New Hampshire’s First “Red Scare”

(A shorter version of this story lives at https://www.nhradicalhistory.org/story/nhs-first-red-scare/.)

On Friday evening, January 2, 1920, federal agents and local police swept through eight New Hampshire cities and towns, searching for people they claimed were dangerous radicals. When the raids were done, nearly 300 New Hampshire residents, mostly immigrants from eastern Europe, were in custody, seized from private homes and meeting halls in Nashua, Manchester, Derry, Portsmouth, Claremont, Newmarket, Berlin, and Lincoln. If they were found to be both “aliens” and members of the Communist Party, they would be subject to deportation.

The Palmer Raids, as they became known–in dishonor of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer–netted as many as 10,000 people in 33 cities nationwide, with the 141 captured in Nashua the largest single mass arrest in the country. The raids also propelled the career of a young Department of Justice attorney, J. Edgar Hoover, whom Palmer had appointed to head the General Intelligence Division (originally named the “Radical Division”) inside the DOJ’s Bureau of Investigation (later renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or FBI). Hoover began compiling a massive file of index cards and dossiers, one for each person suspected or accused of being a radical, no matter how slight the evidence.

During World War I, crackdown on dissent had focused on German sympathizers and anti-war activists (including socialists and IWW members). But after the war and the Russian Revolution, it shifted smoothly to anarchists and communists, especially immigrants from eastern Europe.

For example, a Committee of Public Safety appointed in 1917 by New Hampshire Governor Henry Keyes rallied support for the war. The committee also worked with local police to inform agents at the Bureau’s new Concord office about activities of trade unionists and other suspected radicals. When World War I ended, according to historian David Williams, the Committee turned its attention to Slavic immigrants suspected of sympathy with the Russian Revolution.

In addition to organizations of immigrant workers, Bureau agents kept a close watch on Black protest movements, assuming rather than concluding that both were tools of the Bolsheviks.

Although federal wartime laws which had enabled the jailing of activists such as Eugene V. Debs were no longer valid, dozens of states stepped into the void. According to historian Robert Murray, “by the year 1921, there were thirty-five states plus two territories (Alaska and Hawaii) which had in force either peacetime sedition legislation or criminal syndicalist laws, or both.”

New Hampshire Takes Action Against “Bolshevism”

New Hampshire was no exception. According to Williams, A. V. Levensaler, who headed the Bureau’s Concord office, drafted the state’s anti-Bolshevist bill, which was adopted by the legislature and signed into law by Governor John Bartlett in March 1919. The law made it a serious crime to “advocate or encourage by any act or in any manner” the overthrow or change of government of the United States, the State of New Hampshire, or any of the state’s subdivisions. In addition to criminalizing such advocacy in public or private settings, the law banned the publication, distribution, and possession of any printed or written material, including pictures, deemed to be of seditious intent. Any such materials were to be seized and destroyed.

Another section of the law made it a crime to advocate, incite, or encourage “the violation of any of the laws of the United States, or this state, or any of the bylaws or ordinances of any town or city therein.”

The penalty for violation was up to 10 years in jail, a fine of up to $5000, or both.

In a statement released to the press on March 28, Gov. Bartlett declared, “We have enacted in the closing days of the New Hampshire Legislature the most drastic anti-Bolsheviki law in the United States, and I have requested our Law Department to rake the state with a fine tooth comb to find evidence of their work, which are [sic] rumored to be here in two or three centres No cost will be spared to supress [sic] the social viper."

When Sidney Downing, a pro-labor resident of Lincoln, sent a letter to a state senator saying the bill infringed on free speech, the senator gave the letter to Levensaler. According to Williams, “Downing’s exercise earned him a spot in the Hoover card index, listed as a ‘Bolshevist sympathizer.’"

Feds Launch Search for “Reds”

Accused radicals wait to be deported.

Under orders from Washington to compile lists of alien radical leaders, Bureau agents conducted warrantless break-ins, planted listening devices, cultivated informers, and hired infiltrators to locate subversives inside unions and ethnic social clubs. Business owners, too, got into the act. A manager at Parker-Young in Lincoln turned over copies of Russian language publications to the Bureau’s Levensaler, who after getting them translated informed the manager that the publications violated the anti-sedition law. Other companies, including Manchester’s Amoskeag Mills and Nashua Manufacturing, likewise sent seized literature and names to the Bureau. Postal officials in Manchester, Nashua, Lincoln, and Portsmouth continued their wartime search for subversive letters and packages and turned over what they found. Conservative labor leaders in Portsmouth teamed up with the Bureau to keep an eye on Open Forum, a caucus within the labor movement. Meeting often at the Last Chance Tavern on Market Street, the Open Forum advocated such “radical” notions as shorter hours and higher pay.

