• Tag Archives Woodrow Wilson
  • The Palmer Raids: America’s Forgotten Reign of Terror


    Exactly a hundred years ago this morning—on January 3, 1920—Americans woke up to discover just how little their own government regarded the cherished Bill of Rights. During the night, some 4,000 of their fellow citizens were rounded up and jailed for what amounted, in most cases, to no good reason at all and no due process, either.

    Welcome to the story of the Palmer Raids, named for their instigator, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. Though largely forgotten today, they shouldn’t be. They constituted a horrific, shameful episode in American history, one of the lowest moments for liberty since King George III quartered troops in private homes.

    The terror during the night of January 2-3, 1920, shocked and frightened many citizens. In her 1971 book, America’s Reign of Terror: World War I, the Red Scare, and the Palmer Raids, Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht wrote:

    [T]error is not just a body count. Terror exists when a person can be sentenced to years in prison for an idle remark; when people are pulled out of their beds and arrested; when 4,000 persons are seized in a single night; and when arrests and searches are made without warrants. Moreover, for each person sent to prison for his views, many others were silenced. The author amply documents the government’s insensitivity to civil liberties during this period, its frequent brutality and callousness, and the personal grief that ensued.

    The targets of the Palmer raids were radicals and leftists deemed by the Wilson administration to be hostile to “American values.” Ironically, none of those arrested had done anywhere near as much harm to those values as the man living in the White House—Woodrow Wilson, arguably the worst of the country’s 45 presidents. More on that and the Palmer Raids after some background.

    This wasn’t the first time the government in Washington had trampled the Bill of Rights. No less than the administration of John Adams, an American founding patriot, briefly shut down newspapers and dissenting opinion with its Alien & Sedition Acts of 1798. Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus and arrested thousands of political opponents in Northern states.

    The most immediate precedents for the Palmer Raids were wartime measures of the same administration just a few years before. Wilson campaigned for re-election in 1916 on a boast that he had “kept us out of war” even as he authorized non-neutral aid for Britain and France. He then feigned surprise when Germany declared unrestricted warfare on ships carrying supplies to its enemies. It was the pretext for American entry into World War I in April 1917.

    “Wars are dirty but crusades are holy,” writes Feuerlicht, “so Wilson turned the war into a crusade.” The conflict became “the war to end all wars” and a war “to make the world safe for democracy” while the president made war on democracy at home.

    America was formally at war for only a week when Wilson created the Committee on Public Information (CPI). Its job was to convince Americans the war was right and just. A national venture in thought control, it bludgeoned the people with Wilson’s view until it became their view, as well. It was government propaganda on a scale never before seen in the US, flooding the country with CPI-approved war news, speakers, school materials, posters, buttons, stickers—the works.

    Two months later, under intense pressure from the White House, Congress passed the Espionage Act. Any person who made “false reports or false statements with intent to interfere” with the official war effort could be punished with 20 years in jail or a fine of $10,000 (at least a quarter-million in today’s dollars), or both. It was amended in May 1918 by the Sedition Act, which made it a crime to write or speak anything “disloyal or abusive” about the government, the Constitution, the flag, or a US military uniform.

    Wilson pushed hard for Congress to give him extraordinary powers to muzzle the media, insisting to The New York Times that press censorship “was absolutely necessary to public safety.” According to Christopher M. Finan in his 2007 book, From the Palmer Raids to the Patriot Act: A History of the Fight for Free Speech in America, a blizzard of hostile editorials killed that in Congress, fortunately.

    Wilson’s attorney general at the time, Thomas Watt Gregory, strongly encouraged Americans to spy on each other, to become “volunteer detectives” and report every suspicion to the Justice Department. In a matter of months, the department was receiving about 1,500 accusations of disloyalty every single day.

    Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson jumped into the cause with both feet, ordering that local postmasters send him any publications they discovered that might “embarrass” the government. The Post Office began destroying certain mail instead of delivering it, even banning certain magazines altogether. An issue of one periodical was outlawed for no more reason than it suggested the war be paid for by taxes instead of loans. Others were forbidden because they criticized our allies, the British and the French. “Throughout the war and long after it ended, [Burleson] was the sole judge of which mailed publications Americans could or could not read,” writes Feuerlicht.

    Individuals were hauled into court for expressing reservations about Wilson or his war. One of many examples involved one Reverend Clarence H. Waldron, who distributed a pamphlet claiming the war was un-Christian. For that, he was sentenced to 15 years. In another case, a filmmaker named Robert Goldstein earned a 10-year prison award for producing a movie about the American Revolution, The Spirit of ’76. His crime? Depicting the British in a negative light. They were allies now, so that sort of thing was a no-no.

