Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [61]
In the spring of 1919 post-war inflation hit hard. Workers had less to live on; they needed higher wages just to keep up with rising prices. But the companies they worked for were making less and had little inclination to pay them more. A wave of hard-fought strikes, like the one Vanzetti had helped coordinate in Plymouth three years earlier, swept the United States. It is estimated that four million people—ship-builders in Seattle, construction workers in New York, policemen in Boston, steel workers and coal miners all over the country—went on strike over the course of 1919. These strikes took place against a background of anarchist violence and rioting which allowed local leaders to crush walk-outs by exaggerating the Red menace and discrediting the striking workers as radicals.
Sixteen bombs were found in a New York post office that April by a worker who had read about a brown-paper package exploding in the hands of Senator Hardwick’s maid in Atlanta and remembered that he had set aside identical packages at his sorting office because of insufficient postage. On his information, eighteen more were intercepted at post offices across the country.
On the evening of 2 June bombs were set off in eight cities at carefully planned destinations. The most significant was the one aimed at the front door of the Washington house of the new Attorney-General, Mitchell Palmer. The bomber, who apparently stumbled as he went up the steps to Palmer’s house, was killed by his own blast. He was an Italian activist, an adherent of Galleani and an associate of Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Galleani and eight of his closest followers were deported three weeks later, but although the authorities were desperate to root out more of his associates it was almost impossible to penetrate their tight-knit circles and find evidence that would incriminate them.
After this incident Palmer, known before his appointment to the Attorney-General’s office in March 1919 as a Wilsonian progressive who had supported women’s suffrage and laws to protect child workers, lost no time in mounting a campaign against “enemy aliens”: the “blaze of revolution,” he said, was sweeping across America “like a prairie fire.” He requested and received extra funds of $500,000 to set up Edgar Hoover (no relation to Herbert) in an anti-radical division of the Department of Justice. Twenty-four-year-old Hoover, a former librarian, quickly built up a meticulously cross-referenced card catalogue of 250,000 suspects. As a subscriber to Galleani’s Subversive Chronicle, Bartolomeo Vanzetti’s name was on Hoover’s list.
Using a Labor Department law set up to allow the Government to deport radicals during wartime, Palmer started rounding up suspected anarchists and revolutionaries in November. Despite the appropriation of the Wartime Sedition Act, his tactics were savage and unlawful. Scant attention was paid to individual warrants. Crowded tenement houses were virtually demolished during the raids, staircases ripped out, men beaten and physically torn away from their wives and children. Even the Assistant Secretary of Labor admitted that the attacks were “intended to be terrifying” and noted that “the whole red crusade seems to have been saturated with ‘labor’ spy interests”—that is to say agents hired by big companies to generate and intensify industrial tensions.
In Detroit, where eight hundred men were held for ten days in unheated stone cells, sharing a single toilet and water fountain, the Justice Department’s agent gleefully announced to reporters that, “We didn’t leave them a scrap of paper to do their business.” Between November and January over five thousand people