J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (10 page)

F
or some the armistice meant not the end of the war but only a change of enemies. Those Americans fortunate enough to return from the European battlefields found their country more deeply divided than it had been at any other time since the Civil War.

As in any war, there was violence.

At about eleven-fifteen on the night of June 2, 1919, the new attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, turned out the downstairs lights of his Washington residence and was walking upstairs to join his wife in bed when he heard something heavy thump against the front door. The blast that almost instantaneously followed shattered windows all over the neighborhood.

Across Dupont Circle, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor, had just returned home from a dinner party. Had they been one minute later, they would have still been outside, directly in line with the blast. After running upstairs to make sure his son James was all right, and stilling the cook—who kept shouting, “The world has come to an end!”—Roosevelt hurried over to see if the Palmers needed help. But first he had to step over the mangled bits of flesh that had landed on his front steps.

Neither of the Palmers had been hurt, Roosevelt reported on his return. The only victim was the bomber himself, who had apparently stumbled coming up Palmer’s walk. But, according to James, all this seemed of less interest to his father than another discovery he had made. “Say,” Franklin exclaimed to Eleanor, “I never knew that Mitchell Palmer was a Quaker. He was ‘theeing’ and ‘thouing’ me all over the place.”
¹

“The morning after my house was blown up,” Palmer later testified, “I stood in the middle of the wreckage of my library with congressmen and senators,
and without a dissenting voice they called upon me in strong terms to exercise all the power that was possible…to run to earth the criminals who were behind that kind of outrage.”
²

The following day the
New York Times,
without any evidence whatsoever, authoritatively stated, “The crimes are plainly of Bolshevik or IWW origin.”
³

The Red scare was on.

Actually it had been building since the Russian Revolution of November 1917, which had excited those in the American Left almost—but not quite—as much as it had frightened their conservative counterparts.

The notion that this was the work of a solitary madman was quickly dispelled. Within an hour of the Palmer blast, similar explosions occurred in eight other cities, causing one death, that of a night watchman outside a judge’s residence in New York. And prior to this, in late April, explosive devices had been mailed to thirty-six of the most prominent men in America, including John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan. Although most never reached their intended victims—the Post Office having held them up because of insufficient postage—a package that arrived at the home of the ex-senator Thomas Hardwick of Georgia blew off both hands of the maid who opened it and severely injured Mrs. Hardwick, who was standing nearby. The next day irate citizens, often aided by local police and APL units, broke up May Day demonstrations in more than a dozen cities.

Although the body of the man believed responsible for the Palmer bombing remained unidentified, there was one clue—some fifty copies of an anarchist flier entitled
Plain Words
were found scattered around the neighborhood.

But Palmer was not content to hunt down a few dangerous anarchists. He declared war on all radicals and, as the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., put it, at the same time “generalized his own experience into a national emergency.”
⁴

Immediately after the bombing, Palmer made several changes in the Department of Justice. He appointed his own assistant, Francis P. Garvan, assistant attorney general in charge of all investigation and prosecution of radicals, and he replaced William Allen, O’Brian’s former assistant, as head of the Bureau of Investigation, appointing in his place William J. Flynn.
^*

Palmer, Garvan, and Flynn made a remarkable trio.

A. Mitchell Palmer was a paradoxical man. While in Congress, where he served five terms, he called himself a “radical friend” of labor, but as attorney general he proudly took credit for breaking half a dozen major strikes. Being a pacifist by religion, he had turned down President Wilson’s offer of the post of
secretary of war, but while heading the alien property custodian’s office his belligerency had earned him the nickname the Fighting Quaker. Once considered one of the most progressive members of Wilson’s Cabinet, he would soon decide that in times of national crisis it was perfectly legal to abrogate the Bill of Rights.

Francis P. Garvan, Palmer’s chief investigator during the war, was the son of a wealthy contractor and a graduate of Yale. But he was ever sensitive to the fact that his father had been an Irish immigrant and, in referring to the more recently arrived, was given to imitating Palmer and using such terms as “alien filth.” According to Palmer’s biographer Stanley Coben, the attorney general and his assistant had three things in common: “an aversion to certain types of ‘foreigners,’ a feeling that dangerous internal enemies were plotting against the country, and a powerful devotion to Palmer’s career.”
⁵
And not necessarily in that order. A. Mitchell Palmer’s one great obsession was to become president of the United States.

The new BI chief, William J. Flynn, was a former head of the Secret Service. He was also, Palmer noted in announcing his appointment, the country’s leading “anarchist chaser”: “He knows all the men of that class. He can pretty nearly call them by name.”
⁶

To this trio would soon be added a fourth and, in time, much more famous member.

One of John Lord O’Brian’s last tasks before leaving Justice had been to cut the department’s staffing back to prewar size. But now, armed with a new menace, Palmer saw an opportunity to restore the cuts. On June 13 he asked Congress for an emergency supplemental appropriation of $500,000, bringing the department’s yearly budget up to $2 million.

When the House balked at the increase, Palmer and Garvan went to the Senate.

Senator Smoot of Utah: “Do you think that if we increased this to $2,000,000 you could discover one bomb thrower—just get one?”

Mr. Garvan: “I can try; that’s all I can say.”

Palmer, however, had a hole card. He revealed that the recent bombings were part of a vast conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States. Not only that, but the danger was imminent. He told the senators, “We have received so many notices and got so much information that it has almost come to be accepted as fact that on a certain day, which we have been advised of, there will be another [attempt] to rise up and destroy the government at one fell swoop.”
⁷
Privately Palmer leaked the information that the date of the attempted revolution would be July 4.

He got the money.

