The First Red Scare, Part 4
The one that gets dark
Hi guys. I really thought that I could somehow condense this entire thing into like, 50 pages. I could not. I think by now I've written something like 75ish, but I do use a weird font. I read that thing about how comic sans helps you write, but I couldn’t bring myself to do that. Anyway, it's the fourth part of the first Red Scare series. If you haven't read anything on here before, you are going to be very confused about why I am talking about people practicing law and getting mad at the former attorney general like I know him. You also probably be confused about the context of all of the events, which would be a more reasonable thing for me to say first, but I'm not that kind of person.
So, I haven’t done any content warnings, but I feel like I might need to for this one. We're going to be discussing the Red Summer, which you might assume was related to the whole red theme of radicalism, and the strikes that happened. Nope. Red like blood. The Red Summer was the summer of 1919, when a lot of race riots broke out. So I’m going to have to talk about a lot of racist violence.
And now, onto the history. During the first world war, a lot of white men went off to fight. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of black men went to fight. The 369 infantry regiment, more famously known as the Harlem Hellfighters, spent more time in continuous combat than any other American unit of its size. They also suffered more losses than any American unit. They were an all-black regiment because the US hadn’t desegregated its military yet. Would you like to guess when they did it? 1950. We were in the Korean War. Honestly, now that I think about it, I would have guessed like, Vietnam.
But when people aren't at their jobs, like during the steel strike, other people need to take them. When you're at war, some jobs need to be done. Also, the great migration was happening. Because the South was extraordinarily racist, you know, after the war they fought over slavery, a lot of black families who were able to moved up north to cities. Somewhere around six million black southerners would move in the decades between 1916 and 1970. During the war, the military needed more bodies to fight and the companies needed more bodies to fill the factories. And when soldiers came back… well, you know what people are like when they think that a minority has taken their jobs and moved into their cities. I'm not exactly expecting 1910’s American soldiers to be completely up on their conception of solidarity, but maybe they should realize that companies were exploiting whoever they could, and they found someone else they could exploit while the soldiers were at work.
Obviously not. And the South wasn’t any less culpable in this. During the war, sharecroppers somehow managed to make money, which is amazing because the entire idea of a sharecropper is to do slavery 2.0. But everyone needs clothing, and cotton makes great clothes.
Another cause was a movie. Remember when I was talking about how much Woodrow Wilson sucked and I mentioned that he watched Birth of a Nation in the white house? Chances are that you’ve heard of the movie. If you haven't, it’s really bad. It was based off a book called the clansman, so I think you can guess what it was about. By the 1910s, the first Klan didn’t exist. But the south has always loved to romanticize the past (cough, cough, civil war reenactments), so when a, sigh, relatively technically well produced movie came out about the clan saving a white woman from a black man who was trying to assault her - a theme which will be repeated in a lot of made up stories. It also restarted the Klan. And Wilson watched it and loved it, because that man was horrible.
And we aren’t going to forget the black servicemen. I'm not saying that France is a perfect place racially, (cough, cough, Algeria) but it has a different form of racism. And I'm not saying that the military is perfect, or good, but winning a War and interacting with people who were not “1910’s southern racist”, then coming back to the same world that you had lived in for your entire life is a bit of a radicalizing experience. And the white people definitely thought that. If you're wondering how a bunch of race riots tie into the first red scare, things just happen at the same time sometimes. Also, a lot of white people thought that African Americans coming home would bring bolshevism back, because you could just say things and everyone would believe you, even if it was the stupidest goddamn thing possible. Seriously? You needed a new way to be racist? And if anyone did, good for them, I support it.
And why was this the stupidest thing I've ever heard? Well, I’ve brought it up a lot, but the unions were wildly racist and a lot of black workers ended up as strikebreakers. They had their own unions of course. 2025’s Black History Month theme was “African Americans and Labour.” Remember when I said that the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids was one of the only black unions to become part of the AFL? it was established in 1925, meaning that it did not exist during any of you that's that we are talking about. But black unions still existed. Remember when I was talking about Ida B Wells? Well, she came up again, and will come up later. She’s the little biography at the end. Right now, in fact. During 1919, she was on a mission to stop lynchings. of course, Woodrow Wilson was not much help with that, so she ended up on a trip through the south and wrote articles. That is the time period she is most famous for. I’ll discuss the unions later.
All of this combined to create the time that we now know as the Nadir. A nadir is the lowest point of something, the opposite of a zenith. The nadir we are talking about is the lowest point in race relations since the end of the Civil War. While people think that the Voting Rights act of 1965 was the first time black people (including women, because of the 19th amendment) were allowed to vote equally, it is not. No, the first time that black men had equal voting rights to white men was right after the end of the Civil War. You may not have learned much about it in class. Again, I had a great teacher, so I did in high school, but before that, we barely ever got past the end of the Civil War. I'm not saying anything bad about any of my other teachers either, they were also amazing and never taught me any states rights bullshit, but we had other things to get to, and this is not a critical part of my state's education policy. I couldn’t find the word “Reconstruction” once in there.
The 15th amendment was passed in 1870, and it's the one that says that every man can vote. It was passed because, while the South was under military occupation and forced to pass laws allowing black men to vote, the north didn’t. Again, don't get too high and mighty up there, they’re the reason we needed the 15th Amendment. And the government actually enforced this sometimes, which is why there were multiple African-American members of Congress in the late 1800s. South Carolina, elected black men for three of its four representatives. There were even black senators, and this was a time when senators were chosen by the state government instead of elected by the people, meaning that there were multiple state governments that chose black senators.
When reconstruction ended, the military was no longer there, meaning that Southerners could go back to their disenfranchisement all they wanted. The last black representative of the time, Rep. George Henry White of North Carolina, left office in 1901, and no black man would be elected to the house until 1929. The next black senator? 1967. Again, if you would like to remember who was elected as the first ever North Carolina Senator by popular election, it was the guy who opposed anti-lynching bills and headed up a committee to investigate germans during the war. And don't even get me started on the first successful coup in American history. Yes, a white supremacist mob took over the government of Wilmington, North Carolina, deposing the rightfully elected and mostly black members. Don't start thinking you're better than South Carolina. You might not have started the Civil War, but you weren't exactly innocent.
