In the autumn of 1919, as the nation was convulsing with strikes, bombings, and the shock of revolution in Russia, the Attorney General of the United States, A. Mitchell Palmer, a Quaker politician from Pennsylvania with his eye on the presidency, reached the conclusion that the interior of America harbored a conspiracy of anarchists and communists bent on the violent overthrow of the government. The conclusion was not based on reliable intelligence. It was based on fear, on newspaper headlines, and on Palmer's calculation that establishing himself as the nation's strongest defender against radical conspiracy might clear his path to the White House. To carry out that mission, Palmer created, within the Justice Department, a small intelligence bureau, and placed in charge of it a twenty-five-year-old lawyer named J. Edgar Hoover, a career bureaucrat with a talent for organization and a romantic attachment to the idea of the state's power to identify and eliminate its enemies. What Palmer and Hoover proceeded to construct, over the winter of 1919 and 1920, was a machine for the mass arrest of the nation's poor, immigrant, and radical communities on suspicion of thought-crime, and a process designed to hold, detain, interrogate, and deport them without the warrants, charges, trials, or appeals that the Constitution promised. It was, in essence, the institution of martial law in the major cities of the United States, conducted by the federal government using the apparatus of immigration law, and it succeeded for several months in arresting thousands of people in violation of the fundamental protections that the Fourth Amendment had inscribed into law.
The Palmer Raids, as they came to be called, represent in this series a particular kind of government abuse: not a single trial corrupted by bias, but a systematic program of violation, organized at the highest levels of government, employing federal officials, and designed to succeed by overwhelming the capacity of the legal system to review what was being done. Unlike the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti or Leo Frank, in which at least the forms of trial were observed and errors could theoretically be appealed, the Palmer Raids bypassed the courts almost entirely, using immigration law and administrative detention to accomplish what open prosecution could not accomplish: the seizure and exile of people suspected not of crimes but of political association and belief. The case teaches this series a hard lesson about the Fourth Amendment: that it protects not against the occasional abusive police officer but against the organized, high-level decision to declare entire classes of people subject to warrantless search and seizure, and that when the government makes that decision, the remedy must come from outside the system — from principled officials within the government itself and from public outcry — because the courts will not save you from it while it is happening.
The Red Scare and the Architecture of Fear
The Palmer Raids did not emerge from nowhere. They emerged from a specific moment of genuine crisis and manufactured panic. The war had ended in November 1918. The economy convulsed. Hundreds of thousands of servicemen returned home to unemployment and dislocation. The nation in 1919 was struck by a wave of labor strikes — the Seattle General Strike, the Boston Police Strike, strikes across the steel industry and coal mines — that were genuine labor actions but which were portrayed by the press and political figures as insurrectionary. Simultaneously, a series of bombings terrorized the nation: mail bombs sent to government officials, federal judges, and prominent businessmen. Some were claimed by anarchist groups. Others' origins were murky. The culmination was a bomb that exploded on June 2, 1919, outside Attorney General Palmer's home in Washington, D.C., killing the person who delivered it and frightening Palmer himself. Palmer, who had been tepid on the question of radicalism, suddenly made it his mission to identify and eliminate the radical threat. The nation's newspapers, reflecting the fears of their proprietors and readers, amplified the panic. Reds Menace America the headlines screamed. The political establishment — Congress, state governors, city mayors — began to demand federal action. And Palmer, seeing an opening, began to plan.
The mechanism Palmer chose was already available in the immigration law: the ability to deport aliens suspected of belonging to organizations that advocated the violent overthrow of government. Immigration law, because it treats the deportation of aliens as an administrative rather than criminal matter, permits procedures — detention without bail, minimal due process, expedited hearings, use of secret evidence — that would be unconstitutional if applied to citizens. Palmer's strategy was elegant in its use of this distinction: rather than prosecuting the radicals he feared under criminal law, he would use immigration law to deport them. And to carry out this program, he needed an organization, and he built one, with Hoover at its head. The General Intelligence Division — which Hoover would rename, as he built its ambitions, the Radical Division — began to accumulate files, through informants and interviews, on organizations and individuals suspected of radical sympathies. The lines between criminals, political activists, and mere sympathizers were erased. The files grew. And by the fall of 1919, Palmer and Hoover were ready to move.
The November Raids: Thirty Cities, Thousands Arrested, Most Without Warrants
On the night of November 7, 1919, and continuing through the day of November 8, federal agents and local police officers, operating under Palmer's direction and Hoover's coordination, conducted raids across multiple cities — Boston, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore, and others. The targets were the offices and meeting halls of organizations suspected of radical sympathies: the Union of Russian Workers, the Lusk Committee's target list of organizations, meeting halls of immigrant associations. The arrest warrants, when they existed at all, were blanket warrants that authorized the seizure of people based on their suspected organizational affiliation rather than on specific allegations of crime. In many cases, there were no warrants at all: federal agents simply entered premises, demanded identification, and arrested on the basis of membership or association. The people arrested — hundreds on that night, more in the weeks that followed — were detained in local jails and federal facilities. The conditions were brutal. Prisoners were subjected to interrogation without counsel, held incommunicado from lawyers and family, and fed in conditions designed to be punitive. The Boston police at the immigration detention facility in Boston held prisoners in a basement and subjected them to interrogation designed to extract confessions or admissions of radical belief.
