New film on 1919 Red Scare

Posted on by Ken Ackerman

That’s William J. Flynn standing there in the dapper hat and trenchcoat. Back in 1919, he was very hot stuff. They called him “Big Bill,” the most famous detective in America, former chief of the U.S. Secret Service, former top gumshoe in New York City, recognied as the country’s top spy catcher, Red hunter, counterfeit tracker, enemy of gangsters, kidnappers, bank robbers, gamblers, and criminals of every type.
You could barely pick up a newspaper in the 1910s without seeing his name. He loved splashy midnight raids, and helped terrify the country against German saboteurs during World War I. In his spare time, he even wrote detective novels, mostly making himself the hero.
In 1919, Flynn landed in Washington, D.C. The Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, asked him, begged him, to leave New York and become the new Director of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation (later renamed the FBI). Flynn would hold the job for two years. One of his lieutenants would be a skinny young kid named J. Edgar Hoover who later would head the FBI for 48 years, the most controversial law enforcement figure in Twentieth Century America.
Depite all his big headline-grabbing cases, nobody much remembers Bill Flynn these days. But that could change. A new movie is being made about Flynn’s Justice Department days that, if done right, could nicely poke a rarely-exposed sensitive raw nerve in the American past.
Mitchell Palmer had a special job in mind for Flynn when he invited him to come to Washington in 1919 and head the Bureau of Investigation. Palmer intended to launch a massive crackdown against subversives — communists, anarchists, labor radicals, and a few truly dangerous people — that would culminate in one of the worst civil liberty abuses in American history. Between late 1919 and early 1920, Justice Department agents, working with local police and vigilantees, rounded up some 10,000 people, locked them in overcrowded prisons, had them beaten, abused, cut off from lawyers, threatened with deportation, and then, months later, the large majority simply released, never accused of a crime. The reason? A massive case of paranoia and guilt by association known as the First Red Scare.
Flynn’s direct role in this affair has always been a mystery. Palmer himself and young Hoover played the visible leads — hence the “Palmer Raids”– but Flynn was the person actually in charge of the Bureau at the time. I tell the story of the Raids from Hoover’s point of view in my book Young J. Edgar: Hoover, the Red Scare, and the Assault on Civil Liberties. Now it’s time for Flynn’s.
The new movie, called No God, No Master, recently began shooting in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, (which has several streets that look like 1919 New York City). To play Flynn, it casts actor David Strathairn — who played Edward R. Murrow in the 2005 George Clooney film Good Night, and Good Luck. The production team describes the story this way:
“No God, No Master is the story of U.S. Bureau of Investigation agent William Flynn who is swept into the world of homegrown terrorism during the Red Scare of the early 1900s. His journey into the culture of anarchism sets the stage for a timely drama with rsounding parallels to the politics and issues of contemporary society.”
Let’s hope they do a good job. This is an important story, full of lessons clearly forgotten during the hysteria of our own generation’s War on Terror following the attacks on our country of September 11, 2001. Too often, movies get it wrong. I have my fingers crossed that this will be the exception.

Another J. Edgar Hoover?

Posted on by Ken Ackerman

From this week’s LA Times (June 14, 2007)

The Red scare spawned the tyrannical FBI chief; will a similar homegrown villain emerge from the war on terror?

WHAT created J. Edgar Hoover? He reigned with an iron fist as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for 48 years, until the day he died in 1972. By then, Hoover had evolved into an untouchable autocrat, a man who kept secret files on millions of Americans over the years and used them to blackmail presidents, senators and movie stars. He ordered burglaries, secret wiretaps or sabotage against anyone he personally considered subversive. His target list included the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Albert Einstein, even Eleanor Roosevelt.

Yet when Hoover showed up for his first day of work at the Department of Justice in June 1917, he was a bright 22-year-old, just out of law school. He still had boyish good looks and was cocky and driven. The country had just entered World War I, and Hoover had avoided the wartime draft. Instead, he was ready to help win the war at home, to save the country from spies and subversives.

What changed this young eager beaver into the crass, cynical tyrant of later years?

The fact is, Hoover learned his attitudes and worldview from teachers at the Justice Department during his early years there, when the country was going through a period much like today’s war on terror.

In March 1919, Hoover landed a dream assignment on the staff of new Atty. Gen. A. Mitchell Palmer just in time to participate in the first Red scare, in 1919-1920, and its signature outrage, the notorious Red Raids, also known as the Palmer Raids. For Hoover, it would shape his outlook for life.

On the night of June 2, 1919, bombs exploded in nine cities across the United States, leaving two people dead, including one of the bombers. One of these bombs destroyed Palmer’s Washington home, almost killing him, his wife and his teenage daughter.

These bombs capped months of escalating upheaval during which the country convinced itself that we sat on the verge of a Russian-style socialist revolution. The first Red scare came on the heels of multiple traumas: World War I, the Russian Revolution and subsequent Bolshevik uprisings in Germany, Hungary, Poland, Italy and Argentina. In the United States, the economy had collapsed, prompting waves of strikes, riots and political violence.

Americans vowed vengeance after the June 2 bombings, and the targeted Palmer pledged to crush the reign of terror. He ordered a massive preemptive strike, a nationwide roundup of radicals. To manage the operation, Palmer chose his talented new staff counsel, young J. Edgar Hoover.