After our little detour into reconstruction, I think you can see why the moral arc of the universe doesn’t bend towards justice sometimes. It’s more like the moral yo-yo is the reactionaries’ favorite toy. The time we're talking about is pretty much equidistant between the end of reconstruction and the civil rights era, so you can see why it’s the lowest point for Black civil rights.
So I’ll start at the beginning of the Red Summer. The first riots were in the south. it wasn't even the red summer yet, it was the red spring. The earliest one was in Carswell County, GA, when two white policemen pulled over a black man named Edmund Scott because they were “looking for alcohol.” Yeah, sure. They found that he had a gun and arrested him. While people think that America is full of guns, and it is, there's a reason that California has such strict gun control. The Black Panthers. They were big on community self defense, which scared a lot of people. Basically all gun control laws trace back to something like that. One of Scott's friends, Joe Ruffin, who was very rich, arrived at the scene and promised to pay his bail. One of the cops decided that he was only going to take cash, then hit Joe Ruffin in the head with a gun, which then went off. Joe didn’t die, but his son Louis, who had just left the US Army and I'm sure had no PTSD, thought that he had. Louis killed both the cops.
So then a mob of 500 white guys came to town, lynched Scott, two of Joe’s other sons, and one of his friends. Also, they burned down the church that Joe Ruffin had been driving to, and the three black masonic temples in the town, because he was a mason. After that, the mob burned down seven more black churches. Joe would have been killed, even though he was not conscious at the time, because everyone thought it was him. Louis also managed to escape. Joe managed to escape and was shuffled around jails across the South. Eventually, after a lot of trials and hiring the best lawyers he could with all of the money that he had, he wasn’t charged with the murder that he didn't do. And he had to live the rest of his life in South Carolina because he wasn't safe in Georgia. This will get worse.
There were the Charleston riots in South Carolina, where at least 1,000 white sailors went on a drunken rampage through the city. The city had to impose martial law. There were also riots in Mississippi, Connecticut, Maryland, Arizona, and Texas.
The start, or at least the point that most people chose to start the red summer, is July 19th-23rd, in Washington DC. A young woman, who was the wife of a sailor, was attacked on the 18th. Remember the thing about the birth of a nation? How it was about a white woman being attacked by a black man? Yeah, I think you can guess what group got blamed for it. At the time, unlike now, the city’s black population was close to 25%, unlike now, when it’s around 41.4%. Anyway, I need to talk about how Washington DC is uniquely fucked over by the entire country.
It has never been allowed to be a state. Everyone really wants it to, except the US government. Congress directly controls the capital, which literally no other country does. We carried it over from the constitution, because the funders explicitly didn’t want them to be represented. If the people of DC wanted something, they could just show up to the capital and annoy them about it. They have a representative, but they can’t vote, they can just show up and talk. They couldn’t even vote in the electoral college for a while. One might connect the dots in their head between Washington DC’s population and the fact that they don’t have representation. I am actually explicitly saying it’s racism. I mean, don’t even get me started on Puerto Rico, because they can’t even vote for president even though they are US citizens. There are more than 700,000 people in DC and somewhere around 3.2 million people in Puerto Rico. Wyoming has 587,500ish people and Vermont has 648,500ish. Sorry, I care a lot about the places in the US that don’t get represented. Did you know that people in American Samoa need to apply for US citizenship? That’s real. The US took over their country and didn’t give them citizenship.
Back to Washington DC before I say something that I can’t take back. Mobs of citizens and off-duty servicemen, mostly sailors, some of whom were wearing their uniforms. They attacked local black neighborhoods and beat random people off the streets.
Would you like to guess what the city’s newspapers were doing? That’s right, encouraging the violence. I’m not anti-journalism, it’s very important, I’m anti-these people. The Washington Post literally published an article in 2019 that was basically “Sorry about that one, guys, we messed up.” The article they were apologizing for was one that basically called up all the soldiers to “clean up” the city.
Obviously, the city’s African-American population wasn't ok with this. About 500 guns were bought that day, mostly by black residents. The police did something for the first time in the story (that’s probably a lie, I want to know what they were doing during the race riots) and they shut down the gun dealers. Luckily, it was 1919 and you could go to the black market.
The violence continued for four days, in which the police did, what’s almost the opposite of everything they could? One or two of the things they could. The NAACP tried to get anyone they could to stop it. They went to the secretary of the Navy, Josephus Daniels, who was from… yeah, the South. Second North Carolina Democrat in the story after Overman, I think, and just as racist. I didn’t mention that Overman struck down an anti-lynching bill, which I probably should have. Anyway, Daniel did nothing.
Wilson finally called in his war secretary and asked him to do something. He hadn’t had his stroke yet and the outbreak of racist violence was outside his house, and it took him four days to ask someone else to fix it. You were the president, it would take you six seconds to do it. He was sick, but it was dysentery. Dysentery doesn’t affect your voice.
I don’t have a perfect count of how many people died. It’s believed that this is the only riot where more white people were killed, but numbers range from 4 to 38 people killed, 5o wounded badly, meaning some of them that died later were probably counted, and a hundred wounded less badly.
The district commissioner blamed bolsheviks. No, it’s dumber than you think. It was a false flag, started by agitators wearing the uniforms of service members. I… I don’t even know what to say, let’s move on.
Chicago. When WW1 slowed immigration, Chicago really needed people to work there. I mean, the people who could have been there were dying in the trenches of Austria-Hungary, so they needed someone to work in the horrible meat factories. Companies literally sent people to the south to recruit black farmers. But Chicago was still full of the immigrants that had moved there before. And do you know what happens when you have a bunch of people who are oppressed, but less than another group? Crabs in a bucket!
