Enemies: A History of the FBI Read Online Free PDF

convictions. Five members of Congress were marked for death, including Senator Overman. The secretary of labor and the federal immigration commissioner, both responsible for deportation proceedings under the Anarchist Exclusion Act, were on the list. So were the mayor and the police commissioner of New York. The most famous targets were the nation’s foremost bankers, John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan. The least famous was a plump, balding twenty-nine-year-old Bureau of Investigation agent named Rayme Finch.
    Finch had spent months chasing members of a gang of Italian anarchists led by Luigi Galleani, the founder of an underground journal called Cronaca Sovversiva —the Subversive Chronicle. Galleani had perhaps fifty followers who took to heart his calls for violent revolution, political assassination, and the use of dynamite to sow terror among the ruling class. Literate revolutionaries drew a bright line between propaganda of the word and propaganda of the deed. Galleani believed in deeds. Finch and a handful of his fellow Bureau of Investigation agents had followed a broken trail from the Ohio River Valley to the Atlantic Ocean, ending in a February 1918 raid on Cronaca Sovversiva ’s offices in Lynn, Massachusetts. The raid led to Galleani’s arrest and, a year later, to a judicial order for his deportation, along with eight of his closest adherents, under the new Anarchist Exclusion Act. Late in January 1919, Galleani had filed his final appeal when a flierappeared in the mill towns of Massachusetts and Connecticut, signed by “The American Anarchists.” It promised a coming storm of “blood and fire.”
    “Deportation will not stop the storm from reaching these shores,” it said. “Deport us! We will dynamite you !”
    On the night of June 2, 1919, nine more bombs went off in seven cities. Again, each target escaped alive. In New York, it was a municipal judge, though a night watchman on the street was killed. In Cleveland, it was the mayor; in Pittsburgh, a federal judge and an immigration inspector; in Boston, a local judge and a state representative. In Philadelphia, the bombers hit a church; in Paterson, New Jersey, a businessman’s home.
    In Washington, D.C., a young man blew himself up on Attorney General Palmer’s doorstep. The blast rocked a row of elegant town houses. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the thirty-seven-year-old assistant secretary of the United States Navy, was coming home from a late supper with his wife, Eleanor, when the explosion shook the spring night. The front windows of their home at 2131 R Street in Washington were blown out. Across the street, Palmer was standing in the ruins of his front parlor. The façade of his house was shattered.
    The sidewalks were filled with shards of glass and broken branches and bits of flesh and bone. It took a very long time to determine that the fragments of the disintegrated body were in all likelihood the mortal remains of a twenty-three-year-old immigrant named Carlo Valdinoci, the publisher of the Cronaca Sovversiva .
    Copies of a fresh diatribe against the government, printed on pink paper, fluttered in the wreckage. “It is war, class war, and you were the first to wage it under cover of the powerful institutions you call order, in the darkness of your laws,” it read. “There will be bloodshed; we will not dodge; there will have to be murder: we will kill, because it is necessary; there will have to be destruction; we will destroy to rid the world of your tyrannical institutions.” It was signed “The Anarchist Fighters.”
    “T HE BLAZE OF REVOLUTION ”
    The Boston and Pittsburgh field offices of the Bureau of Investigation were the first to report that Moscow was behind the bombings.
    Palmer presumed that the Reds were responsible. He had become theattorney general in the same week that the Soviets had proclaimed the Comintern—the international Communist movement. Announcing that the movement aimed to overthrow the existing world