Area man was head of ‘hunt’ in W-B

For about 40 local men, the evening and early morning of Jan. 2 and 3, 1920 was unforgettable.

Over several hours beginning late at night, federal agents -- along with Wilkes-Barre police -- raided two hotels and numerous private homes in the city, arresting men they proclaimed communist radicals, bent on overthrowing the American government.

“Wilkes-Barre is a hotbed of these radicals in Pennsylvania,” the Sunday Independent newspaper reported authorities as saying. Agents also “confiscated a large quantity of soviet literature,” the paper reported, adding that the raids had been meticulously planned far in advance.

While many living Americans recall the so-called communist “witch hunt” of the early 1950s, led by U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the 1920 campaign led by a high-ranking U.S. government official who was born in Luzerne County has pretty much faded into history.

Nationwide on that one night, nearly 5,000 people alleged to be dangerous communists, many of them immigrants from eastern European countries, were rounded up with the aim of determining if they should be jailed or deported – once they were convicted.

The government official in charge of those January 1920 raids was the attorney general of the United States, A. Mitchell Palmer, a native of Luzerne County and who cut his political teeth in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

Historical movie

In the new movie “J. Edgar,” the story of former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, actor Geoff Pierson plays Palmer.

In his days as head of the Justice Department, Palmer was an early mentor of Hoover, who would later become famous in his own right as a crime fighter and a pursuer of real or suspected radicals.

Alexander Mitchell Palmer, according to numerous sources, was born at Moosehead, Dennison Township, Luzerne County. He grew up and attended school in Stroudsburg, Monroe County, receiving a degree from Swarthmore College, near Philadelphia, and beginning the practice of law in Stroudsburg.

Becoming active in the Democratic Party, he won election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1908, holding the seat until he relinquished it in 1912.

He impressed party leaders so much that at the Democratic Convention that year he rejected a bid to run for president himself, instead throwing his support to Woodrow Wilson. His reward was an offer to become secretary of war, but he declined it and returned to Stroudsburg and his law practice. He ran for a U.S. Senate seat in 1914 but lost.

In 1917, as the United States entered World War I, President Wilson named Palmer his Alien Property Custodian, in which capacity he took over, administered and sold German property in America. Two years later, Wilson named him attorney general, the chief law enforcement officer in the nation.

Red Scare

By that time, America had entered an era that historians call the “Red Scare.” The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and the creation of a socialist state there sparked fears of socialist uprisings in other countries.

Many Americans were looking with fear at the strong tide of immigration, particularly from eastern European nations. Their concern was that the newcomers might include dangerous radicals and revolutionaries and that, with the blessing of socialists abroad, they would try to destabilize the American government and overthrow capitalism and Christianity.

Palmer, taking over his new post in March, moved quickly and made it clear that his priority would be fighting radicals. One of his early acts was to create the “radical division” within the Justice Department, naming the aggressive 24-year-old J. Edgar Hoover to head it.

Some arrests under Palmer’s direction were made in November 1919. But on Jan. 2, 1920, the action was strong and sweeping.

Starting that evening and extending into the morning hours, federal agents swooped down on suspected meeting places of radicals in about 40 cities of various sizes, mostly in the Northeast, arresting thousands of people believed to be communist radicals.

Numerous people were taken into custody at a North Washington Street hotel, and at another hotel on East Market Street, both in Wilkes-Barre.

“Meetings were in progress in both places,” agents told the Independent. City police officers fluent in foreign languages accompanied the raiders as interpreters. Then the agents moved on to the homes of additional suspects, arresting the occupants.

Newcomers of eastern European descent were the main targets. The federal authorities told reporters the Communist Party in Chicago had issued four official organizational charters for the Wilkes-Barre area’s Russian, Polish, Ukrainian and Lithuanian immigrants. The Communist Party, authorities said, “has a membership of nearly 4,000 spread through Wyoming Valley.”

Such raids should have been no surprise to anyone who had read Palmer’s 1920 publication, “The Case against the Reds,” where in colorful prose he outlined his beliefs and said only quick and drastic action would save America from destruction.

Wrote Palmer, “Like a prairie-fire, the blaze of revolution was sweeping over every American institution of law and order a year ago. It was eating its way into the homes of the American workmen, its sharp tongues of revolutionary heat were licking the altars of the churches, leaping into the belfry of the school bell, crawling into the sacred corners of American homes, seeking to replace marriage vows with libertine laws, burning up the foundations of society.”

Arrest and deport

The 40 people arrested in the Wilkes-Barre area were taken to the Luzerne County prison for Sunday morning hearings, where a federal immigration officer checked on their legal status. Those found “guilty” were to be shipped to the immigration facility at Ellis Island, New York, with the goal of putting them on ships dubbed by federal authorities “anarchist arks” and sent back to their home countries in Europe.

Palmer’s aggressive style soon drew criticism almost as soon as he took over the attorney general post. Many people in his own party were shocked that a liberal Democrat and ally of the idealist President Wilson would virtually ignore civil liberties with midnight raids and arrests.

Union leaders, who supported the Democrats, complained their members were being targeted by the party they’d thought was their ally. In mid-1919, Palmer’s home in Washington, D.C., was bombed, though he was not injured.

While the Red Scare would continue for some time, Palmer left the attorney general’s office in March 1920, just 366 days after taking the job.

He evidently had another goal. Three months later at the Democratic National Convention he sought his party’s presidential nomination. Although he ran strong in early balloting, on the 38th ballot the Democrats finally chose James M. Cox, who would go on to lose to Republican Warren G. Harding in November.

Palmer did not run for office again. But he remained in Washington and continued to participate in Democratic politics, helping to write the party platforms for 1932 and 1936, with Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt winning both times.

Appointee to icon

Palmer’s young employee J. Edgar Hoover would go on to head the new Federal Bureau of Investigation and have an even larger career. He became an iconic figure for the bureau’s crime fighting during the era of prohibition (1920-33), and succeeding presidents allowed him to remain in the post. So powerful and popular a figure was Hoover, in fact, that President Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960s even waived federal retirement rules for him.

Though Hoover’s popular image was that of an intrepid battler against crime and subversion, his FBI was criticized in the turbulent 1960s for investigating seemingly innocuous people such as entertainers and athletes for suspected radicalism.

Hoover died, still in office, in 1972. With his death, the Justice Department’s last connection to the turbulent days of A. Mitchell Palmer and the Red Scare of 1919-1920 was gone.