmer's advocates within the administration prevailed. Had the president been more attentive, Wilson's biographer August Heckscher notes, “one of the blackest marks against his administration—the 1920 raids on radicals and aliens—would never have taken place.”

After the bombings, Palmer had little difficulty persuading Congress to grant him the necessary funds for his fight against the radical elements. But then nothing happened. The attorney general was becoming increasingly skeptical over how real the Red threat actually was, so he watched and waited. Within the Department of Justice, however, he created the General Intelligence Division, a special arm of the Bureau of Investigation, to monitor subversive threats. He put future FBI director (and fellow Hall of Shame inductee) J. Edgar Hoover, then twenty-four, in charge of the operation. Hoover went right to work, creating an elaborate filing system on individuals, newspapers, and organizations he considered dangerous to the nation. It was the beginning of an autocratic career that would last for another half century. But it wasn't enough for the frightened American public.

The labor strife was unrelenting. Federal troops had to be sent into the nation's steel towns, and when 394,000 coal miners went on strike early in November, the public feared a nationwide strike, or worse—perhaps a revolution. Communist agitators were believed to be lurking in every corner, infiltrating labor unions, churches, and universities—laying siege to the very fabric of America. And what, people wondered, was A. Mitchell Palmer doing about it? “I was shouted at from every editorial sanctum in America from sea to sea,” Palmer later said. “I was preached upon from every pulpit; I was urged to do something and do it now, and do it quick and do it in a way that would bring results.”

Even the U.S. Senate demanded an explanation for the attorney general's inaction and passed a resolution of censure against him. For a man of Palmer's presidential ambitions, this was a stinging rebuke. It was time to act. The nation, he declared, was besieged by “thousands of aliens, who were the direct allies of Trotsky,” and the time had passed when it was possible, or even desirable, to draw “nice distinctions . . . between the theoretical ideals of the radicals and their actual violations of our national law.”

To fight the menace, Palmer decided to enforce part of the U.S. immigration code, introduced during the war, that outlawed anarchism in all its forms. That included even reading or receiving anarchist literature. Any violation by an alien meant deportation. It was a good plan, as deportation hearings of the time were a simple matter, handled by immigration officers from the Department of Labor. Although the aliens were supposed to be protected by the procedural safeguards of the Bill of Rights, only minimum proof was needed to show that the immigration code had been violated. There was little oversight of the rulings or opportunity for appeal.

Palmer tested his plan on the night of November 7, 1919, when federal agents and city policemen raided the Russian People's House, a meeting place and recreation center for Russian resident aliens in New York City. Some 200 men and boys were in the building taking night classes. All were put under arrest. When a teacher asked why, since there was no warrant, he was hit in the face and his glasses shattered. The prisoners were herded through a double line of officers armed with clubs. According to one report, thirty-three of them were battered enough to need medical attention. Their injuries, the
New York Times
remarked, were “souvenirs of the new attitude of aggressiveness which had been assumed by the Federal agents against Reds and suspected Reds.” That same night other Russian centers in nine cities were also raided and about 450 people arrested. Although half of them were released almost immediately, Palmer's raids were a tremendous success with the public.

The press, which had been pillorying the attorney general for his inaction the week before, now lauded him as a national hero—“a tower of strength to his countrymen,” as one paper put it. By December, Palmer had secured deportation orders for 199 Russians found guilty under the immigration laws. The prisoners had been assured that no married man would be expelled, and that plenty of time would be given the others to set their affairs in order. Neither promise was honored. The deportees were taken to Ellis Island on December 21, put on board the
Buford,
an old army transport ship now nicknamed “the Soviet Ark,” and shoved out to sea. The action, drastic as it was, was merely a preview of what was to come.

Only a few hundred Russians had been deported; Palmer wanted to snare thousands. To that end, he tried to persuade Secretary of Labor William B. Wilson to amend that part of the deportation law that allowed suspects to secure counsel. He also requested a blanket deportation warrant to cover any aliens discovered once the raids had begun. Wilson balked, but by mid-December he was on sick leave. One of his underlings, John W. Abercrombie, was left in charge of immigration issues and proved much more amiable to Palmer's designs. The right to counsel was suspended, as was the rule that suspects be informed of the charges against them. Also, 3,000 mimeographed warrants were issued, with the aliens' names to be filled in as necessary.

The new series of raids was slated for January 2, 1920. Frank Burke, the assistant director of the Bureau of Investigation, provided some helpful guidelines for the arresting agents to follow: “I leave it entirely to your discretion as to the method by which you gain access to such places [where aliens might be found]. . . . If, due to local conditions in your territory, you find that it is absolutely necessary to obtain a search warrant for the premises, you should communicate with the local authorities a few hours before the time for the arrests is set.” Otherwise, Burke ordered, the raids were to be kept top secret and the aliens held incommunicado. The siege began as scheduled in thirty-three cities in twenty-three states. More than 3,000 were arrested, although the actual number remains unclear because of incomplete or nonexistent records. Certainly all 3,000 blank warrants were used, and as many as 2,000 more people were rounded up. All in all, it was an enormous haul.

The popular acclaim was even greater than before, at least initially. Editorials hailed Palmer. Even the
Washington Post,
which had denounced the November raids as “a serious mistake,” urged quick deportation for this fresh batch of aliens. “There is no time to waste on hairsplitting over infringement of liberty,” the paper declared. But a damper soon came over the excitement as reports of gross abuses began to appear. In Newark, New Jersey, for example, one man had been arrested because, in the words of the arresting officer, “he looked like an alien.” Police burst in on a sleeping woman in Boston and arrested her without a warrant, only to discover she was an American citizen with no Communist connections. In Detroit, all the patrons of a foreign restaurant, as well as an entire orchestra, were hauled away. Stories of the mistreatment of suspects were legion. Many were confined under appalling conditions, including 800 suspects in Detroit who were housed in a corridor of the U.S. Post Office building without beds or blankets. No food was distributed for twenty-four hours, and they shared a single toilet. For many of the detainees, a Russian gulag surely would have been more accommodating.

Investigations into Palmer's raids resulted in sharp criticism of his actions. Twelve prominent lawyers, including several from Harvard University's law school, issued “A Report on the Illegal Practices of the United States Department of Justice,” in which they sharply noted that the real danger to the nation was not a Red revolution, but the blatant abuse of federal power. Examples of egregious violations of the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments were cited. Palmer, the authors said, had ignored due process of law in favor of “illegal acts,” “whole sale arrests,” and “wanton violence.” The attorney general, however, was unrepentant. As he saw it, drastic times called for drastic measures.

“Like a prairie-fire,” he wrote in
Forum,
“the blaze of Revolution was sweeping over every institution of law and order. . . . It was eating its way into the homes of the American workman, its sharp tongues of revolutionary heat were licking the altars of the Church, leaping into the belfry of the school bell, crawling into the sacred corners of American homes, seeking to replace marriage vows with libertine law, burning up the foundations of society.”