The Palmer Raids

by Jack R Johnson 09.2025

A sad truism lately is that we live in a violent and politically polarized time with successful assassinations and assassination attempts happening in the space of weeks. Yet politically charged violence has been with us since our origins, up through the Civil War and the beginning of the 20th century when the Industrial Revolution created enormous wealth disparity, similar to what we are experiencing today. During that period, foreign ideologies that threatened the established order were often violently suppressed. From 1919 to 1920, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer led a series of violent and illegal raids to arrest, torture and deport thousands of innocent immigrant families without legal hearings: the infamous Palmer Raids. 

After World War 1, strikes were common as unions fought for a decent living-- there were over 3,600 strikes in 1919 alone. Employers did their best to paint the striking workers as subversives. The Russian Revolution of 1917 only heightened the tension.  In May of 1919, radicals mailed bombs to the mayor of Seattle and a U.S. Senator, blowing the hands off the senator’s domestic worker. The next month, in June, eight bombs exploded outside the homes of prominent men, including the new attorney general A. Mitchell Palmer. A militant anarchist named Carlo Valdinoci died in the attack which blew off the front of Palmer’s home in Washington, D.C. The bombing was just one in a series of coordinated attacks that day on judges, politicians, law enforcement officials, and others in eight cities nationwide. The next day, a postal worker in New York City intercepted 16 more packages addressed to political and business leaders, including John D. Rockefeller. 

At the time, Attorney General Mitchell Palmer declaimed, “I was shouted at from every editorial sanctum in America from sea to sea; I was preached upon from every pulpit, and I was urged — I could feel it dinned into my ears —  throughout the country to do something and do it now!” 

Attorney General Palmer-- who had his eye on the White House in 1920—created a small division to gather intelligence on the radical threat and vowed to find the mastermind behind the May and June bombings. He placed a young Justice Department lawyer named J. Edgar Hoover in charge. Hoover collected and organized intelligence gathered by the Bureau of Investigation (the FBI’s predecessor) and by other agencies to identify anarchists most likely involved in violent activity. 

Launched in November on the second anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the initial raid was violent, angry, and likely illegal. According to Christopher Finan in From the Palmer Raids to the Patriot Act, the first raid was at a Russian immigrant People’s house, just off Union Square in New York City. “The agents barged in, guns drawn and ordered everyone to stand.  One agent told an old Russian math teacher named Mitchel Lavrowsky to remove his eyeglasses. Then the agent struck Lavrowsky in the head. Two more agents joined the assault, beating the teacher until he could not stand and then they threw him down the stairwell. […]There were several hundred people in the Russian People’s House that night, most of them students. After they were searched and relieved of any money, the students were ordered out of their classrooms and into a gauntlet of men who struck them and pushed them down the stairs toward the waiting police wagons. Later, Mitchel Lavrowsky was sent home at midnight with a fractured head, shoulder, and foot.”

The roundup of Russians continued through the night and into the next day. “The police burst into apartments and dragged people from their beds. Sometimes they had arrest warrants, but usually they simply arrested everyone they found. In the end, the Department of Justice grabbed more than one thousand people in eleven cities. Approximately 75 percent of those arrested were guilty of nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

 In January, a second, even larger series of raids by Palmer seized over three thousand members of two new American parties—the Communist Party and the Communist Labor Party. Using the newly passed Sedition Act of 1918, suspected radicals and foreigners identified by J. Edgar Hoover, including well-known leaders Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, were hauled into jail. With much public fanfare, a number of radicals were even put on a ship dubbed the “Red Ark” or “Soviet Ark” by the press and deported to Russia. 

Outside of bad publicity, and fear mongering, the Palmer raids accomplished little of substance. Attorney General Michel Palmer never discovered who was behind the June bombings that blew off the front of his house. Hardly subversive, many of those arrested and held for deportation did not believe in violence at all. The famous radical, Emma Goldman attacked the effort as an assault on free speech. "What becomes of this sacred guarantee of freedom of thought and conscience when persons are being persecuted and driven out for the very motives and purposes for which the pioneers who built up this country laid down their lives? ... Under the mask of the same Anti-Anarchist law every criticism of a corrupt administration, every attack on Government abuse, every manifestation of sympathy with the struggle of another country in the pangs of a new birth—in short, every free expression of untrammeled thought may be suppressed utterly, without even the semblance of an unprejudiced hearing or a fair trial."

According to Finan, “Two months later, Hoover was standing on the dock as a decrepit government ship, the Buford, departed for Russia, carrying Goldman and 248 other deported radicals under heavy military guard.”

Goldman never returned to the United States alive. Her body was returned for burial in 1940, but her final words about the suppression under the Palmer raids remain. “The free expression of the hopes and aspirations of a people is the greatest and only safety in a sane society,” she said. 

Footnote: One silver-lining—the American Civil Liberties Union, or ACLU, was created in 1920 as a direct result of the Palmer Raids. The ACLU’s first action was to challenge the Sedition Act of 1918.  It took until 1969, but finally the ACLU's long fight against laws punishing political speech culminated in the Supreme Court case, Brandenburg v. Ohio which invalidated the remaining state and federal sedition laws. The ruling established that the government can only penalize speech that is a direct incitement to "imminent lawless action." In other words, you can’t be thrown in jail for supporting an unpopular opinion or ideology, despite powerful people that might think otherwise.