FDR - Jean Edward Smith [110]
The following month the city was torn by a bloody four-day race riot that left fifteen dead and hundreds injured. The Washington police proved powerless, and eventually the military was deployed to restore order. “The riots seem about over today,” Franklin wrote Eleanor on July 23. “Only one man killed last night. Luckily the trouble hasn’t spread to R Street and though I have troubled to keep out of harm’s way I have heard occasional shots during the evening and night. It has been a nasty episode and I only wish quicker action had been taken to stop it.”34
The attack on Attorney General Palmer precipitated a widespread crackdown on suspected anarchists and Bolsheviks, known historically as the Red Scare of 1919–20. Primed by the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, government authorities under the attorney general’s direction launched an attack on civil liberties unequaled in peacetime since passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts at the end of the eighteenth century.35 Law enforcement officials illegally raided homes and union offices, aliens suspected of radicalism were deported, and thousands of innocent citizens were hounded for their beliefs. On a single night in January 1920 more than four thousand suspected Communists were arrested in thirty-three different cities.36 The Palmer raids yielded almost nothing in the way of arms or revolutionaries but triggered a climate of fear that engulfed the nation. The New York state legislature, its better judgment swept away by a tidal wave of reaction, refused to seat five elected Socialists from New York City. In Washington, the House of Representatives twice refused to tender the oath of office to Socialist Victor L. Berger, elected overwhelmingly by the voters of Milwaukee.37
FDR showed no interest in Palmer’s Red-baiting crusade. Indeed, at the same time that Congress and the New York legislature were expelling Socialists from their ranks, he upbraided Rear Admiral S. S. Robinson, commandant of the Boston Navy Yard, for discharging three machinists because they were Socialists. “Now, my dear Admiral,” Roosevelt wrote, “neither you nor I can fire a man because he happens to be a Socialist. It so happens that the Socialist party has a place on the official ballot in almost every state in the union.”38
When an old grad sought to enlist Franklin’s help to cleanse the Harvard faculty of dangerous radicals (FDR was now a member of the university’s board of overseers), he ignored the request. The radical in question was Harold Laski, a young instructor in the Government Department who had recently advocated nationalizing the country’s railroads. “If Mr. Laski were teaching mathematics,” wrote Paul Tuckerman, ’78, “the argument for academic freedom would have some force … but he teaches our sons, not mathematics but government, and what reverence for our government and institutions can a professional Bolshevik teach? Why not clean house and get rid of this foreign propagandist?”39 President A. Lawrence Lowell stood by Laski, and the Harvard board stood by Lowell. Laski returned to England shortly afterward to accept a position at the London School of Economics and went on to become an internationally renowned scholar and chairman of the British Labour party.
While Franklin was busy at the Navy Department, Eleanor took the first steps to make a life for herself outside the home. “Everyone is concerned about strikes and labor questions,” she wrote Isabella Ferguson in September 1919. “I realize more and more that we are entering on a new era where ideas and habits and customs are to be revolutionized if we are not to have another kind of revolution.”40
On behalf of the Red Cross, Eleanor undertook to inspect St. Elizabeth’s, the nation’s mental hospital in Washington, where hundreds of battle-shocked servicemen were confined. “I cannot do this,” she remembered thinking to herself, but she went anyway. “You must do the thing you think you cannot do,” she wrote later, supplying her own emphasis.41