On June 17, 1919, the attorney general held an all-day meeting with Garvan, Flynn, and their assistants. The best way to deal with the new menace, it was
decided, would be a mass roundup and deportation of alien radicals.

There were several problems with this decision. Not all the radicals were aliens; many were either native-born or naturalized Americans. And the Justice Department had no authority whatsoever when it came to deportations, this being the province of the Immigration Department, which was under the secretary of labor. Moreover, since the expiration of the Espionage Act at the end of the war, there was no federal law which prohibited being a Socialist, Communist, IWW member, or anarchist.

Despite these slight obstacles, the group began making secret plans for the raids.

As in any war, up-to-date intelligence on the enemy was essential. It was decided that the additional funds Congress had appropriated would be used to set up a General Intelligence Division (GID) in the Justice Department, its function to collect and correlate information on radicals supplied by the Bureau of Investigation, other governmental agencies, the military, local police, and the private sector.

Garvan had just the man in mind to head the new division—the twenty-four-year-old John Edgar Hoover, a two-year veteran of the Justice Department, whom Garvan had noticed while he was heading a unit in Enemy Alien Registration.

On July 2, pressed by reporters as to what progress had been made in the bombing investigations, BI Chief Flynn, apparently still fighting the last war, announced that the men who had committed these vile outrages were “connected with Russian Bolshevism, aided by Hun money.”
⁸
In truth, the Bureau still didn’t know who the bombers were.

July 4 came and passed, with the biggest explosion that of fireworks. But Palmer hinted at later dates, and the press built upon the hysteria, seeing portents of revolution in everything from the recent race riots in Washington and Chicago, which had left hundreds wounded and scores dead, to the “labor unrest” which had erupted in almost every major industry. Since 1914 the cost of living had doubled, but during that same five-year period wages had dropped 14 percent, while with the war’s end unemployment soared. With labor cheap and plentiful, the National Association of Manufacturers launched a heavily financed campaign for the open shop, which it now called the American Plan. By the end of 1919, more than four million workers were on strike. The steel strike alone, which broke out in September, spread to fifty cities in ten states, before being “terminated,” the attorney general bragged, “through the actions of the Department of Justice.”

Some interpreted these upheavals as America’s uneasy settling into a postwar economy. Palmer had a different vision:

“Like a prairie-fire, the blaze of revolution was sweeping over every institution of law and order…It was eating its way into the homes of the American workman, 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.”
⁹

A. Mitchell Palmer had found his campaign issue.

The General Intelligence Division was officially organized on August 1, 1919. Acting on Garvan’s recommendation, Palmer appointed John Edgar Hoover, special assistant to the attorney general, chief of the GID.
^*

Hoover quickly proved that his reputation was well deserved. As his first project, the former librarian set up a card index system listing every radical leader, organization, and publication in the United States. Finding it just as easy to categorize people as he once did books—a simplification he’d follow for the rest of his life—within three months he had amassed 150,000 names and by 1921 some 450,000. Moreover, they were cross-indexed by localities, so when a strike broke out in, say, Gary, Indiana, all the local “agitators” could be quickly identified.

The more important persons, groups, and periodicals merited more-comprehensive biographies; soon Hoover and his staff had assembled 60,000 of these. They included anyone showing “any connection with an ultra radical body or movement.”

Initially Hoover was aided considerably by the APL reports, IWW membership lists, Emma Goldman’s mailing list, which had been seized during one of her many arrests, and the Bureau’s own already extensive files. But he didn’t stop there. Local police were encouraged to set up their own “Red squads” and share their findings with Washington. Private detective agencies, employed by the struck companies, supplied huge lists of names. Under a variety of pretexts—which included purchase, seizure, and theft—whole radical libraries were obtained. Newspapers were collected “by the bale” and pamphlets “by the ton.” Forty multilingual translators searched foreign-language periodicals for names and inflammatory quotations. Stenographers were sent to public meetings to take down the content of speeches. In Washington one-third of the BI’s special agents were assigned to antiradical work; in the field, over one-half, many of them undercover. “During the steel strike, coal strike and threatened railway strikes,” BI Chief Flynn later proudly admitted, “secret agents moved constantly among the more radical of the agitators and collected a mass of evidence.”
¹¹

But the bombings remained unsolved.

On August 12 Flynn sent a confidential letter to “all special agents and employees” (a euphemism for undercover operatives). No mention was made of the raids, but the more experienced agents guessed what was coming when Flynn ordered “a vigorous and comprehensive investigation” of all anarchists, Bolsheviks, and “kindred agitations.” Although stating the investigations should be directed particularly to aliens, for the purpose of developing deportation cases, Flynn added, “You will also make full investigation of similar activities of citizens of the United States with a view to securing evidence which may be of use in prosecutions under the present existing state or federal laws or under legislation of that nature which
may hereinafter be enacted
…” (italics added).

In short, in addition to investigating aliens for possible deportation, for which neither the Justice Department nor the Bureau of Investigation had statute authority, American citizens should also be investigated, anticipating that perhaps someday Congress might pass laws covering their beliefs and associations too.

As for the type of information to be sent to Washington, the agents and informers were to report everything: “all information of every nature whether hearsay or otherwise.”
¹²

Flynn did not explain how an agent decided who or what was “radical,” and to what degree; whether an accusation was factual or unwarranted or simply irrelevant; or what constituted a permissible, as contrasted to a dangerous, belief. All this would be determined in Washington, by Hoover’s GID.

At the time of Flynn’s confidential letter, the American Communist party hadn’t been born. That event occurred two weeks later, during the Socialist party convention in Chicago, when left-wing members walked out and, already fighting among themselves, gave birth to feuding twins: the Communist Labor party of America and the Communist party of America.