    Of the roughly 2,000 people prosecuted under the Espionage and Sedition Acts, not a single one of them was a German spy. They were all Americans whose thoughts or deeds (almost none of them violent) ran counter to those of the man in the big White House. Hundreds were deported after minimal due process even though they were neither illegal immigrants nor convicted criminals.

    The famous socialist, union activist, and presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs found himself crosswise with Wilson for opposing both the draft and the war. In April 1919, five months after the war ended, he was convicted of “seditious” speech, sentenced to ten years in prison, and denied the right to vote for the rest of his life. Sometime later, when Debs heard that Wilson would refuse to pardon him, he poignantly responded, “It is he [Wilson], not I, who needs a pardon.”

    Allow me to digress for a moment on the Debs case because it brings to mind a current controversy. President Trump was impeached by the House last month because he allegedly tried to cripple a political opponent by pushing for an investigation into that opponent’s possible corruption. But there was hardly a peep from the media in 1919, even though Debs ran for president four times before and would run yet again, and Wilson himself was flirting with the idea of running for a third term in 1920.

    Wilson’s health eventually precluded another run, but Debs ran from his prison cell and garnered more than 900,000 votes. Wilson never pardoned Debs, but Republican President Warren G. Harding did.

    Hostilities in Europe ended in November 1918, but the Wilson administration’s assault on civil rights continued. With the Germans vanquished, the new pretext to bully Americans became known as the “Red Scare”—the notion that communists under the influence of the new Leninist regime in Moscow were the big threat in the country.

    Meantime, in March 1919, Wilson hired a new attorney general—A. Mitchell Palmer—who was determined to tackle it one way or another, especially after two attempted bombings of his home. Palmer was just what Wilson was looking for: “young, militant, progressive and fearless,” in the president’s own words.

    The first of the two biggest Palmer Raids occurred on November 7, 1919. With Palmer’s newly appointed deputy J. Edgar Hoover spearheading the operation, federal agents scooped up hundreds of alleged radicals, subversives, communists, anarchists, and “undesirable” but legal immigrants in 12 cities—some 650 in New York City alone. Beatings, even in police stations, were not uncommon.

    Palmer later said,

    If . . . some of my agents out in the field . . . were a little rough and unkind, or short and curt, with these alien agitators . . . I think it might well be overlooked.

    He pointed to a few bombings as evidence that the sedition problem was huge and required “decisive” action.

    January 2, 1920—when the largest and most aggressive batch of Palmer Raids was carried out—was a night of terror: about 4,000 arrests across 23 states, often without legitimate search warrants and with the arrestees frequently tossed into makeshift jails in substandard conditions.

    Leftists and leftist organizations were the targets, but even visitors to their meeting halls were caught up in the dragnet. No friend of liberty then or now, The Washington Post opined, “There is no time to waste on hairsplitting over infringement of liberties.” A few smaller raids were conducted, but nothing on the scale of January 2-3.

    Palmer thought he would ride the Red Scare into the White House, but he lost his bid for the Democratic Party’s nomination later that year. Meantime, the courts largely nullified his dirty work. By June 1920, the raids were history. In the fall, the Democrats lost big as Republican Warren Harding ushered in “an era of normalcy.”

    It’s hard to find any lingering trace of the “subversive” work the Palmer Raids were ostensibly intended to combat. Thousands were arrested when actual crimes were committed by a relative few. Certainly, none of the arrested Americans gave us a progressive income tax or a central bank or violations of free speech and due process. It was Woodrow Wilson and his friends who gave us all that, and much more mischief.

    Let us remember the Palmer Raids and the administration that carried them out as black marks against American liberty, hopefully never to be repeated.


    Lawrence W. Reed

    Lawrence W. Reed is President Emeritus, Humphreys Family Senior Fellow, and Ron Manners Ambassador for Global Liberty at the Foundation for Economic Education. He is also author of Real Heroes: Incredible True Stories of Courage, Character, and Conviction and Excuse Me, Professor: Challenging the Myths of ProgressivismFollow on Twitter and Like on Facebook.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


  • Woodrow Wilson Made the World Unsafe for Democracy

    Woodrow Wilson Made the World Unsafe for Democracy

    This week is the 100th anniversary of President Woodrow Wilson’s speech to Congress seeking a declaration of war against Germany. Many people celebrate this centenary of America’s emergence as a world power. But, when the Trump administration is bombing or rattling sabers at half a dozen nations while many Democrats clamor to fight Russia, it is worth reviewing World War One’s high hopes and dire results.

