The playbook. Accompanying the ‘Palmer Raids’ of the First Red Scare were a constant stream unsubstantiated bomb plots or mysterious explosions announced by Federal fabulists such as J. Edgar Hoover. Each new contrived plot to be followed by a wave arrests and deportations.

‘Witch-Burner Comes Back for More and Gets It’ by Herbert E. Gaston from Truth (Duluth). Vol. 5 No. 8. February 25, 1921.

CREATION OF BOMB PLOTS IS PALMER’S PAST-TIME

Reign of Terror Foisted On America Not To Be Tolerated In Next Administration.

Prefect Palmer has spoken again. It might be more accurate to say that he has brayed again. He is out with a new warning about “radicals” in the United States. He says the communist party is “renewing its activities,” and that its object is “the destruction of the government of the United States, and the substitution in its stead of soviet rule.”

Heretofore these wordy outbreaks of Palmer’s each have been the prelude to a new campaign of terror. Is such a campaign in prospect now? Are fresh atrocities about to be committed? Probably not. The attorney general is but defending himself against the indictment furnished by his own record.

Surely he needs his own defense. There is scarcely a man in America who has respect for the law or for justice willing to speak a word for Palmer.

Palmer’s persecutions of “radicals” have been particularly despicable in their choice of victims. These have been chosen from among the poor and friendless. He has counted on contempt for the foreigner to support him in raids in which unoffending persons by wholesale have been dragged to jail and forced to face inquisitions whose purposes they didn’t understand. He has held many in prison for months; others, entirely innocent of any crime, have died from mistreatment.

One man was held for months a prisoner because he wouldn’t tell–probably because he didn’t know who printed an anarchistic leaflet found near Palmer’s own house after a bomb explosion in front of it.

That man finally was dashed to death by falling from the window of the high office building in New York in which he was held a prisoner. Whether he leaped in despair or in terror of some fresh form of torture, or was thrown from the window by his captors will never be told. No one ever has been punished for his death and no proof ever has been furnished that he had committed any wrong.

It is not the custom of the department of justice ever to furnish proof of anything.

“Bombs” were sent through the United States mails to many noted persons. “A radical plot,” said Palmer, but no one ever has been tried for the offense. Other bombs have been exploded, one at the very door of Palmer’s own home, terrorizing him and launching him on his career of terror. But with all the resources of what has been boasted to be the best detective organization in the country at his disposal, Palmer has found out nothing about who perpetrated these crimes.

Palmer has caused the name of the department of justice of the United States to stand for the same thing in the minds of newcomers to America and the foreign-born working population that the name of the secret police used to represent in the Russia of the czars. It stands for harsh oppression and persecution.

The outcome of all of Palmer’s wholesale hauls of accused or suspected persons has been, not to find any persons guilty of any violence or plots of violence, but merely to convict a few score of membership in political organizations whose teachings Palmer declares to be dangerous. They have been convicted generally on a line of questioning that would have convicted the great man who wrote the declaration of independence.

Yet it is not to be supposed that Palmer is an arch criminal. He is much too stupid for that. He has put himself in the hands of men who are far cleverer than he is and thoroughly unscrupulous. These are men of the professional detective class, whose business is to serve the large employers of cheap labor These men are interested in removing the agitators–not the political agitators, but the labor agitators. They want their foreign laborers to be thoroughly tractable and cowed. They want those removed who show any spirit and who talk organization.

The men who have been furnishing Palmer his “evidence” and encouraging him in his course are not above either manufacturing evidence or creating crimes to fasten upon other people. They are not above sending threatening letters or even planting bombs if that device will serve to frighten a stupid official so that they can make him more useful.

It is not probable that Palmer has the wit to know for whom he has been working or how he has been worked.

Truth emerged from the The Duluth Labor Leader, a weekly English language publication of the Scandinavian local of the Socialist Party in Duluth, Minnesota and began on May Day, 1917 as a Left Wing alternative to the Duluth Labor World. The paper was aligned to both the SP and the I.W.W. leading to the paper being closed down in the first big anti-I.W.W. raids in September, 1917. The paper was reborn as Truth, with the Duluth Scandinavian Socialists joining the Communist Labor Party of America in 1919. Shortly after the editor, Jack Carney, was arrested and convicted of espionage in 1920. Truth continued to publish with a new editor J.O. Bentall until 1923 as an unofficial paper of the C.P.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/truth/1921/v05n08-feb-25-1921-truth.pdf