Palmer Raids Timeline

The Union of Russian Workers was selected as a target for a nationwide enforcement operation. Federal officials associated the organization with revolutionary and anarchist politics.

Image source: Union of Russian Workers

Palmer requested that his investigative budget be increased from $1,500,000 to $2,000,000 to support operations against radicals. Congress limited the increase to $100,000, but the additional funds still supported the department’s campaign.

Attorney General Palmer told the House Appropriations Committee that evidence indicated radicals would, on a certain day, rise up and destroy the government at one fell swoop. His warning was used to justify expanded federal investigations.

Image source: A. Mitchell Palmer

Palmer named 24-year-old J. Edgar Hoover to head the Justice Department’s new General Intelligence Division within the Bureau of Investigation. The division was responsible for investigating radical groups and identifying their members.

Image source: J. Edgar Hoover

Under Hoover, the General Intelligence Division investigated radical organizations and compiled information about their members. Its work supplied intelligence and organizational support for subsequent federal raids.

Attorney General Palmer devoted his energies to the United Mine Workers coal strike during November and December 1919. His exhaustion and attention to the strike left Hoover to organize the next major wave of raids.

Image source: United Mine Workers of America

The November operation was carried out in 12 cities. The raids were heavily publicized and violent, demonstrating the Justice Department’s new willingness to use coordinated federal and local police action against suspected radicals.

At 9 p.m. on November 7, agents of the Bureau of Investigation and local police began a series of raids against the Union of Russian Workers. The date was chosen because it was the second anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.

Approximately 10,000 people were arrested during the raids. The mass arrests reflected the scale of the Justice Department’s campaign, although many detainees were never shown evidence of criminal activity.

Of the approximately 10,000 people arrested, 3,500 were held by authorities in detention. The number of detainees became central to criticism of the government’s methods and its disregard for ordinary legal process.

Ultimately, 556 resident aliens were deported under the Immigration Act of 1918. Deportation was the principal official objective for many foreign-born people swept up in the raids.

The Justice Department launched a second major series of raids on January 2, 1920. The operation was organized by Hoover while Palmer was occupied with the coal strike and other pressures.

Follow-up operations continued over the next few days after the January 2 raids. Together, the raids formed the largest coordinated federal campaign against suspected anarchists, communists, and socialists in the period.

An initial raid against an anarchist group in Buffalo, New York, achieved little. A federal judge dismissed Palmer’s case, providing an early indication of the legal difficulties that would confront the government’s campaign.

Harvard professor Zechariah Chafee criticized the raids, deportation attempts, and lack of legal process in his 1920 volume Freedom of Speech. His work provided an influential academic critique of the government’s suppression of radical speech.

Image source: Zechariah Chafee

The raids became an enduring example of mass deportation operations that ignored civil liberties, heightened racial tensions, and disrupted families. Later discussions have compared the legal issues of the 1919 raids with deportations during the second Trump administration.

At a Cabinet meeting, Palmer called on Secretary of Labor William B. Wilson to fire Louis F. Post. Post had challenged deportation actions, but Wilson defended him rather than dismissing him.

Image source: Louis F. Post

Palmer had forecast an attempted radical uprising on May Day 1920. When the predicted uprising failed to occur, the political drive behind the campaign began to lose energy.

The nascent American Civil Liberties Union published its Report Upon the Illegal Practices of the United States Department of Justice. Founded in response to the raids, the organization documented unlawful arrests, entrapment by agents provocateurs, and incommunicado detention.

Image source: American Civil Liberties Union

Massachusetts District Court Judge George W. Anderson ordered the discharge of 17 arrested aliens. He denounced the Department of Justice’s actions, adding an important judicial condemnation of the raids.