1920 by Eric Burns Read Free Book Online Page A

Establishment to keep America for Americans, and to define Americans only as the Klan did.
    Federal officials didn’t really believe that an incendiary device was something the Klan would employ, certainly not one set off in Manhattan; the group’s modus operandi was to act against individuals, not to take on large institutions, and to wreak their terror in small towns or sparsely populated farm country, not major American cities. But all possibilities had to be considered; the group, then, was among those scrutinized by the BOI, however superficially.
    It might have been the Klan that set off the bomb.
    BUT THE ATTORNEY GENERAL OF the United States didn’t think so. Palmer believed the explosion was the work of the first two groups, which he tended to lump together into a single perilous mass; anarchists, he thought, were simply communists who had slid a step further down the scale of humanity, their methods more violent than those of communists and their beliefs similar—their membership rolls, in fact, probably including some of the same people. Further, Palmer had concluded that under the influence, if not the direct orders, of the dreaded Galleani, a batch of aliens had been responsible for a wave of bombings the previous year, a frightful introductory act.
    In April 1919, a bomb sent through the mail exploded at the home of the mayor of Cleveland. Another device, similar in nature and also delivered by mail, damaged the residence of a Massachusetts state legislator. Attempts were made to kill judges in Pittsburgh, Boston, and New York, where the vestibule of the jurist’s home was shattered. Neither he nor his family was injured; it is not even certain that anyone was at home. But such was the force of the blast that a young man approaching the house, apparently having after-hours business with the judge, was killed on the sidewalk. The only other injury in the series of April bombings wassuffered by a maid, who, in trying to open a package, had both of her hands blown off.
    The United States, Palmer continued to insist, was under siege. A “blaze of revolution” was sweeping the country “like a prairie fire,” he stated, not toning down his language. He asked for $500,000 to investigate and combat radicals; Congress voted him the money as quickly as the ayes could be uttered. Further, writes Clifton Daniel, Palmer “announced that a plot existed to kill high officials and force recognition of the Soviet Union. Then, almost as if to prove it, a bomb blasted the front of [Palmer’s] house on R Street in Washington.” It sounded “as if something had been thrown against the front door,” Palmer would later say; and it detonated, late at night, just as Theodore Roosevelt’s married daughter, who lived across the street, was coming home from one of her nightly revels.
    Alice [Roosevelt] Longworth in her capacity as ever present historian witnessed the midnight scene: “The pavement in front of the [Palmer] house was marred with glass and leaves—the front wall looked as if it might fetch loose at any moment,” she recalled. “Fortunately just before the explosion, the Palmers had gone to bed in the back part of the house. We went in to see Franklin and Eleanor, who lived just opposite. A leg lay in the path to the house next to theirs, another leg farther up the street. A head was on the roof of yet another house. As we walked across it was difficult to avoid stepping on bloody hunks of human being. The man had been torn apart, fairly blown to butcher’s meat.”
    No one ever knew who the man was, or what he was doing in such an upscale neighborhood so late at night. Some people guessed, not improbably, that he was the bomber, and an amateur in the role.
    Two months later, with the Palmers again at home, another bomb exploded, once again on their porch. It was shortly after eleven on the night of June 2, 1919, almost bedtime, when, according