Instead of normalcy, 1919 was a year of fragmentation that began with President Wilson triumphant on his European journey and ended with him in America broken and defeated. It was the year of the High Cost of Living (as inflation was then known), the year of the great steel strike, the Seattle general strike, the outlaw railway strikes, coal strikes, textile strikes, maritime strikes, telephone operators’ strikes, the Boston police strike, actors’ strikes, even strikes of rent-payers. At one point almost three million workers were out.
Above all it was a year of antitheses. The first year of peace, it saw the United States reject the peace treaty. In Versailles the League of Nations was born, while in Berlin the Spartacist revolt was bloodily suppressed. The AEF paraded under Madison Square’s plaster triumphal arch in New York, and just before Christmas the Spanish-American War transport Buford—nicknamed the Soviet Ark—left Ellis Island for Russia with a load of assorted radical deportees that included Emma Goldman. Within a few months of each other the American Legion and the American Communist Party were founded. “Hell will now be for rent,” Billy Sunday announced triumphantly as Nebraska became the thirty-sixth state to ratify the prohibition amendment; at the same time a crime wave surged from coast to coast.
It was a year of violence. When President Wilson landed in Boston on February 23 after his return from the Paris Peace Conference, Secret Service men lined the roofs and all windows were ordered closed as he drove through the streets. The day before, two members of the Groupa Pro Prensa, a Spanish anarchist circle in Philadelphia, were arrested by Secret Service agents and accused of plotting the President’s assassination. On April 28 Mayor Ole Hansen of Seattle, who had been denouncing the Red Menace, received a bomb package in the mail. The following afternoon a maid at the Atlanta home of Senator Thomas Hardwick, former chairman of the Committee on Immigration, opened a package that blew off her hands. Subsequently, thirty-four bomb packages were put in the mails addressed to Attorney General Palmer, the Postmaster General, the Secretary of Labor, the Commissioner of Immigration, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Judge K. M. Landis (who had recently presided at an anarchist trial), Senator Lee Overman (chairman of a committee investigating Bolshevism), J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and others.
May Day, the first since the Armistice and the second since the Bolshevik coup d’état in Russia, was anticipated by the police in all major American cities. Attorney General Palmer had announced that there was a plot afoot to kill high officials and force American recognition of Soviet Russia. But the bomb packages were followed by nothing so drastic. In New York a Tom Mooney protest meeting that overflowed Carnegie Hall was charged by ex-servicemen in uniform. The New York offices of the socialist Call were sacked by a mob of soldiers and sailors. There were demonstrations and counter-demonstrations in Chicago, and in Cleveland a man was killed when paraders carrying a red flag were attacked. The worst street fighting took place in Boston when the Communist-dominated Lettish Workmen’s Society attempted to hold a parade after a mass meeting in the Dudley Street Opera House.
In mid-May Luigi Galleani, the leading anarchist figure in the United States, was taken to the East Boston Immigration Station for deportation. A man of leonine bearing and much charm, Galleani had edited the brilliantly inflammatory Cronaca Sovversiva in Paterson, New Jersey, in Barre, Vermont, and finally in Lynn, Massachusetts. “Our master,” Vanzetti called him.
Following his deportation, on the evening of June 2, bombs exploded in eight cities. The chief target was Attorney General Palmer, whose house at 2132 R Street, Washington, had its front blown in just as he was going to bed. Windows of neighboring houses were shattered, including those of Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt directly across the street. Apparently the bomb had gone off prematurely, killing its carrier, for parts of a body were found up and down the street, one fragment lying on the Roosevelt doorstep. The police also found a cheap suitcase large enough to hold about twenty-five pounds of dynamite, two pistols, a derby, a sandal, and shreds of a pin-stripe suit and a polka-dot bow tie. About fifty printed pink flyers entitled PLAIN WORDS were scattered over the neighborhood. Several of these were picked up by Secretary Roosevelt. They read:
The powers that be make no secret of their will to stop, here in America, the world-wide spread of revolution. The powers that be must reckon that they will have to accept the fight they have provoked.
A time has come when the social question’s solution can be delayed no longer; the class war is on and cannot cease but with a complete victory for the international proletariat....
Do not say we are acting cowardly because we keep in hiding, do not say it is abominable; 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, behind the guns of your boneheaded slaves....
There will have to be bloodshed ... we will destroy to rid the world of your tyrannical institutions....