BOOK REVIEW: ‘Young J. Edgar’ Focuses on J. Edgar Hoover’s Role in ‘Red Scare’ Hysteria of 1919-1920
By David M. Kinchen
Huntington News Network Book Critic
Consider this scenario: The attorney general of the U.S. is under fire; thousands of people are rounded up and imprisoned without benefit of warrants and without being charged; government officials are spying on dissenters and people protesting an unpopular war.
News flash: President George W. Bush obeys secret document rules, but Vice President Dick Cheney, living in a parallel universe, doesn’t. Link: www.nydailynews.com/news/wn_report/2007 /06/23/2007-06-23_cheneys_secret_pass_.html
Sounds a lot like contemporary America, but the lead paragraph describes 1919 and 1920, in the latter part of Woodrow Wilson’s second term. World War I – called the Great War at the time – is over, but the U.S. is fighting Bolsheviks in Russia in an undeclared war and rounding up, imprisoning and/or deporting – in the case of aliens--- anyone suspected of being a communist in the U.S. in one of the worst violations of constitutional rights in the nation’s history.
Kenneth D. Ackerman focuses on J. Edgar Hoover at the start of his career in “Young J. Edgar: Hoover, the Red Scare, and the Assault on Civil Liberties” (Carroll & Graf, 496 pages, $28.95.
The book deals with many of the subjects covered in “Savage Peace” by Ann Hagedorn, which I recently reviewed favorably on this site, but it concentrates on something dealt with in less detail by Hagedorn. She does sketch the career of J. Edgar Hoover (1895-1972) and his methodical habit of creating index cards -- they totaled more than 450,000 by the end of 1920 -- for anyone he considered a subversive.
Washington lawyer and author Ackerman (“Boss Tweed”) does an outstanding job portraying the Teflon quality of Hoover, who joined the Bureau of Investigation – it wasn’t called the Federal Bureau of Investigation until 1935 – in 1917 as a young man just out of law school. Despite his later denials, J. Edgar Hoover, who headed the FBI from 1924 to his death in 1972, was a major force in conducting the Palmer Raids of 1920. They were named for Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, who wanted to succeed his boss Woodrow Wilson as the next Democrat to be president in 1920.
The precipitating event of the Palmer Raids was the bombing of Palmer’s house in Washington, DC on June 2, 1919. The only casualty was the bomber, or one of them, but the damage was severe. On hand to help was a young neighbor of the Palmer family, Assistant Navy Secretary Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Until the bombings, Ackerman says that Palmer had been a relatively moderating force in the Wilson Administration, which had been hostile to freedom of expression. Wilson, who ran for re-election in 1916 on a “He Kept Us Out of War” campaign, was burning to get the U.S. in the bloody European conflict by the late winter of 1917.
Opposition to the war was strong on the left-wing side of the nation, including the socialists and labor unions. One exception was another major figure in Ackerman’s book, Chicago lawyer Clarence Darrow, who favored U.S. entry on the side of the Allies. This led to a split with Darrow and the lefties, who had employed Darrow to defend labor leaders and others accused of such crimes as the bombing of the Los Angeles Times building in 1911, which resulted in the deaths of 20 pressmen.
Another hero to Ackerman is Lewis F. Post, assistant secretary of labor, who opposed the wholesale roundup of “Reds” spearheaded by Palmer with the help of “Edgar” as Ackerman calls him throughout the book.
Speaking of “Reds” – the 1981 Warren Beatty movie dealing with the Bolshevik revolution – many of the characters in the movie figure strongly in the book. Among them are Russian-born activist Emma Goldman, played in the movie by Maureen Stapleton (she won the best supporting actress Oscar), and Louis Fraina, played by Paul Sorvino. John Reed himself – played by Beatty – figures in Ackerman’s book where he describes an Aug. 31, 1919 meeting in Chicago – an important scene in the film – where Reed and Fraina broke with the main wing of the Socialist Party to form the nucleus of the American Communist Party.
More good guys: Felix Frankfurter, a Harvard law professor who risked his career speaking out against abuses by Palmer and Hoover and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, a Civil War veteran, who a few years earlier dissented in a major freedom of speech case, Abrams vs. U.S. and was attacked for his dissent. Frankfurter later was named to the Supreme Court by Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The June 2, 1919 bomb outside A. Mitchell Palmer’s house wasn’t the only one detonated that day: Eight other cities experienced bomb attacks. It was an eerie parallel to 9/11 and resulted in a series of raids that rounded up more than 10,000 Americans, held without bail or extraordinarily high bail at a time when the American average worker made about $1,000 a year.
Major newspapers – including the New York Times – applauded Palmer’s raids, facilitated by the tireless and thorough J. Edgar Hoover. As time passed, however, there was a reaction to the raids, when it turned out that the large majority of the people detained had no connection to the bombings. The reaction killed Palmer’s hopes of obtaining the Democratic presidential nomination in 1920, but J. Edgar Hoover emerged unscathed, Ackerman notes.
He survived the ferociously corrupt Harding administration and was tapped by another good guy, Coolidge’s Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone – also a future Supreme Court justice – to head the Bureau of Investigation. It was a major error by Stone, who had opposed – at risk to his reputation – the excesses of Wilson and Palmer, Ackerman says.
“Young J. Edgar” is a book that demonstrates forcefully the corrupting nature of power in the hands of flawed government officials. It’s panoramic, detailed and extremely timely.
Publisher’s web site: www.carrollandgraf.com