    Lies, Censorship, and Poison 

    Wilson was narrowly re-elected in 1916 based on a campaign slogan, “He kept us out of war.” But Wilson had massively violated neutrality by providing armaments and money to the Allied powers that had been fighting Germany since 1914. In his war speech to Congress, Wilson hailed the U.S. government as “one of the champions of the rights of mankind” and proclaimed that “the world must be made safe for democracy.”

    American soldiers fought bravely and helped turn the tide on the Western Front in late 1918. But the cost was far higher than Americans anticipated. More than a hundred thousand American soldiers died in the third bloodiest war in U.S. history. Another half million Americans perished from the Spanish flu epidemic spurred and spread by the war.

    In his speech to Congress, Wilson declared, “We have no quarrel with the German people” and feel “sympathy and friendship” towards them. But his administration speedily commenced demonizing the “Huns.” One Army recruiting poster portrayed German troops as an ape ravaging a half-naked damsel beneath an appeal to “Destroy this mad brute.”

    Wilson acted as if the congressional declaration of war against Germany was also a declaration of war against the Constitution. Harvard professor Irving Babbitt commented in 1924: “Wilson, in the pursuit of his scheme for world service, was led to make light of the constitutional checks on his authority and to reach out almost automatically for unlimited power.” Wilson even urged Congress to set up detention camps to quarantine “alien enemies.

    Wilson unleashed ruthless censorship of any criticism. Anyone who spoke publicly against military conscription was likely to get slammed with federal espionage or sedition charges. Possessing a pamphlet entitled Long Live the Constitution of the United States earned six months in jail for a Pennsylvania malcontent. Censorship was buttressed by fanatic propaganda campaigns led by the Committee on Public Information, a federal agency whose shameless motto was “faith in democracy… faith in fact.”

    The war enabled the American equivalent of the Taliban to triumph on the home front. Prohibition advocates “indignantly insisted that… any kind of opposition to prohibition was sinister and subversively pro-German,” noted William Ross, author of World War 1 and the American Constitution. Even before the 18th Amendment (which banned alcohol consumption) was ratified, Wilson banned beer sales as a wartime measure. Prohibition was a public health disaster; the rate of alcoholism tripled during the 1920s.

    To punish lawbreakers, the federal government added poisons to industrial alcohol that was often converted into drinkable hooch; ten thousand people were killed as a result. Professor Deborah Blum, the author of The Poisoner’s Handbook, noted that “an official sense of higher purpose kept the poisoning program in place.”

    Hell’s Dirtiest Work

    The war provided the pretext for unprecedented federal domination of the economy. Washington promised that “food will win the war” and farmers vastly increased their plantings. Price supports and government credits for foreign buyers sent crop prices and land prices skyrocketing. However, when the credits ended in 1920, prices and land values plunged, spurring massive bankruptcies across rural America. This spurred perennial political discontent that helped lead to a federal takeover of agriculture by the Roosevelt administration in the 1930s.

    World War One was ended by the Treaty of Versailles, which redrew European borders willy-nilly and imposed ruinous reparations on Germany. One of Wilson’s top aides at the peace talks, Henry White, lamented: “We had such high hopes of this adventure; we believed God called us and now we are doing hell’s dirtiest work.”

    Wilson had proclaimed 14 points to guide peace talks; instead, there were 14 separate small wars in Europe towards the end of his term–after peace had been proclaimed. Millions of Irish Americans were outraged that, despite Wilson’s bleatings about democracy, Britain brutally repressed Ireland during and after the war. The League of Nations, which Wilson championed in vain, was so smarmily worded that it could have obliged the U.S. to send troops to help Britain crush the burgeoning Irish independence movement.

    The chaos and economic depression sowed by the war and the Treaty of Versailles helped open the door to some of the worst dictators in modern times, including Germany’s Adolf Hitler, Italy’s Benito Mussolini, and Vladimir Lenin–whom Wilson intensely disliked because “he felt the Bolshevik leader had stolen his ideas for world peace,” as historian Thomas Fleming noted in his 2003 masterpiece, The Illusion of VictoryAmerica in World War 1.

    Despite winning the war, Wilson’s Democratic Party was crushed at the polls in both 1918 and 1920. H.L. Mencken wrote on the eve of the 1920 election that Americans were sickened of Wilsonian “idealism that is oblique, confusing, dishonest, and ferocious.”

    Have today’s policymakers learned anything from the debacle a century ago? Wilson continues to be invoked by politicians who believe America can achieve great things by warring abroad. The bellicosity of both Republican and Democratic leaders is a reminder that Wilson also failed to make democracy safe for the world.

    Reprinted from USA Today.


    James Bovard

    James Bovard is the author of ten books, including Public Policy Hooligan, Attention Deficit Democracy, and Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty. Find him on Twitter @JimBovard.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.