“The whole red crusade seems to have been saturated with ‘labor spy’ interests—the interests, that is, of private detective agencies which, in the secret service of masterful corporations, were engaged in generating and intensifying industrial suspicions and hatreds. It was under these influences, apparently, that the appropriations authorized by Congress “for the detection and prosecution of crimes” exclusively, were in part diverted to the rounding-up of aliens, not as criminals but as the possible subjects for administrative deportation.”
The January raids were aimed at the “Communists.”
“Hardly had the year nineteen-twenty opened” says the former Assistant Secretary of Labor, “when the Department of Justice entered upon the red crusade for which its raiding of the preceding November had been a tryout. Numerously recruited for the occasion from roughneck groups of the strikebreaking variety and actively supported by local police authorities, the detective auxiliary of the Department of Justice spent the night of the second day in January at raiding lawful assemblages in more than thirty cities and towns of the United States—thirty-three being the number officially reported. Their object was wholesale arrests in furtherance of the plans already outlined for mass deportations of alien members of the Communist and the Communist-Labor parties. The approximate number of arrests officially reported was 2,500.”
The details can be read in the pamphlet on Illegal Practices of the Department of Justice prepared in May of the same year by a committee of twelve well-known lawyers.
Here is the preface to that pamphlet:
TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE:
For more than six months we, the undersigned lawyers, whose sworn duty it is to uphold the Constitution and Laws of the United States, have seen with growing apprehension the continued violation of that Constitution and breaking of those Laws by the Department of Justice of the United States government.
Under the guise of a campaign for the suppression of radical activities, the office of the Attorney General, acting by its local agents throughout the country, and giving express instructions from Washington, has committed continual illegal acts. Wholesale arrests both of aliens and citizens have been made without warrant or any process of law; men and women have been jailed and held incomunicado without access of friends or counsel; homes have been entered without search warrant and property seized and removed; other property has been wantonly destroyed; workingmen and workingwomen suspected of radical views have been shamefully abused and maltreated. Agents of the Department of Justice have been introduced into radical organizations for the purpose of informing upon their members or inciting them to activities; these agents have even been instructed from Washington to arrange meetings upon certain dates for the express object of facilitating wholesale raids and arrests. In support of these illegal acts, and to create sentiment in its favor, the Department of Justice has also constituted itself a propaganda bureau, and has sent to newspapers and magazines of this country quantities of material designed to excite public opinion against radicals, all at the expense of the government and outside the scope of the Attorney General’s duties.
We make no argument in favor of any radical doctrine as such, whether Socialist, Communist or Anarchist. No one of us belongs to any of these schools of thought. Nor do we now raise any question as to the Constitutional protection of free speech and a free press. We are concerned solely with bringing to the attention of the American people the utterly illegal acts which have been committed by those charged with the highest duty of enforcing the laws—acts which have caused widespread suffering and unrest, have struck at the foundation of American free institutions, and have brought the name of our country into disrepute.
These acts may be grouped under the following heads: