Enemies: A History of the FBI (7 page)

On November 18, Hoover sent fresh orders to all the Bureau’s field agents, marked “personal and confidential” and bearing his initials, JEH.
He wanted legal affidavits naming anyone and everyone in America who was “prominent in Communist activities.” The affidavit would serve as proof that a person was a card-carrying Communist; party membership alone justified deportation under the Anarchist Exclusion Act. The scope of the assignment was breathtaking: New York City alone had seventy-nine local branches of the Communist Party and the Communist Labor Party, each with its own set of leaders. “
To gather a correct, up-to-date list of these would entail quite some investigation by both undercover and open investigators,” a daunted Bureau special agent, M. J. Davis, warned headquarters on December 4. But Hoover wanted immediate results. He alerted Caminetti on December 16 that he was ready to send over “
a considerable number of affidavits.” He did not say how many.

On the night of December 20, Hoover took a cutter across New York Harbor, accompanied by five congressmen and a contingent of reporters. Ice drifted down the Hudson and a cold wind swept snowdrifts against the barracks at Ellis Island. Inside the walls, 249 alien anarchists awaited—the rabble of the Russian Workers and the renowned rebels Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman among them. Midnight passed. The deportees filed out toward a docked barge.

“
The crowd was very cocky,” Hoover recounted, “full of sarcasm.” Hoover sparred with them. He came face-to-face again with Emma Goldman, the emblem of radical America. “Haven’t I given you a square deal, Miss Goldman?” Hoover asked. “Oh,” she replied, “I suppose you’ve given me as square a deal as you could. We shouldn’t expect from any person something beyond his capacity.”

The barge took the Reds to the edge of the harbor at Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island, the oldest military site in the United States, where the
Buford
was docked. Emma Goldman was among the last to board.

“
It was 4:20
A.M.
on the day of our Lord, December 21, 1919,” she wrote years later. “I felt dizzy, visioning a transport of politicals doomed to Siberia.… Russia of the past rose before me.… But no, it was New York, it was America, the land of liberty! Through the port-hole I could see the great city receding into the distance, its sky-line of buildings traceable by their rearing heads. It was my beloved city, the metropolis of the New World. It was America, indeed America repeating the terrible scenes of tsarist Russia! I glanced up—the Statue of Liberty!”

The
Buford
slipped out of New York Harbor, its prisoners bound for
Soviet Russia. Hoover boarded the first train back to Washington. Over the next ten days he perfected his plans for the war on communism.

Hoover marked his twenty-fifth birthday at home—his mother’s home, where he still lived—on New Year’s Day. Then he went back to work. He made sure that the war began on time.

5

“WHO IS MR. HOOVER?”

O
N THE AFTERNOON
of December 30, 1919, the chief of the Communist Party of America, Charles E. Ruthenberg, went to lunch in New York with seven of his closest comrades. One of them was an undercover spy whose reports went to the Justice Department marked “Attention—Mr. Hoover.”

Ruthenberg was rail-thin and balding; he looked much older than his thirty-seven years. He had run for high office on the Socialist ticket in Ohio, winning a fair number of votes. He had gone to prison in 1918, convicted under the Espionage Act for opposing the war, and he had come out a hard-core Communist. He had just been arraigned on a charge of criminal anarchy for publishing the Party platform in New York. Now he was afraid a new wave of arrests was coming. “
The Communist Party is practically busted,” he said, according to the secret agent’s report to Hoover. “Most of the leaders are either in jail, in hiding, or afraid.” If the federal government struck anew, he feared, the Party would have to go underground or die.

At that moment, Hoover was counting down the hours until the crackdown.

Hoover had the names of 2,280 Communists at hand, and he was adding hundreds more to the list on the morning of December 31. His men had worked nonstop for six weeks gathering the names. The Bureau had identified at least 700 Communists in New York alone. Hoover had enlisted help from undercover informers inside the Communist ranks, military intelligence officers, state and local police, business executives, private detectives, vigilantes from the American Protective League and veterans from the newly founded American Legion. By nightfall on New Year’s Eve, Hoover had won the approval for roughly 3,000 arrest warrants from the acting secretary of labor, who oversaw the immigration department, and he had
convinced the immigration authorities to change their rules of procedure, in order to deny the arrested suspects the right to see a lawyer.

“
Arrange with your undercover informants to have meetings of the Communist Party and the Communist Labor Party held on the night set,” read the orders to the Bureau’s agents in charge of the crackdown across twenty-three states. The agents were told not to bother with search warrants unless they were absolutely needed. They were instructed to break into homes and offices, probe ceilings and walls for hiding places, ransack records, and take “literature, books, papers, and anything hanging on the walls.”

“Communicate by long distance to Mr. Hoover any matters of vital importance or interest which may arise during the course of the arrests,” said the orders, signed by Frank Burke, Hoover’s immediate superior. “Forward to this office by special delivery marked for the ‘Attention of Mr. Hoover’ a complete list of the names of the persons arrested.” Agents were reminded that secrecy was paramount: “in order that no ‘leak’ may occur,” they were to tell no state or local police about the planned attack until a few hours beforehand.

A final set of orders went out under Hoover’s initials. “
All instructions previously issued to you for carrying out arrests of Communists should be executed in detail,” they read. “Bureau and Department expect excellent results from you in your territory.” The orders authorized the thirty-three special agents in charge to tell reporters that “arrests are nationwide in scope and being directed by Attorney General.”

The biggest mass arrests in American history began at 9:00
P.M.
on Friday, January 2, 1920. They went down in history as the Palmer raids. But Palmer neither organized nor directed them. Hoover did.

