American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [176]
With Secretary Wilson turning over effective control of his department to subordinates, Palmer saw an opportunity. Commissioner-General Caminetti had already shown that he was committed to the idea of rounding up alien radicals. In Secretary Wilson’s absence, Caminetti made an end run around his superiors and worked directly with Palmer and the Justice Department. His liaison was the twenty-four-year-old head of the General Intelligence Division, J. Edgar Hoover, whom a congressman referred to as a “slender bundle of high-charged electric wire.” A direct phone line to Hoover’s Washington office would be installed at Ellis Island.
If the earlier roundups of suspected radicals consisted of mostly obscure figures from the West Coast, the main targets of the fall 1919 campaign were the country’s most notorious radicals: Emma Goldman and her former lover Alexander Berkman. Goldman was a notorious nonconformist known for her fiery rhetoric and anarchist beliefs. The U.S. attorney Francis G. Caffey referred to her as a “continual disturber of the peace.” Berkman’s claim to fame was his attempted murder of industrialist Henry Clay Frick, for which he served fourteen years in jail.
Both Berkman and Goldman had been born in Russia. Goldman had arrived at Castle Garden in 1886. Berkman was not a citizen, but Goldman claimed citizenship via a brief 1887 marriage to Jacob Kershner, a naturalized Russian immigrant. Goldman’s citizenship should have left her immune from deportation, but that was not to be.
Beginning in 1907, immigration officials began to monitor Goldman closely. Commerce and Labor secretary Oscar Straus began going after anarchists, in part to compensate for the criticism he was receiving from restrictionists. “There is no doubt about it that Emma Goldman, who is a woman of the French Revolution type, is dangerous by reason of her incendiary ability,” Straus wrote in his diary. Secret Service agents monitored Goldman’s public speeches.
For two years, Straus vacillated on the Goldman case. At one point, he ordered Robert Watchorn to take her into custody at Ellis Island for an administrative hearing. Yet that never happened. Straus claimed that Goldman’s speeches were “very skillfully worded so as not to be actionable.” He argued that although she was an anarchist, arresting her would only add to her prestige among radicals.
As Straus continued to debate action against Goldman, a federal judge revoked her ex-husband’s citizenship as fraudulent. It was a peculiar move. By 1909, Kershner was dead and it was not readily apparent why the government thought it necessary to pull the citizenship from a corpse. The move was not really about Kershner, who had been little more than a poor factory worker. The real target was Emma Goldman. In revoking Kershner’s citizenship, the government also revoked Goldman’s. By this dubious legal move, Goldman was now subject to deportation under the immigration law.
This did not put Goldman in immediate jeopardy, although she was more than capable of getting into trouble on her own. Before World War I, she was arrested for lecturing on birth control. Her real problems began after the United States entered the war, as officials continued to monitor her speeches for criticisms of the war effort. In 1917, Goldman and Berkman were arrested under the Espionage Act for speaking out against the draft. They were sentenced to two years in prison.
As Julius Goldman was about to find out, the mere attendance at an Emma Goldman speech could place one in legal jeopardy. No relation to Emma, Julius was a nineteen-year-old deli clerk on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He had been in the country since 1913. One night after seeing a movie, he walked down East Broadway for dinner when he saw a large crowd at Forward Hall, the headquarters of the city’s Yiddish-language, socialist paper. Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were speaking. After their speech, all men in the audience were stopped by police and asked to show their draft registration cards. Having been caught up in the