New York Times
John Ashcroft's Palmer
Raids
By
CLANCY SIGAL
1-LOS ANGELES —
The federal government is still holding hundreds of Middle Eastern and Asian
men rounded up after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11. Most are jailed on
minor immigration violations, but they are being held indefinitely, presumably
as the government looks for some connection to terrorists. Americans who object
to this tactic of indiscriminate roundups, Attorney General John Ashcroft told
a Senate committee in December, "only aid
terrorists."
2-No one wants
terrorists to operate in our country, but the consequences of this kind of
government action can be long-lasting. On this, I have family history to look
to.
3-In the summer of
1919 a series of dynamite bombings, carried out by anarchists, swept over
several American cities. A suicide bomber blew himself up outside the
4-The anarchist
threat was terrifying, just as the terrorist threat is now. Most Americans
supported Attorney General Palmer's campaign against the "Reds" — an
ill-defined menace that went far beyond the small group of actual anarchists
and was blamed for pretty much anything that smacked of social conflict —
including, at various times, the woman's suffrage movement, a
5-My
Russian-immigrant parents fit the profile. They were foreign-born, Jewish,
radical labor organizers who had actively participated in several turbulent
strikes. They had no fixed address and were living in sin. They were arrested,
jailed and almost deported during the infamous Palmer raids of 1920 and 1921.
6-Attorney General
Palmer was an angry man on a mission of vengeance. Using existing sedition
laws, he and his chief investigating officer, a ravenously ambitious
24-year-old named J. Edgar Hoover, ordered 500 agents of the newly created
Federal Bureau of Investigation to go after Communists, socialists, union
activists, and pacifists and arrest them without warrants or judicial hearings.
Homes were ransacked, political literature burned. Estimates vary, but between
4,000 and l0,000 people were secretly, efficiently
rounded up. Like today's detainees, they were often held without bail, habeas
corpus rights or access to lawyers.
7-When I was
growing up my father kept silent about the raids, but my mother told me federal
agents had beaten him on the way to jail. Both of my parents were released to
go back to their lives — my mother after a few days and my father after a few
weeks. They had feared being deported, as some of their friends were.
8-The raids were a
living presence in our house. At a later time, when J. Edgar Hoover's F.B.I.
came around to question me during the cold war, my mother politely met them at
the door, invited them in for coffee and charmed them out of their intended
purpose. But she was pale and terrified when I got home. In an understandable slip of the tongue she said: "The
Palmers have been here. What have you done?"
9-I wonder how
many immigrant homes were like ours. The Palmer raids, though long ago, cut
deep and left scars on individuals caught up in them and on