In the words of historian Regin Schmidt, the Red Scare, orchestrated and largely led by A. Mitchell Palmer, J. Edgar Hoover, and their colleagues in the Department of Justice, “was, at bottom, an attack on … movements for social and political change and reform, particularly organized labor, blacks and radicals, by forces of the status quo.” But Palmer, Hoover, and the others faced a serious obstacle: they had no authority under federal law to prosecute people simply for being union members, Black, or radical. That’s one reason why they targeted immigrants.

In the early 20^th century, immigration was regulated by the Labor Department through its Immigration Bureau. In the wake of the assassination of President William McKinley by Leon Czolgosz, a Polish-American anarchist born in Michigan, Congress chose in 1903 to authorize the deportation of anarchist immigrants. In 1917, according to Schmidt, they “extended the anarchist provision of the 1903 act by making any alien, regardless of how long time he had resided in the US, deportable on the grounds of ‘advocating or teaching the unlawful destruction of property, or advocating or teaching anarchy or the overthrow by force or violence of the Government of the United States or of all forms of law or the assassination of public officials.’”

They amended the law again the following year to not only allow deportation of anarchists, but to allow deportation of anyone who was a member of a group deemed subversive. “This was, in other words,” Schmidt said, “a ‘guilt by membership’ provision which meant that the authorities did not need to prove individual beliefs or actions but simply that the alien belonged to an anarchistic organization in order to arrest and deport him.”

Lacking a federal sedition law enabling them to go after radicals based on their beliefs, the Justice Department could pursue its agenda by teaming up with the Labor Department to go after immigrants. In fact, “a major part of the radical movement in 1919 did indeed consist of non-naturalized immigrants,” according to Schmidt. “The anarchist movement was apparently almost exclusively non-native,” as was membership in the newly formed Communist and Communist Labor Parties. Lacking citizenship, their civil rights were at best insecure. Many of those who were ultimately arrested were denied access to counsel and faced coercion to induce confessions of Party membership.

The “Palmer Raids”

The first major sweep came on November 7, 1919, when federal agents in 18 cities raided gathering places for the Union of Russian Workers, a group with anarchist roots. 1,182 suspects were arrested, mostly without warrants. Six weeks later, in the first and only mass deportation of political dissidents in U.S. history, 249 people were put aboard the USS Buford and shipped back to Europe.

By December the agents were ready for an even more ambitious operation. As 1919 drew to a close, Bureau agents prepared affidavits so that immigration officials could draw up arrest warrants. According to Williams, New Hampshire’s agents used the flimsiest of evidence or none whatsoever. As a case in point, “Russians listed by Thomas Moore of Lincoln [a member of the Committee of Safety] in a letter he sent to the Bureau’s Concord office became party members after Levensaler filled in their names on the affidavits.”

Friday evening, January 2, 1920, began like most other Friday evenings, writes Williams. “That evening people in the ‘Russian’ communities gathered together at their clubs, some to hear socialist speakers, while others danced, played cards, or shot pool. An unexpected knock at the door and the sudden appearance of government agents broke up the parties. The fact that the agents had no search warrants or warrants for the arrest of many of the people did not stop them from detaining everyone present.”

In Manchester, agents found and arrested 54 people at the Tolstoi Club, a hangout for Russian workers on Central Street. In Nashua, agents arrested 141 people at the St. Jean Baptiste Hall on Chestnut Street, which had been rented for the evening by the Lithuanian Club. And in Claremont, agents arrested 23 people, mostly at Joe’s Russian Baths on Main Street. "The prisoners were astonishingly ignorant of anything pertaining to Sovietism, and it required considerable ingenuity and threatening persuasion to get anything out of them," one local paper reported.

In addition to ethnic social clubs, agents targeted private homes and businesses. John Bellows, a member of Open Forum, was arrested while playing cards with his brother Stanley in the back room of Stanley’s Portsmouth grocery store on Russell Street. Stanley was arrested, too, for good measure. Koly Honchekoff, another Open Forum member, was at home in bed when he was captured. Asked at a hearing if he was a union member, he answered in the affirmative, adding he had been one for three years. As Williams recounts, “the interrogator put down three years in the Communist Party and the questionnaire became part of the official record.”

Two days later, Manchester police “took 140 men and women from Manchester to Boston aboard the train labeled ‘the Red Special,’” writes Williams. “Arriving in Boston, the prisoners marched handcuffed and in chains through the streets to the ferry landing. Officials made a special effort to attract attention to the spectacle, inviting newsmen and photographers to record the event.” There, the New Hampshire detainees joined some 400 others at Deer Island, where they were held incommunicado in frigid and unsanitary conditions.

