Palmer Raids
The Palmer Raids (German: Palmer-Razzien ) were a wave of persecution in the USA against US citizens and immigrants who were accused of communist and socialist attitudes between 1918 and 1921, during the first so-called Red Fear . The Palmer Raids were named after Alexander Mitchell Palmer , Attorney General under Woodrow Wilson .
Palmer believed that "communism ate its way into the homes of American workers" and that socialists were responsible for most of the country's social problems. The immediate trigger of the dissent was the October Revolution of 1917 in the Russian Empire .
In 1919 the House of Representatives refused Victor L. Berger , the MP for the Socialist Party of America from Wisconsin , twice the won seat because of his socialist attitude, his opposition to the war and his German roots.
On June 2, 1919, a series of bombs exploded in eight American cities, one of which slightly damaged Palmer's house. Palmer and his 24-year-old assistant J. Edgar Hoover then investigated and prosecuted anarchists and leftists through a 1917 Espionage Act , the Anarchist Exclusion Act and another anti- riot act of 1919 . Victor Berger was sentenced to 20 years in prison for rioting.
Hoover identified 150,000 people in a newly established department of the Bureau of Investigation (BOI), which subsequently attacked the unions and the headquarters of the communist and socialist parties. 249 people were arrested, including well-known anarchists such as Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman , and shipped to Russia on the ship UST Buford . In January 1920, 6,000 more people, mostly members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), were arrested, 4,000 of them in one night. All foreigners were deported. Palmer and Hoover organized the largest mass arrest in the US, a total of about 10,000 people.
The public was initially behind the attacks. When the communist revolution predicted by Palmer for May 1, 1920 did not materialize, critical voices rose about the disregard for civil rights , which shortly afterwards also led to the establishment of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Palmer has been accused of deliberately invoking the Red Peril in order to run as a presidential candidate for the Democratic Party . He lost the nomination.
Many of the deportees became citizens of the Soviet Union and later shot as potential traitors under Stalin ; others were disappointed with Bolshevism and soon left the country.
literature
- Paul Avrich : Anarchist Voices. An Oral History of Anarchism in America . Princeton University Press, Princeton 1995, ISBN 0-691-03412-5 ; New edition: AK Press, Edinburgh and Oakland / CA 2005, ISBN 1-904859-27-5 .
Individual evidence
- ^ A. Mitchell Palmer: The Case Against the 'Reds' . In: Forum 63 (1920), pp. 173-185 ( online ).
- ↑ John Simkin: The Palmer Raids. Spartacus Educational