1920 by Eric Burns Read Free Book Online Page B

to historian Robert K. Murray, “a terrific explosion demolished the front of his residence at2132 R Street N.W. Windows in homes surrounding that of the attorney general’s were blown in and startled neighbors rushed into the street to determine the cause. …
    â€œUpon examination, it was discovered that the attorney general and his family were badly frightened but not harmed, and that the explosion had probably been premature. The bomb thrower evidently had stumbled on the stone steps leading up to the front door and had blown himself to bits with his own missile. Only fragments of his body and clothing were found, but enough to indicate that the bomb thrower was an Italian alien from Philadelphia.”
    The clothing was a polka-dotted necktie, which enabled the man to be identified as Carlo Valdinoci. “This was a big loss to the anarchist movement,” Bill Bryson believes. “Though just twenty-four, Valdinoci had become a legend in the underground. Federal agents had recently tracked him to a house in West Virginia, but he had escaped just ahead of them, adding to his reputation for cunning and invincibility.” He would escape, however, no more.
    Two bombs had now been directed at Palmer’s house in two months. He, his wife, and their daughter were unharmed; still, the attorney general could be forgiven for wanting revenge.
    But he didn’t, having been brought up to rein in such impulses. He came from a family, in fact, that belonged to the Society of Friends, or Quakers, for which pacifism is a principal tenet. He and his wife and children frequently attended meeting, sometimes speaking up, sometimes just listening and reflecting, as is the way of such services. But however they responded, their devoutness was unquestioned.
    It was for this reason that, in 1913, when Palmer was distinguishing himself as he served the third of three consecutive terms in Congress, he had turned down the position of secretary of war. “The more I think of it, the more impossible it becomes. I am a Quaker. As a Quaker war secretary,” he said, “I should consider myself a living illustration of a horrible incongruity.”
    Nonetheless, Palmer was not a man to be bullied, nor to yield to opposition he deemed unjust, a threat to deeply held beliefs. He was known to his supporters as the Fighting Quaker. To his detractors, however, whoheld his religion against him and believed it made him timid in times of crisis, he was the Quaking Fighter.
    He looked more like the former. Palmer was a tall man, handsome, a little over six feet tall and capable of filling out his three-piece suits with an easy ruggedness. At this stage of life, his hair was beginning to gray; he wore it brushed neatly to the side in two modest waves. Photographs seem to show that he was more comfortable with a stern expression on his face than a grin, but friends described him as congenial, if almost always distracted, during these days of great tribulation.
    FINALLY, PALMER DECIDED HE
would
seek revenge, not just for the attacks on his house, but, more important, for what seemed a growing challenge to his country and its leading citizens. Thoughts of the vexing incongruity between his faith and his duties continued to plague him but could no longer dictate his actions; he had taken an oath, and his first responsibility was to fulfill it, to serve and protect the United States as best he could. In this case, that meant taking the offensive.
    Choosing the second anniversary of Russia’s Bolshevik revolution, late in November 1919, as his date for striking, he “initiated the first of his major deportation raids,” Susan Gage tells us, “arresting more than a thousand members of the little-known Union of Russian Workers, an anarchist organization composed mainly of Russian immigrants. He justified the arrests as an antiterrorist measure … and a model for future action to contain the dynamite