Two days later, Judge George Weston Anderson presided over habeus corpus hearings for 28 prisoners, including 7 from New Hampshire. Appalled by what he heard about the conditions of arrests and confinement, he wrote, “a mob is a mob, whether made up of government officials acting under the instructions of the Justice Department, or of loafers, criminals and the vicious classes." Anderson freed several aliens on $500 bond, leading Hoover’s General Intelligence Division to investigate him and start a file.

Although some prisoners were kept at Deer Island for months, criticism mounted. For example, twelve prominent lawyers published “To the American People: Report Upon the Illegal Practices of the United States Department of Justice.” In Schmidt’s words, the report “accused the Justice Department of conducting arrests and searches without warrants, of holding aliens incommunicado, forcing them to confess and even forging evidence, of using agents provocateurs, and of misusing the office of the Attorney General to distribute political propaganda.” The co-authors earned dossiers in Hoover’s growing files.

Anti-Radicalism Becomes “a Permanent Feature”

With liberal journals like The Nation and The New Republic joining the swelling criticism, and with A. Mitchell Palmer’s hopes for a presidential nomination foundering, the Red Scare went into decline. But it never went away, and in the words of Regin Schmidt, “institutional and bureaucratic anti-radicalism, once introduced and established in 1919, became a permanent feature.”

Although a peacetime sedition law never came to be, Congress in 1920 made it a deportable offense to even possess radical literature. And in 1921 and 1924 they tweaked the immigration laws yet again to set quotas aimed at reducing immigration from countries in eastern and southern Europe where most of the radicals came from. Congress also barred Asian immigration entirely and established the U.S. Border Patrol.

As for J. Edgar Hoover, he became Acting Director of the Bureau of Investigation in 1924. From that perch, he continued spying on and trying to destabilize radical groups until the 1960s.

New Hampshire’s sedition law stayed on the books until 1973. In the second Red Scare, New Hampshire adopted a law banning “subversive activities” in 1951 and two years later appropriated funds to enable Louis Wyman, the attorney general, to investigate cases of subversion. Wyman looked high and low, sent Willard Uphaus and Hugo DeGregory to jail for refusal to cooperate with his inquisition, and published a lengthy report detailing his finding. But he never charged anyone with the crime of being a “subversive.” A 1949 act stating that “No teacher shall advocate communism as a political doctrine or any other doctrine or theory which includes the overthrow by force of the government of the United States or of this state in any public or state approved school or in any state institution” is still in force at the time of this writing.

For more on the second “Red Scare,” read about Willard Uphaus and Hugo DeGregory at NH Radical History.

What was it all about, anyway?

Looking back a century later, we might ask, what was it all about?

In his deeply researched history of the period, Regin Schmidt debunks theories that the Red Scare somehow appeared in response to widely held fears. Instead, he concluded, Palmer, Hoover, and their allies used it to bolster the power of the Justice Department within a federal bureaucracy that started growing during the Progressive Era.

And, according to Schmidt, the Red Scare

was an integrated part of a reactionary political campaign, instigated by employers and their conservative allies in the employers’ associations, patriotic societies, state legislatures and the press. Their basic aim was to break the power of organized labor, institutionalize the open shop in the American industry and halt or even roll back the growing government regulation of the economy. The widely publicized warnings of a Bolshevik threat to the US and the charges of subversion and treason levelled against unions and reform measures were all parts of this offensive by the conservative elite to regain its once uncontested and preeminent position of power.

In 2022, in the midst of another Red Scare and a frenzy whipped up to prevent discussion of systemic racism, the final line of Albert Camus’ 1947 novel, The Plague, comes to mind. The plague (a metaphor for fascism) which has ravaged an Algerian city has finally ended. The protagonist, Dr. Rieux, observes the experience of relief throughout the community.

And, indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: The plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.

February 14, 2022

Sources included:

David J. Williams, “’Sowing the Wind’: The Deportation Raids of 1920 in New Hampshire,” Historical New Hampshire, Spring 1979. This article was based on Williams’ dissertation, “’Without Understanding": The FBI and Political Surveillance, 1908-1941,” completed in 1981.

Regin Schmidt, Red scare: FBI and the origins of anticommunism in the United States, 1919-1943, Museum Tusculanum Press 2000. Downloaded in 2021 from Open Access, https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/34930.

Robert K. Murray, Red Scare – Study Of National Hysteria, 1919-1920, McGraw Hill, 1964.

Also worth reading:

Ann Hagedorn, 1919: Hope and Fear in America, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2007