What Were the Palmer Raids and What Tactics Did They Use?

In 1919 and 1920, during the height of the First Red Scare, federal agents and police arrested thousands of people in dozens of American cities suspected of being anarchists, radicals and communist sympathizers. The raids, ordered by U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, targeted foreign-born Americans—especially Russians—who were dragged out of homes and meetinghouses, beaten by police and held without bail in cruel detention centers.

The Palmer Raids initially had broad public support during an anxious time in U.S. history, when anarchist bombings, labor strikes and the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution had American politicians and newspapers warning of a communist takeover.

After World War I, there was growing anxiety in the United States about radical political groups that opposed capitalism and published anarchist manifestos. The fears were deepened by anti-immigrant hostilities directed at Italians, Russians, Catholics and Jews. Many prominent leftists, like the anarchist revolutionary Emma Goldman, were Jewish, and some of the most militant anarchists were Italian Americans.

On June 2, 1919, a bomb exploded in front of Attorney General Palmer’s home in Washington, D.C. That same night, eight other bombs detonated at the homes of judges, politicians and law enforcement officers. No one was killed except for the man who bombed Palmer’s house—a militant anarchist named Carlo Valdinoci.

"When anarchists set off these bombs, it was taken as proof that a revolution was taking place in America,” says Christopher Finan, author of From the Palmer Raids to the Patriot Act. “It seemed to confirm everybody's worst fears and there was a lot of pressure on the government to do something about it.”

Palmer recounted standing in the wreckage of his bombed-out library while senators and other congressmen “called upon me in strong terms to exercise all the powers that was possible to the Department of Justice to run to earth the criminals who were behind that kind of outrage.”

The Immigration Act of 1918 authorized the U.S. Justice Department to arrest any “alien” advocating the violent overthrow of the U.S. government or belonging to a group affiliated with anarchists. The same law also gave the Department of Labor the power to deport foreign-born agitators. Palmer put an ambitious young Justice Department lawyer named J. Edgar Hoover in charge of gathering intelligence on individuals and groups who could be subject to deportation under the 1918 act.

Palmer launched his first major raid on November 7, 1919, the two-year anniversary of the Bolsheviks seizing power in Russia. In more than a dozen U.S. cities, federal officers and local police stormed the offices and meetinghouses of the Union of Russian Workers, an anarchist labor organization that also served as a community center of sorts for Russian immigrants.

At the Russian People’s House in New York City, armed federal agents burst into an algebra class attended by adults and teenagers. Officers ordered the teacher, Mitchel Lavrowsky, to remove his glasses, then they beat him severely and threw him down a flight of stairs. As the Russian students were driven from the classroom, officers struck them with pieces of a wooden banister ripped from the staircase. Federal agents ransacked the meetinghouse looking for bomb-making materials or evidence of terrorist plots.

"They fell on the Russian People’s House and just tore it apart,” says Finan. “It wasn't an orderly process of arresting individuals. They took everybody, threw them in vans and then they destroyed the place.”

The violent raids were repeated across the country. In Hartford, Connecticut, members of the Union of Russian Workers had gathered for a meeting about purchasing a car when federal agents broke down the doors. The men were held at the notorious Seyms Street prison in Hartford, where they slept on bare iron bunks without mattresses or blankets. When visitors came to check on the prisoners’ safety, they were also arrested.

In total, 97 men were kept in near solitary confinement at the Seyms Street lockup for five months. Some were held in the prison’s so-called “punishment rooms” located directly above the boiler room, where the floors were hot enough to burn a prisoner’s feet. The men had no contact with lawyers and received a glass of water and a slice of bread every 12 hours.

Palmer and the Justice Department claimed that the November 7 sweep netted thousands of violent anarchists, but only a small fraction of the people arrested and detained were convicted of a crime and deported. It’s estimated that 75 percent of the people caught up in that first raid were released without charges, but some—like the Seyms Street prisoners—only after lengthy and torturous detentions.

Palmer was emboldened by the first raid, which was celebrated in the press and led to the arrest of Emma Goldman, an unapologetic anarchist and free speech activist. Goldman was born in Russia, but she lived nearly her entire life in the United States. On December 21, 1919, Goldman and 248 others were loaded onto the USS Buford—nicknamed the “Soviet Ark” by the press—and deported.

"[The first Palmer Raid] was very popular,” says Finan. “There was real fear over this new threat. The Bolsheviks had just taken power in this bloody revolution, and it was easy to associate radicals in America with the radicals in Russia.”

The second Palmer Raid on January 2, 1920, was even more ambitious. The targets were allegedly members of either the Communist Party or the Communist Labor Party, but agents randomly raided any organization or group that had a Russian-sounding name or contained the word “socialist.”

“For the most part, there were no arrest warrants," says Finan. “They just identified places where radicals were thought to meet and arrested everybody they found.”

In a single day, an estimated 10,000 people were rounded up in more than 30 American cities and towns. That included Russian couples dancing at the Tolstoi Club in Manchester, New Hampshire and people eating dinner at the Tolstoy Vegetarian Restaurant in Chicago. The members of the Lithuanian Socialist Chorus in Philadelphia were seized in the middle of a rehearsal.

As with the first Palmer Raid, detainees from the January 2 sweep were denied basic civil liberties and due process. They were given little food, locked in unheated cells without bedding or toilets and interrogated without legal representation. The mistreatment of detainees during the Palmer Raids led directly to the formation of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in 1920.

The Palmer Raids resulted in roughly 6,400 deportation cases prepared by the Justice Department. But under the Immigration Act of 1918, the Justice Department wasn’t in charge of deportations—that was the Labor Department’s job. Acting Labor Secretary Louis Post was a sharp critic of Palmer’s methods. Post canceled thousands of warrantless arrests and nullified 70 percent of the deportation orders. In the end, 556 people were deported as a result of the Palmer Raids.

But Palmer wasn’t done. The attorney general planned to run for president in 1920 and the raids had garnered some popular support. Palmer doubled down on his anti-Russian rhetoric and claimed that Bolshevik revolutionary cells in America were planning a major uprising on May Day (May 1, 1920), including “more than a score” of assassination attempts against government officials. When the May Day attack failed to materialize, Palmer’s political aspirations dried up.

In 1921, Palmer expressed no remorse about the raids when he testified before a Senate committee. “I apologize for nothing the Department of Justice has done,” said Palmer. “I glory in it. I point with pride and enthusiasm to the results of that work. And if agents of the Department of Labor were a little rough and unkind with these alien agitators, I think it might well be overlooked in the general good to the country.”