Hoover seized the opportunity. With Palmer’s blessing, he laid plans for a series of brutal raids across the country. Backed by local police and volunteer vigilantes, federal agents hit in dozens of cities and arrested more than 10,000 suspected communists and fellow travelers. They burst into homes, classrooms and meeting halls, seizing everyone in sight, breaking doors and heads with abandon. The agents ignored legal niceties such as search warrants or arrest warrants. They questioned suspects in secret, imposed prohibitive bail and kept them locked up for months in foul, overcrowded, makeshift prisons.

It turned out that virtually none of these prisoners had anything to do with violent radicalism. Nearly all were released without being charged with a crime. Palmer’s grand crackdown was one big exercise in guilt by association, based primarily on bogus fears of immigrants being connected to vilified radical groups such as the recently formed American Communist Party.

Still, Hoover relished his moment on the national stage. He appeared twice at Palmer’s side during congressional hearings, and he faced off against future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter in a Boston courtroom in raid-related cases. Behind the scenes, Hoover demanded more arrests, higher bail and fewer rights for prisoners.

Ultimately, the public recoiled in disgust at the excesses and illegality of the raids, and Palmer saw his political career destroyed. But his young assistant fared much better.

Hoover never lost his anticommunist religion, nor his disdain for and distrust of “liberals” who defended “subversives” on grounds of free speech and civil liberties. He also never lost his sense of entitlement to bend the rules, either to protect the country or to protect himself.

Almost 90 years later, today’s war on terror exists in an echo chamber of the 1919 Red scare. The federal government demands more powers at the expense of individual rights: secret CIA prisons, enhanced interrogation techniques, suspension of habeas corpus. Even the president openly claims powers that are beyond the reach of laws such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The same kinds of teachers who transformed the straight-laced, young Hoover in 1919 seem to be on the loose again in Washington. And that raises a troubling question: Are we today creating a whole new generation of young J. Edgar Hoovers, dedicated government agents learning the wrong lessons from the war on terror, who will stick around to haunt us for decades to come?

Alberto Gonzales: The Worst Attorney General Ever?

Posted on by Ken Ackerman

So here’s my thought over coffee today: If Democrats follow through on their plans, then Alberto Gonzales will soon become the first US Attorney General in American history ever to face — and probably lose — a no confidence vote in Congress. But is he really the worst Attorney General ever?

The competition is fierce. To start with, two Attorneys General actually were indicted and stood trial from crimes committed in office. John Mitchell (1969-1972), who held post under President Richard M. Nixon, served 19 months of a four-year prison sentence after being convicted of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury for his role in the Watergate scandals. Five decades earlier, Harry Daugherty (1921-1924), who held the post under President Warren G. Harding, escaped prison only by the grace of two hung juries when he was prosecuted on fraud charges growing out of his part in the Teapot Dome Scandal of the 1920s.

But that’s not all. Even putting aside the criminals, you then come to the likes of A. Mitchell Palmer (1919-1921), who presided over the Great Red Scare after World War I. As his signature achievement, Palmer ordered a coast-to-coast round-up of 10,000 suspected leftists, primarily immigrants from Eastern Europe suspected of belonging to the then-recently-formed Communist Party. Almost all of them turned out to be utterly innocent — victims of guilt by association and bungled intelligence. In the process, Palmer’s Justice Department struck without search warrants or arrest warrants, kept suspects locked up for weeks or months with no access to lawyers or family members in overcrowded, makeshift prisons, and ultimately released them without ever charging them with a crime.

Congress considered impeaching Palmer, but its investigation descended into partisan finger pointing. Only Palmer’s young protege, J. Edgar Hoover, who as a 24 year-old staff lawyer in Palmer’s office actually managed the operation, managed to survive the backlash. Hoover, of course, then went on to lead the FBI for 48 years.

Finally, my choice to round out the bottom five would be Roger B. Taney (1831-1833) , who held the AG post briefly under President Andrew Jackson and helped Jackson engineer his controversial scuttling of the Bank of the United States. But Taney did his real damage to the country after Jackson promoted him to Chief Justice of the United States in 1836. Here, Taney gave us such gems as Dred Scott v. Sandford (1856) upholding the Fugitive Slave Law and bringing the nation to the brink of Civil War, and Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842) justifying kidnapping and adduction if done for the sake for keeping slaves.

How does Alberto Gonzales stack up in this exciting race for the bottom? He’s never been indicted for a crime, and has not had the chance to twist the constitution on the Supreme Court. Still, Gonzales has a record on civil liberties that is striking by any standard: his opinions as White House counsel justifying torture, use of secret prisons, ignoring of the Geneva Conventions and of the FISA statute, and his recently-disclosed pressing of John Ashcroft in his hospital bedroom to sign off on even-more-extreme measures . Add to this his record as AG pressing for the suspension of habeas corpus — something even Mitchell Palmer in his wildest zeal never cosidered — and the politicization of the US attorney corps under his watch. It certainly makes him a contender, and he still has over a year left in office to beef it up his claim– so long as his friend in the White House doesn’t fire him and Congress doesn’t impeach him in the meantime.

So best of luck to all the entries. Please weigh in with your favorites.
Meanwhile, all the best. –KenA