It was summer. Summer, shocker, is hot. And getting hotter every day. But it was still hot enough then than people went to the beach. I don’t care if my shoes are melting, I would not step foot in lake michigan. The Edmund Fitzgerald hadn’t gone down yet, so they didn’t know not to be afraid of it then. But the beaches were, of course, segregated. A boy named Eugene Williams was on a raft with his friends. Unfortunately, that day, some black men and women had come to the not legally segregated beach and tried to swim, so a white mob threw rocks. And when the kids floated over on their raft, there were still people throwing rocks. Eugene drowned, and the rest of his friends tried to get someone to help them. The white police officer there, Daniel Callahan, refused to arrest the guy that everyone saw do it, and the black beachgoers, who had come over to try to save Eugene, got angry. If you can guess by the last name Callahan, he was Irish, and the Irish police officers were pretty famous for not doing anything when white people did racism.
Around a thousand black Chicagoans gathered at the beach to tell the police “Hey, everyone saw the guy who did it, why don’t you arrest him and the police officer who isn’t doing shit.” A black man named James Crawford opened fire on the police officers, killing none of them. That is zero, if you thought I might have misspelled or misspoke one. The police retaliated and killed him. But things were getting ugly at the beach. White people started to leave, bringing wildly inflated rumors about what was happening. The race riot had started by that night.
Over the next 13 days, white mobs destroyed somewhere around a thousand homes. The state of Illinois called in a militia force on the fourth day to restore order, but it would take another nine days until the riot had officially ended. In the end, 38 people were dead, 15 white and 23 black. Another 537 were injured, 195 white and 342 black. Around a thousand black families were left homeless.
Next, Arkansas. The Arkansas race riot happened because a group of sharecroppers organized into a union to get market price for their cotton, so they could buy their own land and employ a lawyer to settle their accounts with their landlord. Of course, the idea was that no one would ever get paid well for their labor. Sharecroppers would take their crop to the white landlord, and the landlord would tell them what their bills for living on the land and buying things from what was basically a company store that the landlord set up. Wouldn't you guess it, they never seemed to make money. And then when cotton was extremely valuable, white people realized that this system may not be sustainable. 2/3 of the world’s cotton was grown in the south by these sharecroppers, source Ida B. Wells, and that was a lot of money that was being made. So when they wanted to create a union, I think you can guess what happened.
On September 20th, 1919, black farmers and their families met with Robert L. Hill, an organizer, to form the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America. A white mob shot at them and the farmers returned it in self-defense. One white guy died, so a larger mob formed and killed some number in the hundreds of African-Americans. It, again, took troops to stop the violence. But while this is likely the single deadliest part of the red summer, that isn't the part I'm going to talk about. It was rural Arkansas, there weren't a lot of people writing about it at the time.
But afterwards, there were. After the riot, over 100 people were arrested. I think you can guess how many of them were white, and the number is 0. They were tried for first degree murder, and the judge found them guilty after 6 minutes. It was an all white jury because African-Americans weren’t allowed to serve. 12 of them were sentenced to death and 75 were sent to jail, for sentences ranging from 5 to 21 years.
Ida B Wells-Barnett (she got married) wrote a letter that was published in the newspaper, appealing to African-Americans across the country to raise money for the men on death row. One of those men wrote her a letter thanking her for the money and talking about his situation. She then got on a train down to the prison, and interviewed the men's wives. She was able to interview the men, and wrote an utterly heartbreaking pamphlet about the event. The men were being tortured in prison in horrific ways to make them confess to a conspiracy to kill white people.
Eventually, the NAACP would take their case, and attorney Scipio Jones ultimately won their release from death row in front of the supreme court. But this wasn't the end. The red summer would continue into fall, then winter. In 1921, the Tulsa Massacre would occur in May. It was very similar to the events that we discussed, except for the fact that the police may have been actively involved in dropping bombs on people. There were definitely planes dropping bombs and definitely police in planes, and they were probably the same planes. It was horrible, but not within our scope and this research has made me legitimately sad.
Now, how was this connected to the Red Scare? Well I think you know why. I explained it for each of them. But, in the context of relating everything back to the modern era, there's a certain kind of thing that people do when they have a word that they don't like. They start using it against everything. Woke causes things now in the same way that bolshevism and radicalism caused things in the past. and when using the word allows someone to carry out horrible things against the people that they were already prejudiced against, they're going to do it and then they're going to justify it. But that's enough talk about modern things, onto what I’ve been promising, the Lusk committee. Kidding, kidding, time for the Palmer raids.
I actually don't know why I've been waiting for the Palmer raid for so long. I've been cutting out promises that I would get to this for all of these posts. You would never know how much I wanted to get to these if I didn't tell you.
Aright. It's been a while since I talked about what Palmer was up to, so just imagine the scene in your mind. A. Mitchell Palmer and FDR are sitting on the curb… wait, I need to google something. It turns out it’s really hard to find when they added curbs to Washington DC, but this is to remind you what happened, not an actual retelling of the history. Palmer is sitting on the curb, just kind of staring at the mildly damaged facade of his house while FDR is patting him on the back and mouthing “what do I do about this?” to his wife, who was talking to Ms. Palmer… googling… sources say roberta, most places say “wife” or “Ms. Alexander Mitchell Palmer” which I wouldn’t put in her obituary, but whatever. While Roberta Palmer was talking to Elenore Roosevelt and saying something like “you’re so lucky your husband has a job as assistant secretary of the navy, I’m sure that no Italian will ever try to murder him.” And across the Atlantic ocean, a young Giuseppe Zangara got a great idea - I know he only went after FDR because he was somewhere warm, they also didn’t know it was an Italian guy who had almost blown palmer up either. Palmer then goes into the office and points to J Edgar Hoover and says “You! I’m giving you all the power, now go and suppress the left,” and J Edgar got visions of the fifties dancing in his head. I mean, Palmer called in a guy who recruited J Edgar from the DoJ lawyers, but imagination is a wonderful thing and this is mine.
