Enemies: A History of the FBI Read Online Free PDF Page A

asked the senator.
    “The foreign agitators should be deported,” he said. “American citizens who advocate revolution should be punished.”
    Senator Overman concluded by saying it was high time to start “getting this testimony out to the American people and letting them know what is going on in this country.”
    As the Senate’s alarm at the Red threat increased, the fighting spirit mustered for the world war festered. Nine million American workers in war industries were being demobilized. They found new jobs scarce. The cost ofliving had nearly doubled since the start of the war. As four million American soldiers started coming home, four million American workers went out on strike. The United States never had seen such confrontations between workers and bosses. The forces of law and order felt the Reds were behind it all.
    On January 21, 1919—the day that the Senate took its first testimony on the Red threat—thirty-five thousand shipyard workers in Seattle walked off their jobs. Federal troops put down their uprising, but the spirit of the strike spread to coal mines and steel mills, to textile workers and telephone operators, and to the police force in Boston. Hundreds upon hundreds of strikes threw sand in the gears of the American engine. Political and economic fear ran across the country.
    The White House was vacant. President Wilson had set sail across the Atlantic aboard the USS George Washington , seeking to bring an end to all wars. He and his most trusted aides went to France in pursuit of his dream of a League of Nations, a global alliance to keep the peace. Wilson called his proposal a covenant; a messianic element tinged his mission. His wartime allies, the leaders of England and France, found Wilson unbearably sanctimonious. They were far more interested in punishing Germany than in building a new world founded on Wilson’s visions.
    Without a peace treaty, the United States was still in a state of war abroad. Without a president in the White House, the nation had no one to lead the war at home.
    Wilson was out of the United States from December 4, 1918, to February 24, 1919. Nine days later, he left again for France, and he stayed away for four months. On the day he set sail for the second time, Wilson named an old political ally as the new attorney general.
    A. Mitchell Palmer was a handsome man of forty-seven, a three-term congressman from Pennsylvania, a pacifist Quaker and a smooth talker with flexible principles and soaring ambitions. A ranking member of the Democratic National Committee, he had served as Wilson’s political manager at the 1912 Democratic convention. During 1918, he had run the Justice Department’s Alien Property Office as a fief, giving friends and cronies custody of seized German property and patents worth millions. Now he leaped at the chance to run the Justice Department.
    Palmer had one great goal in mind. He fancied himself the next president of the United States.
    “W E WILL DYNAMITE YOU! ”
    Thirty-six brown paper packages of dynamite made their way through the U.S. mails in late April 1919. They constituted the biggest conspiracy to commit political murder in the history of the United States.
    On April 29, the first bomb arrived at the Atlanta home of Thomas W. Hardwick, who had just left his seat as a U.S. senator from Georgia. Hardwick had helped pass the new Anarchist Exclusion Act, aimed at deporting radical foreigners. The bomb blew off the hands of his housekeeper.
    Not one of the mail bombs reached its intended victim. A postal clerk in New York found sixteen of them on the postage-due shelf; the bombers hadn’t used enough stamps. The would-be assassins were evidently semiliterate; they had garbled some of the addressees’ names. But their hit list was sophisticated.
    Attorney General Palmer led it. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes was on it. So was Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who had overseen more than one hundred Espionage Act