Happy Saturday. Today's Classic is a request from listener Amy, who asked us to replay it because of how applicable it is to current events. This is our episode on the Palmer Raids, which originally came out in twenty sixteen.
This is a two part episode, and we haven't been rerunning two parters of Saturday Classics lately unless the original episodes are so short, like from an earlier time when our episodes tended to run a little shorter that they could add up into one regular length episode today, but that's not really the case with these, so we're running
the two parts on separate Saturdays. These episodes also each have their own arc, so today's involves some historical context and a series of bombings that were carried out in nineteen nineteen, and then next week, part two on Saturday will cover the federal response to those bombings. So this first part of the Palmer Raids originally came out December fifth, twenty sixteen. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class a production of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. So after World War One, the United States was in the midst of a lot of social unrest. There were a lot of financial issues facing the nation in the form of
inflation and unemployment and labor strikes. In nineteen seventeen, the Bolshevik Revolution, which established the world's first communist nation, terrified Americans, and after the war ended in November of nineteen eighteen, there was a very pervasive fear, which came to be known as the Red scare, that radicals in the United States would try to stage a similar revolution. Additional, the Spanish flu pandemic that had started in nineteen eighteen also
had people on edge. Additionally, there was a lot of racism that was blowing up in the form of violence. In short, the US was in this state of feeling helpless and uncertain and uneasy all the time. And this is kind of the setting of what we were talking
about today, which is the Palmer Raids. And this is going to be a two part episode, and there are a lot of moving parts to it, Like we're kind of jumping around a little bit where we'll talk about one thing for a moment, and then another thing for a moment, and then another they're sort of in separate sections, but they eventually all become part of this bigger picture. And so the first thing that we're going to talk
about is actually the Sedition Act of nineteen eighteen. On May sixteenth, nineteen eighteen, the Sedition Act was passed by the US Congress, and this act expanded on the previously existing Espionage Act of nineteen seventeen. The Espionage Act had made a crime to traffic and information with the intention that that sharing would harm the United States and the war effort, or assist any enemies of the United States, and the Sedition Act was both more expansive and more focused.
Anti war activists, pacifists, and socialists were all targeted in its wording, and under the Sedition Act, it became illegal to make false statements that interfered with the war effort. It was illegal to insult or in any way abuse the US government or its representative, flag, military, or the Constitution. Agitating against the production of war materials was also covered, as well as teaching or defending any of the actions that were made illegal in the language of the Act.
The punishments outlined in the Sedition Act were the same as those described in the Espionage Act. If anyone was found guilty of the crimes described, they could be fined up to ten thousand dollars jailed for twenty years, and both of these punishments could be sentenced at the same time. So keep the Sedition Act and the Espionage Act in mind. But next we are going to hop to a different thing, and we are going to talk briefly about a postal clerk.
And that man was named Charles Kaplan, and he was a postal clerk working in New York City's main post office in nineteen nineteen. And on April twenty seventh of nineteen nineteen, over the course of his normal work, he encountered sixteen small parcels, and they were all virtually identical, both visually and in the fact that they all had
insufficient postage. And Kaplan set these parcels aside to be returned to the sender at the return address on the package, which was an address that was Gimbal Brothers, thirty second Street in Broadway, New York City, and they were marked
novelty samples. A few days later, while riding the train home from work in the wee hours of April thirtieth nightnineteen nineteen, Caplan read the paper and one of the stories he read detailed a small parcel, and the description of this parcel was almost identical to these he had set aside. On the twenty seventh, this parcel was delivered to former US Senator Thomas Hardwick in Atlanta, Georgia, and
when Hardwick's maid open the package, it exploded. Both the maid and Hardwick had survived, although the maid had been really injured by the blast and there was a lot of property damage. Yeah, descriptions of her injuries very a little bit. They're pretty brief. Some will say that her hands were actually blown off, Others will say that they were crippled in some way, but she was very, very injured.
Kaplan immediately exited the train. He jumped off at the next stop, and he ran back to the post office and those sixteen brown paper wrapped parcels that were in the storeroom that he had set aside. The parcels, which indeed matched the description that Kaplan had just read in the paper, had not moved on to their next step in the of being returned, so Caplan notified Postal Inspector W. E. Cochran,
and the authorities were immediately called. The New York City Bureau of Combustibles, which is sort of a fabulous name and no longer exists in that particular nomenclature, opened some of the parcels along with Cochrane because he was extremely good at this. Apparently, upon examination by the Combustibles Bureau, these parcels were deemed infernal machines, another kind of great name for something really terrible they were. Today they would
be labeled as incendiary devices. They were addressed to J. P. Morgan Junior, John D. Rockefeller, Mayor John F. Hyland, Police Commissioner Richard Enwright, and a number of other well known businessmen, politician and judges. So Caplan had unwittingly discovered a serial bombing. So after receiving all of this information, Postmaster General Albert Burlison's out an alert to all postal offices describing these bomb parcels with instructions to be on the lookout for
similar packages. The next day, one turned up in Salisbury, North Carolina, addressed to State Senator Lee Slater Overman. Additional parcels that all were identical, were identified in Nebraska and Utah. In total, three dozen mail bombs were eventually found and identified. When the bombs are taken apart. They were all identical in construction, and experts were unable to find a single
fingerprint on any of the components. Manufacturers of the type of paper that was used to wrap the boxes shared a list of all the dealers who had been sold that type of paper in the preceding twelve months, and the government authorities followed up on all of those leads in an effort to identify who ultimately bought the paper from the dealers, and it was determined as well that an Oliver brand typewriter with a misaligned lowercase W key and a defective lowercase K key was used to type
the address labels on the boxes. The labels with the Novelty samples Gimbal Brothers Return Address were determined to be forgeries and not the actual stationery of that company. The investigation next led to a house on West forty fifth Street, where a number of other explosives were cached, but what wasn't clear was who was collecting all this material, Although
investigations continued. We'll talk more about the mail bombs and they're coverage in the press in just a moment, but first we are going to pause for a word from a sponsor. The discovery of those bomb parcels, which came to be known as the May Day bomb plot, led
to a panic. A front page story in the New York Times on May fourth read quote, there are more than two thousand radical agitators in New York City who have been preaching bullism and the overthrow of the United States government, and every one of these persons is now under investigation by federal and local authorities. According to that same news article, more than seventy five percent of those two thousand people were quote, citizens or subjects of foreign nations.
Many were expected to be deported with the process described in the following manner. Quote. It is generally understood that a large number of them are now being considered for deportation as persons whose presence in this country is undesirable. All persons recommended for deportation have to be passed upon by the Attorney General and Secretary of Labor in Washington
before the recommendation can be carried into effect. An official from the Department of Justice gave statements to the press that it was believed that Bolshevik and Industrial Workers in the World IWW papers were not only circulating in abundance in the United States, but that the Bolshevik movement in North America was being funded directly from the Lenin Trotsky government.
The IWW for Information was and still is a labor union that was founded in nineteen oh six in Chicago, and the IWW was believed by the Department of Justice to have a large reserve fund of its own to promote an agenda of government sabotage. This brings us around to the Attorney General at the time, Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer or A. Mitchell Palmer, and He was born
on May fourth, eighteen seventy two in Moosehead, Pennsylvania. He grew up a Quaker, first attending public schools and then Moravian Parochial School before moving on to Swathmore College in Pennsylvania. He graduated summa cum laude in eighteen ninety one and went on to study law at Lafayette College and George Washington University. Although he didn't finish his law degree, he did pass the bar exam in Pennsylvania and started his
law career in eighteen ninety three in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. Early on in his professional career, he also became involved in politics. Palmer was elected to the US House of Representatives in nineteen oh five, and he held that role for a number of years. His last reelection bid that he won was nineteen twelve, and during that period that he served as a representative, he was instrumental as a steady supporter and campaigner in securing the nineteen twelve Democratic presidential nomination
for Woodrow Wilson. Once Wilson was in office, Palmer made the move to run for a seat in the Senate in nineteen fourteen, but he lost the election. Although he lost that race, he was soon given a different sort of promotion by appointment, because Woodrow Wilson appointed him to the US Court of Claims as a judge. But only a few months into that appointment, Palmer changed his mind about the job and decided that instead he wanted to
go back into private law practice. Later, Woodrow Wilson offered him another position, that of Secretary of War, but Palmer turned it down, citing his Quaker beliefs is the reason that he could not take that job. Since the United States entered World War One, Palmer was named Alien Property Custodian by President Wilson and he did take that job.