Even if this was a completely accurate retelling of the facts, which it is not, everything probably would have happened the same way. I mean, Roberta Palmer wouldn't even feel weird about predicting the future because she unfortunately died a few years later. But no matter how much Palmer was banging the table demanding that something happened, in June, bolshevism wasn't as scary to elected officials as, say, reelection. If you would like your civics lesson, I guess I'm going to explain how the US electoral system works.
An election year was coming up in 1920. However, for members of the US house of representatives, an election comes up every 2 years. the even ones. If you've ever heard about the Congress being flipped in the midterms, that's because the entire house is re-elected. so in the middle of the president's term, half of the Congress can be completely changed. It usually doesn't though, because most people run in extremely safe districts. For instance, mine. I'm not telling you where I live, but just know that it's just a very safe district for whatever political party wins every house election. People just see the letter of the party and vote for the person, they don't really care about their policies.
However, that's the problem for the person running. Nobody really likes them as a person. They might, but a lot of people are not invested in local politics. So they will just see the letter of the political party. If the party leadership does not like a representative, they can run a different person against them in the primary. All right, what's the primary? It's when all the candidates who want to run for the party seat run against each other. If they are running in a fairly safe district, and the incumbent (the person currently elected) is doing things that the party leadership doesn't like, they can run a primary challenger. As the national party, they definitely have more money than the incumbent. so they can run a bunch of ads in the district saying that the incumbent isn’t representing the people, and the kind of people that would vote in primary elections, who are extremely invested in local politics, and will definitely have something against the incumbent, will probably vote for the party sponsored challenger. And since representatives need to be elected every two years, they need to keep the people in their district and their national party happy constantly because they are almost always campaigning to not get primaried.
On the other hand, senators. They're reelected every 6 years. Half of them are elected in the midterms, and the other half is elected during the presidential term. Since there are two senators per state, one is elected in the midterms and one is elected during the presidential election. However, that hasn't always been true. The 17th Amendment to the US Constitution was the one that created direct election of senators. Source? I had to memorize all of the Amendments for a test once, and I can definitely remember 13-15, 17-19, and 21. I should probably look up what 16 and 20 are. Nope, boring procedural stuff. Oh, and I can do the beginning and end of the bill of rights, the trial stuff is confusing and there is too much in each amendment. I don't think I need to know my fourth amendment rights because those don't seem to be getting respected right now. Anyway, While the direct election of senators sounds really boring, it is not. Senators used to just be chosen by state legislatures, which meant that they were chosen by extremely rich people. But in 1913, the direct election of senators began to happen, meaning that they needed to start appealing to the normal people. Fun fact, Overman, the NC senator, was the first popularly elected senator in North Carolina history. So, in 1920, the election for half the Senate, the entire house, and the president was coming up.
And then there was Palmer. It's not like he wasn’t legitimately scared of anything, he had almost gotten blown up twice. It wasn't like he wasn't scared of radicalism either. He was a Quaker, and while most Quakers are pretty nice or are Nixon, they are also religious. And what have you always heard about communism? It’s godless. To be fair, they were pretty anti-religion, and usually still are. Opiate of the masses, etc, etc. but you can feel the weight of history bearing down on when you hear what was probably the first major political figure in this to worry about godless communism.
So, after our little civics lesson, we must get back to where we were. Palmer had created the forerunner of the forerunner of the modern FBI, and they quickly got to creating a giant catalog of people. names, addresses, affiliations, all of it. If you know anything about J Edgar Hoover, he is going to take this idea and run with it. Because I'm a giant nerd, here's how a card catalog works. you also kind of need to know how it works to know why they collected all of the stuff that they’re going to take.
A card catalog is a large cabinet (one might even say… a bureau. that's a joke, a bureau is just a dresser) With a bunch of drawers in it. Each of these drawers has a bunch of cards in it which have information on them. J Edgar worked at the Library of Congress, which makes sense because he is very good at this shit. I know that the Library of Congress gets very mad if you imply that the FBI system was based off of theirs, so I'm not saying that they were. I'm just saying that Hoover probably learned something while he was there. I guess I'm going to have to do the second Red Scare, so I'll set everything up now and I'll explain things like his purposeful misfiling later. I don't understand his filing system, so I won't explain that. But I assume a lot of you do not know how to actually work a card catalog, and I don't either. It's all theoretical.
But here’s how a regular card catalog would work. Let’s say I want to find a person. I have a card catalog full of cards with people's names on them, and they're organized by last name. so I would go to the drawer labeled “hol-hov” on it, open it, and look through it to find Hoover. If there were a lot of people with the last name Hoover in there, the people under it might be organized by first name. Since his first name is John, then it would probably be near the front of the Hoovers. And then I would pull the card out and it would have information about him. Most catalogs were in libraries, so they were organized by the Dewey Decimal System. The Library of Congress is organized by their own thing which I am not going to try to understand, and Hoover's was organized by something even more confusing that’s probably more secret.
Anyway, now that I have made a lot of people feel very old, back to the Palmer raids. the radical division, and the justice department as a whole, was not acting as you think the justice department cracking down on people would. Remember, in June, people weren’t too worried about radicalism. They were more worried about, say, the pandemic. I probably should have mentioned that the 1918 flu, or the Spanish flu as it is more commonly known, was running rampant. I don't like saying the Spanish Flu, because the Spanish weren't at fault for it. It started in Kansas, but it started at a military base, and said soldiers were sent over to Europe, where it spread rapidly among the troops. Putting a bunch of sick people, especially sick people with a respiratorily spread disease, in a crowded boat, means that a lot more people are going to get sick on the boat (cough, cough, airplanes, cough, cough)(don’t cough on airplanes). And trenches were horrible if you don’t want to get a disease, so it got everybody from a lot of countries sick. But since Spain had a free press at the time, they weren’t prevented from publishing things that might have been detrimental to morale. Which is why it's called the Spanish Flu. Justice for Spain, they shouldn’t be associated with the pandemic. We should talk about the Spanish Civil War, though.
