Louis F. Post was Assistant Secretary of Labor during the first Red Scare and opposed to the deportation ‘mania’ of the Palmer years. After his retirement he wrote a tell-all book on the period, published by the Kerr Cooperative. Richard Brazier, a leading wobbly who lived through the period, reviews the book. A PDF of Post’s book here.

‘The Amazing Deportation Mania’ by Richard Brazier from Industrial Pioneer. Vol. 1 No. 10. February, 1924.

READING of the book by Louis Post on “The Deportation Delirium of Nineteen-Twenty” must move all those fortunate enough to read this timely and interesting narrative of official tyranny to amazement.

One’s first impression is: that for a long period of time one of the most important departments of the American government was in the hands of a lunatic, a man who was crazed with fear, and so hag-ridden by a phobia against all schools of radical thought that, in order to suppress them, he encouraged and permitted acts against them that would have shamed an Ivan the Terrible.

The nation-wide raids of 1919-20 against all those suspected of harboring thoughts repugnant to the frightened mind of this “Thought Censor,” Att’y-General Palmer, have never been paralleled in the history of the American nation, and never duplicated elsewhere. For wanton disregard of all elementary rights; for shameless abandon of all semblance of justice and for sheer inhumanity towards a harmless and unoffending citizenry, these attacks by Palmer’s “plug uglies” upon homes and liberties, rank high in the long list of outrages perpetrated against their suppliant subjects by autocratic rulers.

Degenerate Recruits

Mr. Post makes it clear beyond all peradventure of doubt that the Department of Justice under Mr. Palmer’s administration was simply an adjunct of the Burns Detective Agency, and that its secret agents were the dregs of that most despicable of all groups in society: the finks, stoolpigeons, gunmen and degenerates from which private detective agencies recruit their evil armies of crime.

Not content with capturing the Department of Justice, by playing the “Red” bogey to the credulous and frightened Mr. Palmer, and running it to suit themselves and serve their nefarious ends, this horde of detectives, defectives and ineffectives sought to control other government departments, and did, for a while, control the Department of Labor and its machinery for deporting aliens. It was during the control of these thugs that scores of members of the I.W.W. were rushed across the continent from Seattle to Ellis Island and hurried out of the country to their respective fatherlands. without any formality of trial at all.

Medieval Reminders

Some of the incidents of the “Red” raids, mentioned by Mr. Post in his book, make one hark back to medieval times for an adequate comparison. We read of secret prisons and dungeons on top floors of towering sky-scrapers; of some poor victims of official, terrorism hurtling to death from dizzy heights—either driven insane by the tortures of his persecutors or else deliberately hurled into oblivion to hide some especially hideous act of injustice—and many people suspect the latter.

We find homes and halls of public assembly being broken into and despoiled; of families being separated, husbands from wives, mothers from children and girls from their sweethearts. We read with horror of the indignities heaped upon these innocent victims of a brutal despotism caught in what Mr. Palmer called his “rat-trap.” Men by the thousands were held incommunicado for weeks and months, tortured, beaten and “third degreed” by atavistic savages masquerading as officials of the law, and were placed in jeopardy of disease and death by being crowded together like cattle in defiance of all the laws of health and sanitation.

To advertise their infamy still further, these Goths and Vandals dragged their captives, loaded with chains, through crowded city streets to furnish amusement and sport for pure 100 percenters, for all the world like a conquering army staging a triumph—a modern Roman holiday, all in the name of Democracy. Could hypocrisy be more hypocritical than this?

Blazoning Palmer’s Misdeeds

Mr. Post has done well to blazon to the world the misdeeds of the infamous Palmer and his cutthroat crew of dastards; he has rendered a great service in exposing the usurpation of powers not vested in them by Palmer and his hirelings, but there is danger that his book will lull into false security the liberty loving ones of America who are apt to conclude from a reading of Post’s book that the whole disgraceful business of deporting innocent aliens is over and done with when, as a matter of fact, the aftermath of Palmer‘s “Red” crusade is still with us.

Mania Still Survives

There is, for instance, the cases of the 15 I.W.W. members—all of them political prisoners—who are being held for deportation under the amendment to the Immigration Act of 1920. This amendment, which makes all aliens convicted of violating the wartime laws subject to deportation, is a direct outcome of Palmer’s “Red” crusade. These men are to be deported—if the government has its way—for violating laws that no longer exist, since most of the wartime laws have been repealed and the rest are in abeyance until a state of war exists again. Then again this amendment to the Immigration Act is an ex posto facto law, passed while the political prisoners were still in prison and two years after their conviction, yet the government which admitted its wrong in jailing the political prisoners by releasing them all before their sentences were served, due to the pressure of public opinion, still seeks to punish these men by deporting them to countries where some of them are in danger of facing a firing squad.

Mr. Post will not have done his duty until he has helped to arouse the American people to realize the fate that may await these men if they are deported. He once had it within in his power to cancel the warrants against these men, as the original warrants were in his possession up till 1920. It would, perhaps, only have been a gesture of fairness, as his successors would, no doubt, have issued new warrants against these men, but it would have shown that his attitude of fairness towards aliens held for deportation, which he stresses in his book, was something more than a mere pose.

Last Vestige Remains to Be Removed

The last vestige of Palmerism will not be removed from the statutes of this country until the amendment to the Immigration Act of 1920 is repealed, and it behooves Mr. Post and all those who, like him, burn with indignation at the deportation outrages of Mr. Palmer to see to it that no one who was sent to prison for his opinions, or for mere membership in the I.W.W. shall be deported. We wait to see if Mr. Post has the courage of his convictions, and if he will raise his voice as loudly in protest against the attempt to deport these I.W.W. political prisoners as he raised it for the earlier victims of Palmer’s ‘Red’ crusade. Unless he does so protest, his book will remain a work of insincerity; unless he defends to the last ditch every victim of the war hysteria who faces deportation his task remains half done, and he will have assisted, instead of prevented the “Deportations Delirium” to continue.

(The Deportations Delirium of Nineteen-Twenty, Louis F. Post. Chas. H. Kerr & Co., Chicago, III.)

The Industrial Pioneer was published monthly by Industrial Workers of the World’s General Executive Board in Chicago from 1921 to 1926 taking over from One Big Union Monthly when its editor, John Sandgren, was replaced for his anti-Communism, alienating the non-Communist majority of IWW. The Industrial Pioneer declined after the 1924 split in the IWW, in part over centralization and adherence to the Red International of Labour Unions (RILU) and ceased in 1926.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/industrial-pioneer/Industrial%20Pioneer%20(February%201924).pdf