The first raids took place on November 7, the second anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Suddenly, an army of government agents, local police, and special deputies, augmented by a haphazard swarm of private detectives, many of dubious background, swooped down on the various headquarters of the Communist Party, the Communist Labor Party, the Union of Russian Workers, and the Russian anarchists. During that wild and vengeful night the raiders smashed their way into buildings in all the large cities, wrecked property, broke open safes, and indifferent to warrants and the niceties of habeas corpus hustled thousands of citizens as well as noncitizens to the lockup.
But the November raids were only a prelude to the sweeping raids of January 2, 1920. These were timed to take place simultaneously in thirty-three cities. Six thousand warrants were issued, and thousands of aliens were picked up with or without warrants. Subsequently, about three thousand were held for deportation—although in the end only 446 of these were deported.
In Massachusetts there were fourteen such raids, and in Boston five hundred aliens were marched through the streets in chains and taken to the Deer Island House of Correction, where they were isolated in brutally chaotic conditions.
The callous illegalities of the raiding procedures caused much indignation among native Americans. In Boston, Federal Judge George Anderson spoke out sharply against the mob actions of government agents. Twelve nationally known lawyers, among them Zechariah Chafee, Roscoe Pound, and Felix Frankfurter, all of the Harvard Law School, collaborated on a report condemning the illegal practices of the Justice Department.
If the raids caused indignation among the native-born, among the alien radicals they caused terror. No one seemed safe from the midnight knock on the door, the hard-faced men with clubs, the blinding lights and the hammering questions of the night-long interrogation. Rumor exaggerated the Palmer proceedings to outright murder as they were discussed by Sacco and his friends in Stoughton and by Vanzetti and his comrades on Sunday afternoons in the Italian Independent Naturalization Club of East Boston.
After months of following each clue, even to tracing the polka-dot tie to the store that sold it, Department of Justice agents concluded that the man blown to pieces in the bombing of Attorney General Palmer’s house was an Italian anarchist, Carlo Valdinoce, a member of the dynamite-minded group in Paterson, New Jersey. Valdinoce had been associated there with Galleani in the printing of the Cronaca Sovversiva. In addition, Flynn, the new Bureau of Investigation director, had collected enough evidence to convince him that an explosion of the same date in Paterson was the work of another local anarchist, Ruggero Baccini, who had since been deported. There were no clues in the other eleven bombings, though Flynn was certain that they were all the work of anarchists and that the dynamite had come from Paterson. Efforts to determine the origin of the PLAIN WORDS flyer failed.
Then, in February 1920, Flynn received a tip from an ostensible direct-action anarchist named Ravarini. Recently, in Boston, Ravarini had sold subscriptions to Malatesta’s Umanita Nuova to Sacco, Vanzetti, Boda, and Orciani, among others. He told a federal agent that a Roberto Elia, a printer at Canzani’s Printing Shop in Brooklyn, New York, was engaged in publishing anarchist literature, including flyers. On the night of February 25, Bureau agents picked up Elia in his lodgings. At the print shop the agents turned up pink paper similar to that of the flyer and unearthed from the Canzani fonts the peculiar S that had not matched the typeface used for the first nine letters of the title PLAIN WORDS. Canzani’s typesetter turned out to be Galleani’s old associate, Andrea Salsedo.
Salsedo and Elia, questioned separately, at first maintained they knew nothing about PLAIN WORDS. They were taken to the Manhattan offices of the Department of Justice at 21 Park Row and there they remained until the morning of May 2 when Salsedo’s smashed body was found on the pavement, fourteen floors beneath the window of his room. It was believed by the anarchists at the time, and afterward by many liberals, that Salsedo had been tortured by Bureau agents and then thrown from the window. Actually, Salsedo was a suicide.
Neither he nor Elia was under formal arrest at Park Row, although the agents made it clear that the alternative to staying was jail or deportation. According to a Department of Justice report, Salsedo confessed that he had printed PLAIN WORDS. Elia admitted that he had been in the shop and that he had delivered a bundle of the flyers to Carlo Recchi, a member of the Galleani group. After consulting with their lawyer, Narciso Donato, the men agreed that they would remain in the Department’s offices, “that their whereabouts should remain unknown to all except their families, their attorney, and certain of their friends, and, further, that neither should be subjected to interrogation or examination without the presence of their attorney.” Donato later said that his clients had been well treated and had been questioned only when he was present.