The justice department was not going to go after people, at least not directly. Remember all of the cards that they had? By then, it was at least 60,000. Unlike in my explanation, they weren't all about people, some of them were about organizations. Which meant that they had a lot of radical propaganda. Again, I don't mean to say propaganda in a derogatory way, that was just what you called your pamphlets at the time. Propaganda was a piece of paper trying to convince everybody that your ideas were right. which means that you can send them out to newspapers. When the Communist party was formed, Palmer himself sent a letter to major newspapers “explaining” (read exaggerating) communists, their philosophies, and actions. If you were wondering how the newspapers seem to get all of these strike calls and manifestos the second that they came off the printers, it's because they were getting sent by the government. Also, when I say manifesto, think Communist Manifesto, not anything else that you might be thinking about.
So why wasn't the justice department doing a lot of things actively? Well, they had made a mistake a little bit earlier. After the Seattle strike, the DoJ was worried about the city. They arrested 54 people, mostly IWW members, and sent them across the country to Ellis Island. The train was called the red special, and that was probably the only reason I could find anything about it, because this is the time when a lot of people were getting deported. But this turned out the heat on the pot under the frog a little too quickly. Most people were fine with it, but a few newspapers realized that this was a little messed up. They said that this was a little bit too far, or, as the New York Call (it wasn't going to be the times, guys, they are going to come up in this, but it's never going to be on labor’s side), as New Yorker Call said “today it is the IWW; tomorrow, the Socialist Party.” I'll give them points for pushing back, but maybe nobody needs to be deported?
The opposition made sure the DoJ had to back off. Most of them were let go over insufficient evidence. Remember the beautiful time when people wouldn't be deported because there wasn't enough evidence? Another 12 of them renounced their beliefs, or at least said they did, and were let go. In the end, only three of them were deported.
This would inform the Department of Justice’s actions for a while. But over the summer, the coal fires were stoked by the strikes, and the pot started boiling. People are writing to Congress asking them to do something. The Senate unilaterally adopted a resolution which essentially asked the Attorney General to tell them what he was doing vis-a-vis the deportations, and if he wasn't doing anything, why?
Palmer realized that this was his path forward. He still wanted a peacetime espionage and sedition act, and this would let him get it. Again, if you remember, the Espionage Act is still in effect to this day, and I don't think it's going anytime soon. The Sedition Act wasn’t, though. Since the radical division believed that 90% of radicals, and in fact the most radical among them, weren’t citizens, the prevailing theory was that if you deported the radicals, the tiny amount of people left would shut up.
He wrote them a letter back, talking about how much of a danger the anarchists and bolsheviks were to the government. Well, talking about that and talking about the danger that radicalism in the black community posed. You know, the radicalism related to the red summer.
And so, finally, began the Palmer Raids. The department decided that, on November 7th, they were going to go after the Union of Russian Workers, especially at their headquarters of the Russian People’s house. November 7th was the second anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution. Keep that in mind, it's why I assume that somebody is going to say something very dumb later.
Now who were the Union of Russian Workers? Established 1908 by refugees of the first failed revolution of 1905, it was an enormous anarchist federation. By the time that we’re talking about it, they had formed close ties with the IWW. Large group of Eastern European immigrants, who are close to the IWW and explicitly anarchist? I don't think anything bad is going to happen to them. I’m just going to check out their statements- oh, they said they were a group of “atheists, communists and anarchists.”
Now you can probably skip ahead over this if you want, but I'm going to get into some grammar stuff here. The way it's written, without the Oxford comma, implies that they are a group who are all atheists, but part communist and part anarchist. This is a hypothetical reading of the phrase we are given, because Russian Orthodoxy was a fairly important pillar of Russia. Both of those groups are opposed to religion, which being a priest after the 1917 Revolution was not a job that lent itself to a long life expectancy. On the other hand, the Oxford comma was popularized in 1905, despite being invented in the 15th century. While there were a lot of people teaching English, I'm not sure if they were looking through the style guides of the Oxford printing press. It has been used in multiple languages, but not consistently. Russian does not use the oxford comma, meaning that the people writing the official statements may not have used it. But since I have no idea what places the phrase was in, because I found it in Red Scare, I have no clue who wrote it, meaning I have no idea what kind of rules they were operating under and what kind of atheist-communist-anarchist combination the URW was working with.
As you can assume by any of the combinations that I laid out, they were not the darlings of the Department of Justice. So, one day before the coal injunction and four days before what would be the Centralia massacre, the raid that Palmer had decided would be first hit the Russian People’s House in New York. Simultaneous raids happened across the country, but the New York one is the one I’m going to talk about, because that's what I have the most information about.
At 9:00 in the morning, federal and state agents closed in on the house. They ended up taking truckloads of papers, and arrested hundreds of people. Well, arrested, “violently assisted” as red scare said, who knows? I think that the best description would be violently arrested, because the police pulled out their clubs. And then they were taken to the police station, where I'm sure nothing bad happened to them. Some of them managed to get released which is pretty impressive. But some of them were just Russian immigrants who needed somewhere to hang out. Russian, shockingly, not the official language of the United States. and since URW also had social and educational parts, a lot of people who went there just wanted to learn how to speak English, or swap borscht recipes or something. They were so ignorant of the radicalism going on that even the 1919 NYPD admitted that they were innocent.
What were the truckloads of paper for? well, remember the card catalog? These papers had a lot of names, and those names got put into the system. They must have had a lot of paper, so I must assume that they just took every single printed thing in the building. Somewhere in the FBI evidence warehouse, there must be three or four boxes of introductory russian-american worksheets and another box of some bored URW secretary's dime novels.
But there were a few of these random Russian workers whose borscht recipe story wasn’t convincing enough, and they were thrown in jail. Some of the people from the URw in Hartford Connecticut ended up being held for up to five months.
State and local governments realize they could do this too. Remember when I talked about the Lusk committee? Well now I need to explain it. Before the Lusk committee, there was a report by a guy named Archibald E. Stevenson. He wasn't any sort of politician, he was a lawyer. He was apparently a very scary lawyer if you were on the left, but he was still just a lawyer. He concluded in the report, you know, the one that some lawyer either wrote or commissioned, that bolshevism was rampant among New York workmen and something needed to be done about it. He used to be part of the Bureau of Investigation, and he had insisted on listing the names of people he considered disloyal. I’m hearing a name, starting with an m, involved in another Red Scare.
He was supported by the Union League club, which, unlike you would have thought, actually had nothing to do with the idea of a labor union. No, it was a private social club founded for pro-union men during the American Civil War who didn't like the city government figures who were sympathetic to the Confederacy. And then they turned out to be a bunch of reactionary weirdos, so they brought the proposal to the state government, who formed the Lusk Committee. They had also done their own inquiry, and I think you can guess what they did while they were doing it. Yep, racism. They concluded “first, an attempt was currently underway to arouse discontent among African-Americans by disseminating Bolshevik propaganda among them; and second, radical forces presently infiltrating organized labor would, if not halted, eventually gain control of the American Federation of Labor.”
The Lusk committee was the closest we’re going to get to McCarthyism in this red scare. It was organized to investigate individuals and organizations in the state who are suspected of promoting the overthrow of the American government. I don't know what they were doing about people who are actually working on overthrowing the government. It is a little bit odd that it does not appear to make actually doing any of these things illegal, but also you are doing illegal things in your pursuit of anarchy, so I don't think that they actually needed to make it illegal. They wrote it surprisingly early, in 1902. I think you can remember what happened in 1901, but if you don't, William McKinley. Remember, when I say New York, I don't mean New York City only, because New York has things outside of the city, and also people outside of the city. Like Buffalo, the city that gives us that one sentence which is just repeating buffalo. Or Albany, the capital.
If you're wondering why it was named the Lusk committee, no, that wasn't its technical name, but it was chaired by state senator Clayton Lusk, and saying the Joint Legislative Committee to Investigate Seditious Activities by Concurrent Resolution every single time I wanted to mention it would get real old real fast. Interestingly for a man named Clayton, he was not born in the south, he was a lifelong New Yorker. You want to know what he studied when he went to Cornell? That's right, we have another guy who studied law. Well, him and Stevenson, but I’ll let an actual lawyer slide.
So what were they doing? Well, they were basically allowed to do whatever they wanted to investigate these people, so they did FBI shit before J Edgar Hoover had ever considered doing COINTELPRO in his card catalog dungeon. They were raiding organizations, helping out the Department of Justice, even infiltrating meetings. They got 30,000 to carry this out, which is somewhere around $554,564.74 in modern money. Before anything started, because this was voted on in March and it would start much later, they started talking to the newspapers. I don't know if everyone was just copying off each other or what, but this was the right place to do this. I mean, everywhere was the right place to do it, but remember yellow journalism? I didn’t talk about it but I’m sure that you’ve heard about it. No, it didn't really start the Spanish-American War, but the big newspaper war between Hearst and Pulitzer happened just 30 years before. Newspapers weren't pretending to be objective at the time.
They were told to start July 1st, but since a bunch of bombs had just gone off, Lusk told everybody to come in on June 12th. I personally would have hated being told to come in half a month early to my job, and most state senators are just as lazy as I am, but somehow this wasn't true in 1919 and everybody was thrilled to start repressing the left.
The Palmer Raids, the one that I was talking about earlier on the URW, was not the first raid like this. It was not even the first raid on a Russian organization in New York City. On June 12th, 1919, which you will note is the day that they all decided to meet, the committee got search warrants to raid a number of organizations. This was of course based on lots of information, yeah, I'm kidding. They apparently found a three page article on the floor of the bureau talking about the conditions of workers in Omsk, Russia that said one thing that could maybe be considered seditious. "Soviet as the form of government, Soviet as the form for emancipation of the workingmen; that is the watchword of the workingmen from Omsk in the same way as that is the watch-word of all the revolutionary workingmen." You will notice where that says American, which is nowhere. They were given the permit by a judge who was experienced in… being a traffic court judge. Yep, that's the guy that I trust to understand radicalism. He only has to deal with libertarians and sovereign citizens, and while I had to explain the difference between anarchists and sov cits to my parents, they are very different things. And they probably didn't exist in 1919.
The first was the Russian Soviet Bureau, which was the bureau set up by the new Bolshevik government to try to secure diplomatic recognition by the US. which is why they were allowed to raid them. If you don’t recognize the government, you can do whatever you want to their buildings. like taking out two tons of documents. Actually, documents, cash boxes, filing cabinets, pictures of people's family, hats. Well, one hat.
How did they have two tons of documents? I know that they were the official government propaganda office, but two tons? How many trees are they cutting down? According to the official New York State archives, it is “correspondence and memoranda from the commercial, diplomatic, legal, and other departments within the Russian Soviet Bureau. There are also mailing lists of individuals and organizations, copies of speeches and articles, and lists of companies interested in doing business with the Bolshevik government. The records also contain reports of events occurring in Russia during the period.” Okay, there were a lot of things happening in Russia at the time, but there were not two tons of documents amounts of things happening. Are you writing down what every single soldier is doing?
The Soviet Bureau was led by Ludwig Christian Alexander Karl Martens, a man with a truly Spanish amount of middle names. He was basically the Soviet ambassador, but he didn't get diplomatic immunity, because, again, the US didn't recognize them as the actual leaders of Russia. Lusk claimed that the evidence they got when raiding the building proved Martens was the “American Lenin”. Lusk also claimed that the government had given him a bunch of money to start an American Revolution. No, he was there to start economic relations between the two countries. They wanted to purchase supplies from the US. That's just capitalism. He then got charged under the immigration act. Eventually, the Soviet government told him to rescind all orders placed in the US, and come back home with his family without officially being deported.
But with these documents, they were able to do the thing that the Department of Justice was doing. Pick people's names off the lists, and then go after them. Also like the Department of Justice, they were more than willing to talk with the newspapers. The LA times carried an eight-column headline about it, which is a lot for something that happened across the country. I would have assumed that it would come from the other Times, but who can say?