The arrests produced a small harvest of evidence of actual crimes. The vast majority of the people arrested were immigrants — Russians, Poles, Italians, Jews — who had engaged in no illegal act but who had attended a meeting, subscribed to a publication, or been present at a gathering where radical ideas were discussed. Nevertheless, Palmer and Hoover moved forward with deportation proceedings. The machinery of the Immigration Service — a machinery designed for the processing of garden-variety immigration cases — was repurposed into an apparatus of political deportation. Hearings were held in which the defendant could not see the evidence against him, could not confront the informants who reported on him, could not bring witnesses, and could not appeal with any meaningful review. The charges were vague: membership in an organization that Palmer designated as radical, possession of radical literature, attendance at a radical meeting. The penalty was exile from the country — exile that had no statute of limitations and no judicial appeal, and that could be imposed by an immigration inspector on the basis of hearsay.
The January 1920 Raids: The Machinery at Full Capacity
The first raids, in November 1919, produced arrests but also produced a first wave of public criticism and legal challenges. Some federal judges refused to sign the blanket warrants Palmer was requesting. Some lawyers filed habeas corpus petitions. The American Civil Liberties Union, founded just the year before, began to challenge the arrests in court. But Palmer and Hoover, rather than retreating, chose to accelerate. On January 2, 1920, a coordinated series of raids occurred in thirty-five cities across America. The number of people arrested was extraordinary: between three thousand and ten thousand individuals, by various accounts, taken from their homes and workplaces, brought to detention facilities, and held without bail or charge. The raids in January were more systematic than the November raids, more organized, and more complete. Federal agents, working from lists prepared by Hoover's Division, targeted meeting halls, union offices, printing presses, and the homes of people suspected of radical sympathies. The constitutional violation was brazen: they were warrantless or near-warrantless seizures of people based on political association. They were the kind of general warrants that the Fourth Amendment had been written to prevent.
The detention conditions were appalling. At the Deer Island detention facility in Boston, prisoners were crowded into cells, beaten, interrogated under conditions designed to extract confessions. At Ellis Island, men were held in the basement without light or heat through a New York winter. At the Hartford detention facility in Connecticut, the conditions were similar. The federal government was now operating prisons that shadowed the worst of local police custody, and it was doing so in service to a deportation program designed not to manage immigration but to eliminate political dissent.
Simultaneously, Palmer initiated a series of prosecutions under the federal Sedition Act — laws that had been passed during the war and that made it criminal to publish or speak support for the violent overthrow of the government. The prosecutions produced some convictions, though many were later overturned by courts that recognized them as unconstitutional applications of vague law to protected speech. But the point of the prosecutions was not to secure convictions so much as to create a culture of fear: the message was that federal authority would pursue anyone who spoke or published in support of radical change. The combination of the raids, the detentions, the deportation proceedings, and the prosecutions created what amounted to a federal suppression of political activity. Palmer estimated that he had removed the radical threat. What he had actually done was construct a parallel system of justice, outside the courts and the normal criminal process, that permitted the federal government to arrest, detain, and exile people based on political suspicion.
The Redemption: Louis F. Post and the Lawyers Who Fought Back
The remedy, when it came, came from an unlikely source and from sources outside the system altogether. Within the Wilson administration, the Assistant Secretary of Labor, Louis F. Post, held responsibility for the deportation cases that Palmer's Justice Department was forwarding to his bureau. Post was a man in his seventies, an old-fashioned liberal who believed in due process and law, and as he began to review the cases being sent to him for deportation orders, he was horrified. The cases had no evidentiary foundation beyond association. The hearings had been perfunctory. The evidence was hearsay or secret informant reports that no defendant had been permitted to challenge. Post made a determination: he would not sign the deportation orders. Over the course of months, Post reviewed thousands of cases, and he canceled over 1,500 deportation orders, returning the cases to the immigration inspectors and telling them that the legal foundation for deportation was insufficient. Post's action was an act of bureaucratic rebellion: he was using the authority of his office to undo what the Justice Department had done, to restore due process to a system that had abandoned it.
Palmer and Hoover, enraged, moved to impeach Post. Congress opened impeachment proceedings against the Assistant Secretary of Labor for having interfered with the Attorney General's deportation programs. The charge was, in essence, that Post had enforced the law against Palmer's violation of it, and that this enforcement was an abuse of authority. Post, in his seventies, came to Congress and defended his actions. He testified about the cases, about the lack of evidence, about the secret informants who could not be identified, about the denial of the right to counsel and confrontation. He insisted that the Constitution required due process, that the Immigration Act did not permit the kind of proceedings that Palmer had orchestrated, and that he had a duty to refuse to sign the orders. Congress, remarkably, agreed. The impeachment effort failed. Post survived. And the message, however muted by the political pressures of the time, was that there were officials within the government who understood that what Palmer and Hoover were doing violated fundamental law.