That office was established on October twelfth, nineteen seventeen, under authority of the Trading with the Enemy Act to assume control and dispose of enemy owned property in the United States and its possessions. So President Wilson ultimately put Palmer into an even higher position in nineteen nineteen when he named him Attorney General of the United States, and Palmer
started that job on March fifth of nineteen nineteen. And initially there was criticism from Republicans that Palmer wasn't aggressive enough in pursuing subversives who might wish to take down the US government, But Palmer, eager to gain favor as he had plans for a presidential bid, would eventually earn the nickname the Fighting Quaker for the fervor with which
he carried out his duties. On the night of June second, nineteen nineteen, just a few months into Palmer's time as a turney in General, a man named Carlo Valdinocci approached Attorney General Palmer's Washington, d c. Home. He had a
parcel with him, and the parcel contained a bomb. Palmer himself had gone upstairs to retire for the evening about fifteen minutes earlier, but Valdenochi's in sundiary device went off while he was carrying it, and the front and a significant portion of the bottom level of Palmer's home was damaged. This also killed Valdinocci. Yeah, Palmer had been in office during that made a plot uncovery, but people thought he
was not very strong about it about following up on it. However, this suddenly came to his own door and things changed significantly. That bomb had been quite powerful, so it had, in addition to blowing up the bottom floor of his house, it had blown out the windows of the home across the street as well, which was where Franklin and Eleanor
Roosevelt were living at the time. And it was Roosevelt who had run across the street to offer assistance and Palmer who had run downstairs who found the remains of Valdanocci's body and anarchist literature that he had been carrying, which led to the conclusion that this had been a terrorist plot gone wrong. Also, this bomb at Palmer's home was not an isolated incident. In the ninety minutes that
followed Valdinoci's explosions. Seven other bombs exploded in New York, Pittsburgh, Boston, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Patterson, New Jersey, and among the targets were three judges, a mayor, a state legislator, legislator, a Catholic priest, and a prominent police officer, along with two businessmen. The coordinated bombings had resulted in the death of a night watchman named William Bayner in New York, although he had not been one of the targets. Yeah, none of the actual
targets were killed in those bombings. There are also some accounts that suggest there were some other bystanders that were injured, and some will even say they were killed, but I couldn't verify any of those. The night watchmen is the only one that consistently comes up over and over. So along with each bomb that had been delivered, there were also several copies of flyers with the title Plain Words,
and I'm going to read part of it. It's quite long, but I'm taking excerpts, and it reads, the powers that be make no secret of their will to stop here in America the worldwide spread of revolution. The powers that be must reckon that they will have to accept the fight that they have provoked. Do not expect us to sit down and pray and cry. We accept your challenge and mean to stick to our war duties. We know that all you do is for your defense as a class.
We know also that the proletariat has the same right to protect itself. Since their press has been suffocated, their mouths muzzled, we mean to speak for them the voice of dynamite through the mouth of guns. Do not say that we are acting cowardly because we keep hiding. Do not say it is abominable. It is war, class war, and you were the first to wage it under cover of the powerful institutions you call order, in the darkness of your laws, behind the guns of your boneheaded slave.
Our mutual position is pretty clear. What has been done by us so far is only a warning that there are friends of popular liberties still living. Only now are we getting into the fight, and you will have a chance to see what liberty loving people can do. Do not seek to believe that we are the Germans or the devil's paid agents. You know well we are class
conscious men with strong determination and no vulgar liability. And never hope that your cops and your hounds will ever succeed in ridding the country of the anarchistic germ that pulses in our veins. We know how we stand with you and how to take care of ourselves. Besides, you will never get all of us, and we multiply nowadays. Just wait and resign to your fate, since privilege and riches have turned your heads. Long live social revolution, Down
with tyranny, and it is Sun the anarchist fighters. So next up we will detail the bombs in the second attack as compared to those from the earlier incidents we talked about, you know, tying those together. And before we do, we will take a quick break to talk about one of our fantastic sponsors. The June bombs were significantly more powerful than the bombs that had been discovered in the
late Spring. They contained approximately twenty five pounds that's eleven point three kilograms of dynamite wrapped in a package, each of them with metal slugs to create destructive shrapnel. As you may recall, one of those springtime bombs maimed but did not kill the woman who opened it, whereas this bomb that went off while Valdenocci was carrying it killed him.
Presumably instantly blew out a significant amount of the building he was in front of and caused minor damage to other structures on that same street, so a significant increase in power. The pink flyers and the plain words writing were traced to a print shop run by two men, typesetter Andrea Salcedo and compositor Roberto Alia. Both men were followers of an anarchist named Luigi Galliani and Carlo Valdanocci.