As Murray says, and you know this is going to be something ridiculous because the man only says either ridiculous things, or things that are extremely relevant to the modern times, “only the liberal and radical press seemed unduly upset by the unorthodox procedure.” Yeah, I think that a state sanctioned raid on the offices of a sovereign country, or just a state sanctioned raid of anything, might worry a few people. Just one or two, I don't know.
Because all these people were worried about “government overreach” and “wait, is this legal,” the Lusk committee realized that they would have to justify this to everybody. They used the documents that they had seized to say that they had actually stopped a revolution that was going to happen in the US. These offices were the place where all radical activity was planned in the US. Again, they don’t understand anarchists, but communists really did listen to the Soviet Union. Later. Not then, the soviet government hadn’t even taken over the entire country yet.
Of course, there was a kernel of truth in these allegations. By that, I mean that there was a lot of radical literature in there, and it's pretty easy to apply the criminal anarchy charges to those. So the committee was able to continue with its activities. Stevenson - the lawyer - joined the committee as assistant counsel. He also loved to make lists and create card catalogs of people. There is nothing new under the sun, I wonder if he and J Edgar were writing to each other.
Nine days later, on June 21st, which, reminder, is before the committee was even supposed to start, they raided the Rand school of Social Science, the headquarters of the Socialist party, and the local IWW.
If you’re wondering what the Rand School is, it is not actually affiliated with Ayn Rand. kind of the opposite. It was a school established by the American Socialist Society in 1906 that just kind of turned into a school for people who wanted to come there. It was relatively cheap, only 20 cents ($3.70) per lecture. Faculty didn't get paid more than 2,500 a year, but that’s 46,213.73 in modern money. That's about $300 less than the average starting teacher salary right now, so it wasn't bad. I mean, it was bad, but not as bad as it is now. You can buy a lot more for your dollar back then. It honestly sounds great, if I could pay a little under four dollars to go listen to the kind of guest speakers they had, I would be thrilled.
So this was another thing like the URW. Yes, it was started by a radical group, but it kind of turned into a place for immigrants and working class people to learn things. The courses fell into one of three categories, the Local Department, the Workers' Training Course, and the Correspondence Department. The Local Department was what I was talking about, weekend and evening lectures are individual classes for people who lived nearby, but couldn't go to school full time. The Workers Training Course was this, but full time, for students who wanted jobs in things like the Socialist Party or labor unions. The Correspondence Course was a correspondence course. If you've never heard of those, think about when people say that they're going to sell courses online, but this one wasn't a scam. they would send you your work through the mail and you could teach yourself.
This was, as you can assume, not popular with the certain kind of people who form a mob and attack a school. which happened four times. But then the official, state sanctioned, attack on the school happened. Lusk asked for two dozen reporter credentials to make sure that every newspaper that he wanted to talk to could write a story about this. and he made sure that they were much more gentle in raiding the school so that the newspapers would stop getting mad. They again took a lot of papers. I would assume there were a lot, it was a school.
This backfired again. You really don't want to invite the media to your raid, even if you are being very nice, because people start feeling weird that you’re raiding a school full of students. Lusk realized that he really had to use everything that he could find in the school to justify himself. There was a big safe on the premises that the school director didn't let them into the first time. so they went back two days later to open it. And now that they had this, they could say whatever they wanted. Like that the school was planning to propagandize to African-Americans. They did invite W.E.B. Dubois, but that was just because they invited a lot of people and he was very important. It was also established by a prominent abolitionist.
The Socialist Party and IWW raids were very similar. There were only a few people in each. When they rated the Socialist Party, there were a few people playing cards, and one of them got up to show them around. There weren't any plans for radical revolution, but it's a lot easier to make sure people are ok with you raiding the socialist party and IWW, some people were a little bit less worried about this than the Rand school.
So, you can see when I say the Palmer Raids, I don't just mean the raids carried out by the Department of Justice under Palmer. He was the one who kicked off the rash of raids, and he was the head of the Department of Justice, which is in charge of justice for the country. The things that the state and local government did were sanctioned by the DoJ. Also, it's a lot easier to just say the Palmer raids.
Between all of these raids, hundreds of people were deported eventually and Palmer became famous. The nation was thrilled that he had foiled the plot. If you’re wondering when I mentioned that plot coming up, I didn't, there was no plot being planned, they just assumed that since he had arrested a bunch of immigrants, it was for a good reason. They were probably going to do something bad, probably. He became the new Hanson or Coolidge.
Why was he allowed to do this? I haven’t mentioned Wilson in forever, but surely he had an opinion about this, right? Well, he had a stroke in October. People didn't know that until 1920, but the people in the government did. They needed to run the government without him, so he was allowed to do whatever you wanted, basically. Everyone was so busy trying to put out fires that they weren't concerned about trying to stop Palmer from putting out the fire in his own unique way.
Palmer sent a letter about what he was doing to the Senate. Remember that resolution forcing him to either tell them what he was doing, or tell them why he wasn't doing anything? Now, he sent them back a letter which was half bragging about all of the things that he was doing, and half asking them to pass a peacetime sedition act. Now, he could come after both citizens and non-citizens.
So the government, like it always does, moved on from persecuting one group to a different group. The people, the mythical “common people” were upset about the strikes and the riots and the disruptions, and they wanted it to stop. Remember the coal strike? Well, it was getting cold, and people needed it to heat their homes. In the weeks after the raid on the URW, people started to get more and more insistent on deportations. But Wilson couldn't do much, and what he did was focused on the League of Nations, his pet project. domestic radicalism was not important to him. His secretary of state tried to call multiple cabinet meetings, but he was told by the White House that he couldn't do it without approval from them. I say the white house because it wasn't Wilson doing this. and now, we bring up the second Wilson.
