Palmer Raids - Background

Background

During the First World War, the United States witnessed a nationwide campaign against divided loyalties on the part of immigrants and ethnic groups. Particular targets were Germans with sympathies for their homeland and Irish whose countrymen were in revolt against America’s ally, the United Kingdom. In 1916, President Wilson warned against hyphenated Americans who, he charged, had "poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life." "Such creatures of passion, disloyalty and anarchy", Wilson continued "must be crushed out". The Russian Revolution of 1917 added special force to fear of labor agitators and partisans of ideologies like anarchism. The general strike in Seattle in February 1919 represented a new development in labor unrest that the war had suppressed.

Anarchist bombings in April and June 1919 carried out by Galleanists, Italian anarchists and followers of the radical anarchist Luigi Galleani, meant the threat was real. At the end of April, some 30 Galleanist letter bombs had been mailed to a host of individuals, mostly prominent government officials and businessmen, but also law enforcement officials. Only a few reached their targets, and not all exploded when opened, though some people suffered injuries, including a housekeeper in Senator Thomas W. Hardwick's residence, who had her hands blown off. On June 2, 1919, a second wave of bombings occurred, when several much larger package bombs were detonated by Galleanists in eight American cities, including one that damaged the home of Palmer. At least one person was killed in this second attack, night watchman William Boehner. Flyers declaring war on capitalists in the name of anarchist principles accompanied each bomb.