The man who had his bomb go off as he approached Palmer's residence, had been an editor of one of Galliani's publications, which advocated the use of violence to affect change. One of the addresses in the Mayday bomb plot had been Raimi Weston Finch, who was an FBI agent who had been investigating Galliani and his followers. So at this
point Galliani was heavily implicated in these bombings. For an incredibly brief overview, just to try to contextualize this connection to Luigi Galliani's tempestuous life, he was from Vircelli, Italy, and studied law at the University of Turin. During his time in school, he became increasingly in politics, and eventually his anarchist beliefs made him a wanted man in Italy, so he fled his home country in eighteen eighty before
he was able to finish his degree. He ended up living in France on and off for the next twenty years. He then moved briefly to Switzerland but was deported. He once again went to France, but then was deported back
to Italy and was ultimately imprisoned. After an escape from confinement on the island pantell Pentelliera, which I may or may not be butchering, he went to England and then he emigrated from there to the United States, and he lived in Patterson, New Jersey, and until an indictment for inciting a riot when he tried to flee to Canada, but he was refused entry. Allegedly he was literally just
pushed back across the border. He found a group of like minded people eventually in Vermont, and from there he began publishing an anarchist periodical in nineteen oh three, which ran for fifteen years from various locations before the US government shut it down. You have probably as a listener, heard of the more well known anarchists Sacho and Vanzetti, Galiani and his circle had ties to them, as well as for the men who had made the flyers. Salsado jumped or fell from the window of his cell in
the DJ's building on Park Row in New York. He had been held there secretly for eight weeks, and there were rumors that he died by suicide. To keep himself from giving up names of collaborators, Alio was offered a deal where his deportation would be canceled if you testified about the anarchists and their organization, but he refused, so two days after Salsado's death, Ali was given up to
the Department of Labor and moved to Ellis Island. The Department of Justice contended that the men had both turned state's evidence and then had been held secretly for their own protection. The investigation into this second set of bombings was led by Todd Daniel, who was a special Agent of the FBI, as well as the acting head of the FBI, William Flynn. Flynn, who had been Chief of the Secret Service, was lauded by Attorney General Palmer as
quote the leading organizing detective in America. Flynn is an anarchist chaser, the greatest anarchist expert in the United States, but just days after the June second bombings, a number of people were being tracked as suspects an active participation
in the attacks. Over the next several months, Palmer invoked both the Espionage Act of nineteen seventeen and the Sedition Act of nineteen eighteen that we talked about at the top of the show to assemble a special team led by a lawyer from the Justice Department named Jay Edgar Hoover. This team would go on to work closely with the Immigration Bureau, both to investigate existing suspects and identify others.
Hoover and his team went after every possible scrap of intelligence they could find to identify persons that they felt were the most likely to take violent action. So at this point they were not just tracking who possibly participated in this bombing act, but anyone that they thought might one day think that doing something similar was a course
of action they would try so. When all of their research was collected, Palmer was utterly convinced that there was a communist plot to overthrow the US government and that there were tens of thousands of people in the US working to that end, and he had compiled a list of them that he was going to go after. In the next episode, we will talk about the steps that Palmer and his team took to address this perceived communist threat, But for now, this is where we are going to
leave the story. Yeah, so at this point, there's a lot of fear that there are communists literally lurking everywhere in your neighborhoods, trying to slowly overtake the entire US way of life. Like these two bombing plots are legitimately casts for concern. To be very clear, we're not saying yes, you know, we're not saying they shouldn't have investigated the bomb plots. Obviously that was a big deal. But like this took on a much much greater scope for sure.
Like I said, it really did transition to I think you might be shady onto the list you go. Yeah, there's there's an episode in the archive already about McCarthy and the Red Scare and how that ties together. I feel like this this part is not as well known as that. Like today, I feel like the McCarthy era is a lot better known than the Palmer raids that
we're going to talk about. Yeah, and part of that is just a matter of documentation, Like there is a lot of documentation on the Palmer Raids, but then the McCarthy era stuff was later enough that there were more forms of communication that were more common, so more people knew about it instantly. Yeah, the Palmer Raids are one of those points in history that does not often get a lot of attention. Yes, thanks so much for joining
us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email addresses History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.