If you ever heard that Wilson's wife was running the White House while he was sick, that's kind of true. Edith Wilson was not a girlboss running the government. She was not really big on politics, even when she was the first lady. She was a little bit more worried about making sure that nobody knew that her husband was essentially incapacitated by his stroke. and now, we must get into the most egregious quote from red scare. that's not true, he does write the n-word multiple times. He says “no woman could have been more fickle or indefinite on the specific issue of radicalism than was the President.” I do assume that this is the worst piece of sexism in the book, but that's because he doesn't mention a lot of women. Real “woman be shopping” energy, but it was written in the 50s, so he didn't know that women be shopping.
He then follows it up with the best pieces of political commentary I've read in the book, and one of the best ones about liberals I’ve heard. Not the best, but “Like most well-meaning liberals, his ideas on the subject ran in so many different directions that definite decisions on his part were virtually impossible,” is pretty good. Wilson believed in free speech, but he also believed that bolshevism was so worrying that some restrictions were necessary. He didn't know how to resolve the two, he just thought that both of them were true, and that something needed to happen.
As time went on, he moved from worrying about Europe becoming communist to worrying about American bolsheviks. He was willing to use people's fears for his own gain. He said that the republicans weren’t bolsheviks. But they also were. Hey, he didn't say that, he said the opposite. Any conclusions you jump to are entirely your own. He wasn't going to release Eugene V. Debs, even though a bunch of people arrested under the Espionage and Seditions acts were getting out of prison after the war.
But at the time that we're talking about, he isn't there to do anything. The government is being run by his cabinet, and his very confused position on communism in 1919 allowed anybody to sound like they were correct if they said something about the official White House position on it. The cabinet split itself into three positions. Well, first I probably need to explain what the cabinet is. The president advisors, who are also the heads of various departments. Currently, you have a lot of them, but we've added more over time. All you need to know is that it's a bunch of the president's advisors who also head various parts of the government.
The people in his cabinet that didn't have much of an opinion on the issue were the Secretary of the Treasury, Secretary of Commerce, and the Secretary of War (Which became defense, and then became war again! Fun.) I would have thought that War and Commerce would have opinions on this, especially because of the strikes and the soldiers being sent in to stop them, but I guess I didn't really care. By the way, all of the people except for the vice president and the Attorney General are called the secretary of [x]. The Attorney General is not special, they just have a different name. They’re still the Secretary of Justice, they just don't want to be called that.
On the side opposed to Palmer, you had the navy (Josephus Daniels, still here. Again, you can have people with decent ideas who are horrible people), interior (Franklin K. Lane), Agriculture (David Houston), and our third Wilson. William Wilson was not related to either of the other two, because he was born in Scotland. He was the Secretary of Labor, and he was a surprisingly good person to have the job, because he had once been a coal miner. And he wasn’t just a coal miner, he was a leader in the AFL. He was also the first Secretary of Labor, so he was just kind of cool overall. Another cool thing was that he was the only person willing to stand up to Palmer, especially because of the coal miner injunction. Most of the other people on his side just talked behind Palmer's back to the media.
And then we had Palmer's side. Palmer, of course. The postmaster that we talked about at the start, the Secretary of State Robert Lansing, and the president's secretary. When I say the presidential secretary, I don't mean a position in the cabinet, I mean what you think of when you hear secretary. And since he was close to the president all the time, he was more able to impact his opinion.
And so that's where we will end. The president is sick, the cabinet is arguing, the raids are happening. The machinery of the Red Scare is chugging along, but it’s a plane put together by duct tape, and it will fall out of the sky.
And now, we must talk about my favorite person in the story. I am once deviating again from tradition to talk about a black woman. She also falls under the label of ‘cool’, but Foster ended up the first cool guy. On the other hand, they've all been guys. Now we need to give Ida B Wells her due.
Ida Bell Wells was born enslaved in Holly Springs, Mississippi in 1862, attended the college her father helped start when she was a child, then lost her parents in a yellow fever outbreak at 16. She then convinced a school administrator that she was 18 and managed to get a job there to take care of her siblings. She eventually was able to continue her education, but on a train ride where she had bought a first-class ticket, she was forced to move to the segregated car. She refused on principle, was removed from the train and bit one of the crew members as they tried to remove her, and then sued the railroad, winning $500. The decision was overturned by the Tennessee supreme court, because they sucked.
After this, she started writing about race and politics in the south under the name Iola, because it was not safe to be using her own. She is genuinely amazing at writing, everything I've read of hers is very moving, and he was extremely brave. Eventually, in 1892, she turned her attention to anti-lynching action. Her friend and two of his business associates were lynched. She wrote articles about the murder, and risked her own life to travel the south and gather information on other lynchings. Eventually, an angry white mob stormed her newspaper office. She was in New York at the time, where she stayed after and wrote a report on lynching in America.
She lectured people in the UK to spread awareness, because she existed at a time when spreading awareness was a legitimate thing you could do. There was no posting on social media, someone who knew a lot about it needed to go over to another country and tell them about it. She brought her campaign to the White House in 1898, and called for President McKinley to make reforms. Unfortunately, if you know it was happening at the time, you know he was way too busy fighting the Spanish-American War.
She was very busy, because she was not only actively working to stop lynching, she was a very active feminist. Intersectionality, huh? She wasn’t a fan of the white feminists who were more worried about white women’s right to vote than black women’s. Later, she would be one of the first American women to keep her maiden name when she got married, which is why she is Ida B. Wells-Barnett. She was asked to march at the back of a parade for women's suffrage, which she didn't do. She stood at the side of the parade, and then joined the Chicago marchers when they came by.
Her work with the Alpha Suffrage Club, which was the club that she was a part of that got her invited to be part of the parade, played a role in the victory of women's suffrage in Illinois, a full 7 years before the 19th amendment, the one that let women vote across the US.
Unfortunately, she died on March 15th, 1931 of kidney disease. She was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2020 for her reporting on lynching, which she should have gotten a lot earlier. Ida B Wells is one of the coolest journalists in history, and more people should be like her. I'm not telling you to go risk your life, because you don't need to do that, but more journalists should be willing to publish things that are true, but make people mad.
Shifting gears, the next post is going to be the last one. I do not care how long it is going to be, but all I need to get through is May Day 1920, and the wrap up.
Goodbye, and good luck!