Mass deportations during the Hoover Administration under the pious Secretary of Labor, and former rail union bureaucrat, William Doak saw hundreds of thousands of people rounded up, with all of the associated horrors of such a policy. Foreign-born radicals, even U.S.-born radicals, were a specific target.

‘Deportations—1932’ by Albert Deutsch from the Daily Worker. Vol. 9 No. 126. May 27, 1932.

Edith Berkman: “I PLEAD GUILTY TO ONE CRIME, AND THAT IS OF HELPING THE TEXTILE WORKERS AND ALL OTHER WORKERS TO BETTER THEIR CONDITIONS. FOR THIS ‘CRIME’ THEY WANT TO DEPORT ME.”

Secretary of Labor Doak: “I NEVER DEPORT ANYONE JUST BECAUSE HE IS A RED, OR HAS REVOLUTIONARY IDEAS, OR BECAUSE OF HIS WORKING-CLASS ACTIVITIES.”

Ann Burlak:  “YOU’RE A LIAR, MR. DOAK!”

Mr. Bill Doak wants to have it known that he is just a tender-hearted, kindly gentleman who is ever so deeply solicitous for the welfare of his ever-increasing “brood” of deportees. Loudly and frequently does he protest that the “boys” in the Immigration Bureau carry out deportations with a maximum of courtesy, consideration and gentleness–deportees are treated as “Humanly as possible.” Yes! And the Inquisition used to carry out its death sentences “in the most merciful manner possible, without the shedding of blood”–that is to say, by burning at the stake, boiling in oil, slow roasting and other methods similarly refined.

Workers are seized and torn away from their families, held incommunicado for weeks and months, grilled and terrorized by immigration inquisitors, frequently transported over long distances to deportation points under conditions unfit for humans, then thrown into filthy pens crowded to bursting, and finally deported to countries where militant workers face certain death or imprisonment. Such are the “humane methods” used by the modern Torquemadas of the Immigration Bureau, methods which even La pussy-footing Wickersham Commission was forced to condemn as “despotic, tyrannic and oppressive, comparable to the ruthless cruelty of the Dark Ages.”

Who are the people that Mr. Doak deports? “Undesirable aliens,” he tells us. But what are “undesirable aliens?” Does he mean crooks, murderers, racketeers? What a naive idea! The records show that of the more than 18,000 persons deported in 1931 only 511 were criminals–less than 3 per cent of the total. The overwhelming majority were deported because they were foreign-born militant workers, or workers made destitute by the Hoover-Doak starvation government. Thus we see that workers who are considered “undesirable” by the capitalist politicians are precisely those who are considered “undesirable” by the boss-class which they represent.

The deportation activities of the United States Department of Labor, under Doak, by far eclipses all the other combined work of this department. Its tremendous scope is indicated by the fact that it has already expended $2,000,000 appropriated by the government exclusively for deportation work for the fiscal year ending in June. President Hoover recently recommended that Congress immediately appropriate $2,000,000 more for “continuation of the very large program of undesirable and destitute aliens, while an additional sum of $126,000 is to be diverted from other sources for the same purpose. Millions for the continuation of the deportation terror, but not one cent for unemployment relief! This is the dictum of the ruling class.

Last year, over 18,000 foreign-born workers were deported. At the beginning of the present year, Doak boasted that he would deport 20,000. Indications thus far point to his boast being more than fulfilled. Ever ready to do the bidding of the masters he serves, the despicable Doak is using deportation as a weapon of attack against the working class with the same alacrity he displayed in selling out the great railroad strike in 1922, when he was racketeer par excellence in the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen.

Today, as head of the ironically named Department of Labor, this bootlicking betrayer plays his old, familiar strike-breaking role.

The Department of Labor can no longer disguise the fact that it is little else than the official strike-breaking machine of the federal government. It serves as a focal point for the complete “collaboration” of the bosses, their political hirelings and the labor fakers, in their united efforts to stifle the militant struggles of an awakening working class.

The present strike of the 18,000 beet workers in Colorado, who are fighting against starvation wages and intolerable working conditions, offers a typical example of the vicious anti-labor role of the government. Hard upon the announcement of the strike, immigration officials were rushed to the beet-growing area, and immediately commenced their contemptible activities. The deportation threat is intended to break the back of the strike, since most of the workers in the beet-fields are foreign born. Militant workers have been seized by the immigration men and are facing deportation. Among these are the Herreras, man and wife. The officials are trying to deport Herrera to Spain, and his wife to Mexico. Thus the government shows its loudly-trumpeted concern for “the sanctity and inviolability of the family” by brutally tearing apart husbands and wives, fathers, mothers and children.

