New York Daily News, “The 1920 Wall Street bombing: Authorities blamed agitators for the deadly explosion amid the first Red Scare”
Authorities kept unmasking Red plots all through 1921. NEW YORK ANARCHISTS REORGANIZED, the papers said. REDS OF AMERICA UNITED UNDER ONE HEAD. AGENTS SOWING CLASS HATRED, DISSENSION, SABOTAGE. One million immigrants continued to arrive in the U.S. every year. At least 15 million more, warned U.S. Immigration Commissioner Frederick Wallis, were certain to come unless […]
Washington Examiner, “Stephen Miller is right: Lazarus’ immigration poem is not US law”
Thus paupers were not allowed, or elderly people with no assets or relatives; there was even a political test, for “anarchists,” which is not so surprising considering that in the 1890-1901 period anarchist terrorists murdered the president of France, the empress of Austria, and the president of the United States. Continue Reading
Slate, “How Paranoia Infiltrated the Movies”
Though the political casts of the designated villains fluctuate wildly according to the ideology of the country and period—ranging from the anarchist “vampire” gang to the red spies of Cold War thrillers, to the nearly invisible capitalist tycoons of Cutter’s Way (1981), to the smug government bureaucrats in The Ghost Writer (2010)—the evil designs remain […]
Forbes, “Immigration And Isolationism – We’ve Been Here Before”
The act also created a literacy test for immigrants and banned a broad group of “undesirables” including “epileptics,” “imbeciles,” “feeble-minded persons,” “idiots,” “political radicals,” “anarchists,” “polygamists,” “paupers,” “contract laborers,” “persons being mentally or physically defective,” “persons with constitutional psychopathic inferiority,” and “vagrants.” Continue Reading
Smithsonian Magazine, “Has the FBI Ever Been Divorced From Politics?”
After the war, the growing “Red Scare” led to more political bungling. Anarchist bombing attacks in 1919 and 1920 produced the “Palmer Raids,” ordered by General A. Mitchell Palmer and overseen by Hoover. “[P]olitics, inexperience, and overreaction got the better of Attorney General Palmer and his department,” writes The FBI: A Centennial History, 1908-2008 on the […]
Vermont Public Radio, “The Palmer Raids”
In late 1919, Federal and local authorities arrested more than two hundred individuals at New York City’s Union of Russian workers. On December 21st of that same year, two hundred and forty nine radicals, including anarchist Emma Goldman, were deported to Russia on the USS Buford, which was dubbed “the Soviet Ark” by the press. […]
The Daily Beast, “The Progressive Attorney General Who Raided Immigrants—And Paid the Price”
There was a threat. The Palmer bombing – committed by an immigrant anarchist – came after 36 mail bombs in April alone and 3500 strikes in one year, amid calls from overconfident radicals to conquer America. However, most immigrants just wanted to improve their lives not change the world. Continue Reading
The New Yorker, “What Happens to the Deported”
After an anarchist placed a bomb at the front door of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s home, in Washington, D.C., the hysteria escalated and Palmer ordered the surveillance of supposed radical communities with ties to anarchist groups and the Communist Party, many of which were Russian immigrant organizations and associations. Continue Reading
NPR, “Trump Backers Want Ideology Test For Extreme Vetting”
In a broad sense, tests of attitudes aren’t unprecedented. Doris Meissner, a former commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, notes that an ideological test for newcomers is “deeply embedded” in U.S. history. The U.S. barred anarchists in 1903. During the Cold War, she says, “It was people who believed in communism. It’s still in […]
The Boston Globe, “Trump’s anti-immigration playbook was written 100 years ago. In Boston.”
Anti-immigrant sentiment grew in response to fears of Bolshevik radicals and the deadly bombings by anarchists — the Islamic terrorists of their day. It reached a fever pitch in 1919 and 1920 with the Palmer Raids, the mass arrests and deportations of thousands of Eastern European immigrants. A key tool in those roundups had been […]