Outside the government, the response was equally powerful. Twelve of the most distinguished lawyers in America — including the Harvard Law School professor Felix Frankfurter, the Yale Law professor Roscoe Pound, and other luminaries of the legal establishment — issued a joint report titled Report Upon the Illegal Practices of the United States Department of Justice. The report detailed, case by case, the constitutional violations: the warrantless arrests, the detention without bail, the interrogations without counsel, the secret evidence, the absence of meaningful hearings, the deportations based on hearsay. The report concluded that the Department of Justice, under Palmer, had engaged in systematic violation of the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments, and that the raids and the deportations that followed them were unlawful. The report was published in 1920 and distributed among the legal community, Congress, and the press. It was a formal, authoritative condemnation of the government's actions, issued by the establishment of American law, and it carried weight precisely because it came from established figures, not from radicals or critics of the system.
Simultaneously, federal judges began to push back. Judge George Anderson, a federal judge in Boston, issued opinions in habeas corpus cases challenging the detention and deportation orders. In one opinion, Anderson wrote that the raids and the detentions that followed them were not law but mob action — that a mob is a mob, whether conducted by a street gang or by the federal government. The opinion was a stinging rebuke to the Justice Department and to the government's claim that what it was doing was lawful process. The opinion was also, importantly, written by a federal judge while the raids were still ongoing, while Palmer's power was still at its height — a contemporary condemnation, not a historical judgment.
The Predicted Revolution That Never Came, and the Slow Retreat
Palmer had predicted that a massive anarchist revolution would occur on May Day 1920 — that the nation would face coordinated bombings and insurrection designed to overthrow the government. He placed federal agents on alert. He told the press and Congress to prepare for the worst. And May Day 1920 came and went without any revolution, without any coordinated action by radicals, without any of the catastrophe that Palmer had prophesied. The predicted insurrection had been entirely Palmer's invention, a fantasy constructed to justify the extraordinary expansion of federal police power that his raids had accomplished. When the prediction failed to materialize, Palmer's credibility collapsed. The press that had amplified the panic began to report on the conditions of detention, on the lack of evidence, on the canceled deportation orders. Congress began to lose interest in the crusade against radicalism. And the momentum of the raids, which had seemed unstoppable in January 1920, began to slow.
By the end of 1920, Palmer's political career was effectively over. He had run for president, but the raids had become a liability rather than an asset — a reminder of arbitrary federal power that the electorate was eager to shed. Hoover, by contrast, had built an intelligence apparatus that would persist, and he himself would emerge from the raids with a reputation as a master of federal police work, a reputation that would carry him through the decades. But in the immediate aftermath, the raids receded, the deportations that had been stayed were not pursued, and the people who had been detained in the most egregious conditions were quietly released or deported. There was never a systematic review of what Palmer and Hoover had done. There were no criminal prosecutions. Palmer was never held accountable for the violation of constitutional rights that he had orchestrated. And Hoover, rather than being disciplined, received implicit permission to build on the machinery he had constructed.
The Inheritance of the Palmer Raids
What the Palmer Raids established in American practice is a lesson that this series must insist upon: that the Constitution's promise to protect against unreasonable search and seizure, to require warrants, to protect the right to counsel and confrontation, applies only if the government chooses to follow the law. The Palmer Raids showed that a determined Attorney General, working with a subordinate intelligence official, could overcome the Constitution's protections by the sheer scale and coordination of violation, by the use of administrative rather than criminal law, by the strategic choice to target populations that had no political power to resist. The Constitution's protections failed to function because the enforcement of those protections — judicial review, bar association discipline, internal Justice Department accountability — was not invoked while the violations were happening.
The remedy came, tardily and incompletely, from an Assistant Secretary of Labor whose authority happened to fall within the deportation process, and from a voluntary association of distinguished lawyers who chose to use their prestige to condemn what was happening, and from federal judges who issued opinions while the violation was ongoing. That remedy did not send Palmer to prison. It did not restore to the deported people their homes and families and livelihoods. It did not establish any systematic process for identifying and prosecuting officials who violated the Constitution. It simply stopped the momentum of the violation and permitted the system to return, slowly, to constitutional norms.
The Fourth Amendment was written to prevent general warrants, to prevent the government from seizing people and property without judicial process, to prevent the kind of unlimited search power that the British king had exercised. The Palmer Raids were the federal government's attempt to do precisely what the Amendment forbade — to exercise general warrant authority over entire classes of political suspects. That the attempt was stopped before it became permanent, before it was codified in law and bureaucratic practice, was due not to the courts but to principled officials and to public pressure. The courts that could have stopped the raids while they were happening mostly did not. The courts that could have invalidated Palmer's deportations on a wholesale basis did not. What stopped the Palmer Raids was the exhaustion of political will and the courage of a few officials willing to risk political consequences to refuse to carry them out. The lesson is that constitutional rights are not self-enforcing, that courts are not the only repository of rights protection, and that when the executive branch decides to violate the Constitution at scale, the remedy must come from outside the normal judicial process — from principled resistance within the government itself, from the bar, from the press, and from citizens willing to demand accountability. In the absence of that external pressure, the Constitution provides almost no protection against organized federal violation.