From coast to coast, from Gulf to Great Lakes, the Department of Labor carries on its dirty work. In Jackson, California, immigration authorities have arrested four workers who were active in organizing gold miners, and are holding them at Angel Island for deportation. In this same state, which keeps Mooney and Billings and the Imperial Valley workers entombed behind prison walls, thousands of Mexican, Japanese and other foreign-born workers who were cajoled into coming to this country by the bosses as very desirable “cheap help,” and are now being ruthlessly rounded up and rushed out as “undesirables.” Likewise, 4,000 Mexicans who were imported into the Chicago and Gary districts by the steel barons as a move to force wages down, have been deported back to their native land-scrapped by benevolent Uncle Sam. Down in Tampa, Florida, the underpaid, over-worked tobacco workers are carrying on a determined fight for the right to organize and to demand livable conditions. Fourteen of their leaders are serving long terms on atrocious frame-up charges, and their militant union–the Tampa Tobacco Workers’ Industrial Union–has been illegalized by the boss court. And now, a small army of immigration officials have swooped down on Tampa, boasting that they “will clean out all the reds” in that city. A number of workers are already being held for deportation to fascist-governed Cuba and other countries. But the workers are defiant in the fact of this terror, and organization goes steadily onward.

Doak’s deportation terrorists have invaded the mining regions, where they also hope to halt the development of the fighting National Miners’ Union, and the textile industrial centers of the eastern cities. The cases of Frank Borich, Vincent Kemenovich and Edith Berkman are well known. The cold-blooded cruelty of the Doak machine is further illustrated in the seizure, imprisonment and efforts to deport Ann Burlak, also a textile union organizer, despite the fact that the authorities knew from the first that she was American born. The mass protest of indignant workers made this palpable frame-up fall through.

The merest suspicion of militant working class activity is enough to set Doak’s hounds on a Red-Hunt. No sooner had news been received of the recent action of 35 rank-and-file members of a Sheet Metal Workers’ Union local, who sought to depose the bureaucratic czars of the union, than Doak ordered his men to investigate these “rebellious workers” immediately. After questioning the workers, the immigration inspectors reported that they were “safe, 100 per cent Americans.”

The favorite questions of the inquisitors are: “Have you participated in any strikes?” “Were you on the picket lines?” “Have you attended any mass meetings of workers?” etc., questions which are infallible indications of the real purpose behind the deportation terror.

Still another aspect of the intricate and far-flung network of the government’s anti-labor activities is revealed in the case of August Yokinen, foreign-born worker, who faces deportation to fascist Finland for the “crime” of renouncing white chauvinism, and dedicating himself to the fostering of unity between Negro and white workers in this country. Thus we see that the Department of Labor, besides being intended as a wedge to split native and foreign-born workers, is used also to try and split the working class along color lines.

The venomous vindictiveness with which the immigration inspectors pursue militant workers is instanced in the case of Martin J. Forkin, who is held for deportation to Canada. Forkin, an English citizen and organizer of the National Miners’ Union of Canada, was arrested at Pembina, charged with crossing the border “without inspection.” The Canadian authorities are eager to get hands on him, and to railroad him to a long prison term for his activities in the Saskatchewan mine strike last fall. The “co-operative” role which the United States and Canadian immigration authorities are playing is too obvious to require explanation.

The deportation mania which is sweeping the United States has extended to Canada, where it is spreading rapidly. The despotic Bennett government has apparently found that even its Section 98, which outlaws the Communist Party and other working-class organizations, has failed to stem the rising tide of the starving Canadian masses. It had, therefore, seized the deportation terror as a new weapon in its offensive against the workers. Within the past month, militant foreign-born workers have been kidnapped from their homes at night, shanghaied to deportation centers, subjected to inquisitions by a secret tribunal and held incommunicado while awaiting deportation. Canada also has, in the case of Sophie Sheinen, young union organizer of Calgary, a case bearing striking resemblance to that of Edith Berkman. Shenien has contracted a serious illness in prison, and her condition is reported to be critical; she has lost 25 pounds in prison. Bail has been refused her. The Canadian Labor Defense League is carrying on a fight for her release.

The International Labor Defense and the Canadian Labor Defense League calls upon all workers to protest against the deportation terror. Mass protest meetings must be held. Letters and telegrams of protest must be sent to Secretary of Labor Doak in this country (Washington, D.C.) and to Premier Richard B. Bennett of Ottawa, Canada. Demonstrations before Canadian consulates throughout the country must be planned at once. The growing organization and unity of the international working class must be maintained! The boss offensive against workers’ unity must be frustrated!

The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1932/v09-n117-NY-may-17-1932-DW-LOC.pdf