J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (12 page)

T
he obstacle to the raids was William B. Wilson, the country’s first secretary of labor.

Himself a former coal miner, Wilson had opposed many, if not all, of the actions against the IWW. But Wilson had much else on his mind during the summer and fall of 1919—not only was he ill but both his wife and his mother were dying—and for long periods he was absent from his office, leaving many of the day-to-day decisions of his department to his subordinates.

Although Wilson had agreed with Hoover’s contention that membership in the Communist party of America was a deportable offense, when he returned to work on December 24 he discovered that Hoover had submitted
three thousand
warrants of arrest.

Shocked at the number and apparently learning for the first time that the Justice Department intended to conduct another mass roundup, Wilson called a high-level conference in his office that night. Present at the Christmas Eve meeting, in addition to Wilson, were Assistant Secretary of Labor Louis Post, Solicitor General John W. Abercrombie, and Immigration Commissioner Caminetti. Of the four, only Caminetti was in favor of the raids. Several things bothered Wilson and the others.

First was the Labor Department’s inability to handle such a large number of cases.

Second, the affidavits of probable cause were “flimsy,” almost devoid of proof; in nearly all the cases, there was only the name of the alien and the unsupported allegation that he was a party member. The reason for this, Wilson was told, was that the GID did not want to identify its informants. In short, one had to take Hoover’s word that such proof existed.

Third, and even more basic, how real was the threat? Was there, as Palmer
asserted, a revolution in the making? Except for the still-unsolved bombings, no one in the Labor Department had seen any evidence of this. Again it was the matter of one man’s word, that of Palmer, plus Caminetti’s fanatic espousal of it.
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Apparently that was enough. They decided to go along with the attorney general. But Wilson added a condition. Abercrombie, who was acting secretary of labor in Wilson’s absence, was instructed to treat each case individually, on its merits; in addition, the mere assertion of membership would not be enough—it had to be accompanied by some evidence of wrongdoing.

Hoover couldn’t have been too happy with this news, which must have reached him late that night. Yet it’s possible that he already knew that the problem was not insurmountable.

Hoover spent Christmas Day with his parents, with whom he was still living. It was an especially festive occasion, for Hoover’s one close friend from college days, Frank Baughman, was present and celebrating his first Christmas back in the United States. On his return from France, Baughman had joined the Bureau of Investigation, Flynn accepting him on Hoover’s recommendation.

Dickerson and Annie Hoover had reason to be proud of their youngest. Although he had been in the Justice Department less than three years, he already headed one of its largest and most important units and was considered one of the attorney general’s most trusted aides.

But even though it was a holiday, J.E. was unable to relax. He was on the telephone a good portion of the day, making calls or receiving them.

On Christmas Eve, Solicitor General Abercrombie had joined Wilson and Post in opposing the raids.

On the day after Christmas, ignoring entirely Secretary Wilson’s conditions, Abercrombie signed all three thousand of the arrest warrants, without requiring any additional proof.

What caused Abercrombie to go against the instructions of his superior remains a mystery. All that is known is that Abercrombie was a Palmer appointee and may have felt a greater loyalty to the presidential hopeful than to his own boss.

With the warrants signed, BI Chief Flynn gave the go-ahead.

On December 27, Flynn’s chief assistant, Frank Burke, wired secret instructions to the U.S. attorneys in the thirty-three cities where the raids would occur, notifying them, “For your personal information…the tentative date
for the arrest of the Communists is Friday, January 2, 1920.”

There is no better evidence of the thoroughness with which the two Communist parties had been infiltrated than the paragraph which followed:

“If possible you should arrange with your under-cover informants to have meetings of the Communist Party and Communist Labor Party held on the night set. I have been informed by some of the bureau officers that such arrangements will be made. This, of course, would facilitate the making of the arrests.”

That the informants could schedule party meetings whenever they chose indicated the high level of their penetration.

Apparently convinced that the Constitution did not apply to aliens—or citizens, for that matter—Burke in his instructions violated one after another of its provisions.

In addition to raiding the meeting halls, agents were to search the residences of party officials and to seize all literature, books, papers, membership lists, records, and correspondence, plus “anything hanging on the walls.” (The walls themselves were to be sounded and, if believed hollow, broken down.) “I leave entirely to your discretion as to the methods by which you gain access to such places,” Burke instructed. “If, due to the local conditions in your territory, you find that it is absolutely necessary for you to obtain a search warrant for the premises, you should communicate with the local authorities a few hours before the time of the arrests.”

Anyone apprehended was to be searched immediately. There was no mention of informing them of their rights, or even an assumption that they had any. As soon as the subjects were apprehended, the agents “should endeavor to obtain from them, if possible, admissions that they are members of either of these parties, together with any statement concerning their citizenship status.” Burke did not spell out the means to be employed in obtaining such admissions. If anyone was apprehended for whom there was no arrest warrant, Burke stated, a warrant should be requested from the local immigration office. Burke noted that it was not desired that American citizens be arrested, “at this time,” but that if they were, their cases should be referred to the local authorities.

To Hoover’s embarrassment in later years, his name was mentioned frequently in Burke’s secret instructions:

“On the evening of the arrests, this office will be open the entire night, and I desire that you communicate by long distance to Mr. Hoover any matters of vital importance or interest which may arise during the course of the arrests.…I desire that the morning following the arrests you should forward to this
office by special delivery, marked for the ‘Attention of Mr. Hoover,’ a complete list of the names of the persons arrested, with an indication of residence, or organization to which they belong, and whether or not they were included in the original list of warrants…I desire that the morning following the arrests that you communicate in detail by telegram ‘Attention Mr. Hoover,’ the results of the arrests made, giving the total number of persons of each organization taken into custody, together with a statement of any interesting evidence secured.”
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Hoover was again mentioned in Burke’s “extremely confidential” final instructions which were sent to all Department of Justice agents just before midnight on December 31: “Arrests should all be completed…by Saturday morning, January 3, 1920, and full reports reported by Special Delivery addressed to Mr. Hoover.”
⁴

These instructions were occasioned by a late development, a belated Christmas present, as it were, from Mr. Caminetti to Mr. Hoover.

The previous day Caminetti had persuaded Abercrombie to revise Rule 22. Under the revised rule, the alien was to be advised of his right to counsel, “preferably at the beginning of the hearing…or at any rate as soon as such hearing has proceeded sufficiently in the development of the facts to protect the Government’s interests…”
⁵

But, in his last instructions, Burke made it clear that no one was to be accorded that right until the Justice Department was good and ready. “Person or persons taken into custody shall not be permitted to communicate with any outside persons until after examination by this office and until permission is given by this office.”
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In all this there was one voice of sanity, although it came much too late and was, unfortunately, none too assertive.

Returning to his office on December 30, Labor Secretary Wilson discovered that Abercrombie had ignored his instructions and that the mass roundup was imminent. Protesting to Palmer, by memo, that it would be “impossible to immediately dispose” of three thousand cases, he suggested that instead of a nationwide raid the cases be presented individually, as they were developed.
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7

Palmer did answer Wilson, stating that the simultaneous raids were preferable since individual arrests would remove the element of surprise and permit the radicals to escape and hide or destroy incriminating evidence. But he waited until after the raids to send Wilson his reply.

Nineteen twenty was an election year, and began accordingly.

The state’s attorney of Cook County, Illinois (a Republican), did not wish the attorney general of the United States (a Democratic presidential hopeful) to reap all the glory in the great Red hunt, so he conducted his own Communist
raids, in Chicago and its environs, on New Year’s Day, twenty-four hours before the federal raids were scheduled to occur.

Although this caused some confusion for the Chicago BI chief, Jacob Spolansky, and his men, the raids in the other thirty-two cities went off more or less as scheduled, at 8:30
P.M.
local time on January 2, 1920.

Spolansky encountered still other problems, which were probably common to most of the raiding parties. Competing for membership, the two American Communist parties had issued red membership cards to anyone who would take them. Also, whole branches of the Socialist party, as well as several of the foreign-language associations, had automatically transferred their memberships en masse to one or the other party, frequently without the knowledge of the individual members. Spolansky later recalled the following all-too-typical dialogue:

S
POLANSKY
: “Why do you have that red card?”

A
LIEN
: “They told me my card is passport.”

S
POLANSKY
: “Passport? For what?”

A
LIEN
: “To go back to the old country.”

Many of the prisoners, Spolansky observed, were “so illiterate that they could not even spell ‘Communist,’ much less understand its meaning.”

“In those cases where the prisoners had obviously been misled or coerced into joining the Party,” the Chicago BI chief noted, “we released the misguided soul promptly.”
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While this may have been true in Chicago, it wasn’t elsewhere.

Although the figures would be much disputed, apparently upwards of ten thousand persons were arrested. Of that number, all but about four thousand were released after a few days, either because they were American citizens or because there was not even a red card to prove their party membership. Of those remaining in custody, more than half had been arrested without warrants. In many cases, the warrants were obtained only
after
the arrests had been made. As for search warrants, they were practically never used.

In New York City some seven hundred persons were seized. According to the
Times,
“Meetings open to the general public were roughly broken up. All persons present—citizens and aliens alike without discrimination—were arbitrarily taken into custody and searched as if they had been burglars caught in the criminal act. Without warrants of arrest men were carried off to police stations and other temporary prisons, subjected there to secret police-office inquisitions commonly known as the ‘third degree,’ their statements written categorically into mimeographed question blanks, and they required to swear to them regardless of their accuracy.”
⁹

Although this became almost standard procedure, there were variations. In Seattle, according to the testimony of an immigration inspector, Justice Department agents didn’t bother to search out radicals and match them with the warrants; “they went to various pool rooms, etc. in which foreigners congregated,
and they simply sent up in trucks all of them that happened to be there.”
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In Boston some three hundred men were chained together and paraded through the streets to Deer Island in Boston Harbor, where conditions were so intolerable that one man dove five stories to his death and another had to be committed as insane. In Detroit eight hundred persons were held six days in a small, airless corridor on the top floor of the Federal Building, with a single clogged toilet and only occasional water and food.
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“Revolution Smashed,” read the front-page headline of the
New York Times,
while its editorial page heaped praise on the attorney general. Featured prominently in all the papers was BI chief Flynn’s claim that the raids had been necessary to smash an imminent uprising.

If the claim was true, the revolutionaries were amazingly ill prepared. What Flynn didn’t tell the reporters was that in searching hundreds of meeting places and residences, the agents found only four guns (three of them rusty pistols confiscated in an antiques shop) and no dynamite. Four “bombs” were found in Newark. Despite their owners’ claim that they were bowling balls, the raiders took one look at them and, seeing no holes, hastily immersed them in buckets of water. None of the agents had heard of the game boccie.

In the aftermath of the raids, Hoover stayed busy. In addition to making sure that the Justice Department had an agent at each of the immigration hearings, he barraged Caminetti with memos, urging either that no bail be permitted or that it be set at an unmeetable amount, such as ten or fifteen thousand dollars. Allowing the aliens out on bail, where they could contact their lawyers, “defeats the ends of justice,” Hoover argued. Also, he contended, if kept in custody, they would be unable to propagandize.
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