“A
HUMAN NET NO OUTLAW CAN ESCAPE
”

The Bureau broke into political meetings, private homes, social clubs, dance halls, restaurants, and saloons across America. Agents hauled people out of bookstores and bedrooms. Hoover worked around the clock, answering the ringing telephones and reading the urgent telegrams as his squads checked in from across the country.

Not all the raids went off smoothly. “
About 25 aliens were apprehended in the course of the night on suspicion and while in a number of cases we
were satisfied that they were members of the Communist Party, we were in possession of no evidence to prove it,” the special agent in charge in Buffalo, New York, reported to Hoover. “As they denied it, they were released.”

The Bureau took 2,585 prisoners on Friday night and Saturday morning, but their job was only half done. The raids went on into the next week. Agents sought at least 2,705 new warrants. In addition, hundreds of people, perhaps thousands, were arrested without warrants. All told, somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 people were swept up in the raids. No one will ever know precisely how many were arrested and imprisoned, how many questioned and released. No official accounting ever took place.

The raids sent the Communist Party reeling. Charles Ruthenberg and his inner circle survived by going underground, taking false names, communicating in code, living clandestine lives. A few of Ruthenberg’s handwritten reports turned up in the Comintern archives at the end of the century. “
The attack upon our organization,” he wrote, had made it “impossible for the party to function on a national scale.” He spent the next and last seven years of his life on the run, under indictment, on trial, in prison, or fleetingly free on bail.

By Wednesday, January 7, roughly five thousand captives crowded county jails and federal detention centers across the country. Ellis Island was overflowing. Chicago’s prisons were jammed. In Detroit, eight hundred suspects filled a corridor on the top floor of the post office; the mayor protested the lockup, and a prominent citizen compared it to the Black Hole of Calcutta. In Boston Harbor, more than six hundred huddled in the unheated prison on Deer Island.

“
The Department of Justice of the United States is today a human net that no outlaw can escape,” Attorney General Palmer wrote. His aides sent every major newspaper and magazine in America sheaves of press releases and political cartoons and photographs of disheveled detainees. Palmer declared that he was “sweeping the nation clean of such alien filth,” inspired by “the hope that American citizens will themselves become voluntary agents for us in a vast organization.”

“What will become of the United States Government if these alien radicals are permitted to carry out the principles of the Communist Party?” Palmer asked. “There wouldn’t be any such thing left. In place of the United States Government we should have the horror and terrorism of Bolshevik tyranny.… The Department of Justice will pursue the attack of these ‘Reds’ upon the Government of the United States with vigilance, and no alien
advocating the overthrow of existing law and order in this country shall escape.”

Congress now seriously debated the sedition statutes Palmer had proposed, new laws that would imprison Americans for politically charged speech in peacetime. The House of Representatives voted to bar its lone Socialist member from holding his seat. The New York legislature expelled its five elected Socialist assemblymen. Public acclaim for Palmer poured in. Politicians pronounced him a clear choice for the next president of the United States.

Hoover bathed in the reflected glory. He was now a public figure, quoted across the country as the Justice Department’s top authority on communism.

The first pictures of Hoover in office show an element of his pride. He is fit and trim, snappily dressed. His suit is stylish and his necktie slightly rakish. The tie is tightly knotted beneath a slightly jutting chin. He has the barest hint of a smile, but his eyes are dead serious. He signs an order with a fountain pen. He looks astonishingly young.

He began to cultivate reporters as his superiors did. He kept a bulging scrapbook of his newspaper clippings. (He was sometimes misidentified as J. A. Hoover or J. D. Hoover. Not for long.)

He worked to promote his reputation inside and outside the government with regular bulletins on Reds and radicals in America. The first went out a few days after the January 1920 raids. He contended that all the threats of the past year—the terrorist bombings, the nationwide strikes—arose from a master plot hatched in the Kremlin.

“
The revolutionary conspiracy is international, it is being fiercely pushed, and most cunningly led,” read one of his first reports to Congress, a warning of a threat to America’s existence. “Civilization faces its most terrible menace of danger since the barbarian hordes overran West Europe and opened the dark ages.” He theorized that the Communists might organize secret cells in Mexico, stockpile arms from Germany and Japan, cross the border, and plant the seeds of revolution among black men in the American South. He believed that he was in a battle with the world in the balance.

Hoover went on his first counterterrorism raid on February 14, 1920. The Bureau and the local police swept into the tenements and industrial warehouses of Paterson, New Jersey, and found seventeen members of an Italian anarchist gang called L’Era Nuova. The Bureau had placed an undercover
informant inside the group four weeks before.
TERRORISTS CAUGHT IN PATERSON RAIDS
, read the headline in
The New York Times
. The Bureau announced that reams of blank pink paper seized in the raid resembled those used in the broadside “Plain Words,” which had been found near Attorney General Palmer’s shattered home in June 1919—“the first clue to the origin of the bomb outrages which stirred the nation,” the newspaper said.

But it was not a clue that Hoover had time to pursue. He was called to a federal courthouse in Boston to defend the Bureau’s conduct in the war on communism.

“D
EMOCRACY NOW SEEMS UNSAFE
”

Political revulsion had been rising against the raids, a public reaction Hoover had not imagined possible.

The chief federal prosecutor in Philadelphia, U.S. Attorney Francis Fisher Kane, had resigned in an open letter to the president. “
I am strongly opposed to the wholesale raiding of aliens that is being carried on throughout the country,” he wrote. “The policy of raids against large numbers of individuals is generally unwise and very apt to result in injustice.” The chief federal immigration officer in Seattle reported to his superiors in Washington, D.C., that the Bureau had swept up uncounted innocents to find a handful of suspects. And in Boston, a federal judge named George W. Anderson, addressing two hundred people gathered at a banquet convened by the fledging Harvard Liberal Club, issued an open invitation for a legal challenge to the raids.