The Progressive Attorney General Who Raided Immigrants—And Paid the Price
A. Mitchell Palmer had reached the peak of American politics, but his indiscriminate pursuit of terrorists backfired.
Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast
The immigration raids were unexpected, unnerving, unjust. In one devastating American-dream-shattering, day, federal agents arrested more than 4,000 aspiring Americans for supposedly threatening America.
This overreaction, the Big Red Scare of 1919, triggered a Red, White, and Blue Repair. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer became a laughingstock for initiating these immigrant-rousting “Palmer Raids.” And his nemesis, a lowly Assistant Secretary of Labor, Louis F. Post, became a hero.
Before this immigration crackdown Palmer was known as a progressive Democrat, a Woodrow Wilson man and a man of conscience—while Post was considered a kook. Born in Moosehead, Pennsylvania, in 1872, a Quaker and Swarthmore graduate, trained as a lawyer, Palmer served in Congress from 1909 to 1915. He opposed child labor and endorsed lower tariffs, defying many constituents who feared free trade.