The Palmer Raids were a series of raids conducted in November 1919 and January 1920 by the United States Department of Justice under the administration of President Woodrow Wilson to capture and arrest suspected socialists, especially anarchists and communists, and deport them from the United States. The raids particularly targeted Italian immigrants and Eastern European Jewish immigrants with alleged leftist ties, with particular focus on Italian anarchists and immigrant leftist labor activists. The raids and arrests occurred under the leadership of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, with 6,000 people arrested across 36 cities. Though 556 foreign citizens were deported, including a number of prominent leftist leaders, Palmer’s efforts were largely frustrated by officials at the U.S. Department of Labor, which had authority for deportations and objected to Palmer’s methods.

The Palmer Raids occurred in the larger context of the First Red Scare, a period of fear of and reaction against communists in the U.S. in the years immediately following World War I and the Russian Revolution. There were strikes that garnered national attention, and prompted race riots in more than 30 cities, as well as two sets of bombings in April and June 1919, including one bomb mailed to Palmer’s home.

Between November 1919 and January 2020, Palmer’s agents deported nearly 250 people, including notable anarchist Emma Goldman, and arrested nearly 10,000 people in seventy cities.

100 Years Ago, the First Red Scare Tried to Destroy the Left meow-anarchist

“For a World Without Oppressors:” U.S. Anarchism from the Palmer Raids to the Sixties - Andrew Cornell anarchy

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  • anticlockwise [love/loves, she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    8·
    6 months ago

    By chance, I found out that in a secret laboratory in the 1920s Gleb Bokii—the chief Bolshevik cryptographer, master of codes, ciphers, electronic surveillance—and his friend Alexander Barchenko, an occult writer from St. Petersburg, explored Kabala, Sufi wisdom, Kalachakra, shamanism, and other esoteric traditions, simultaneously preparing an expedition to Tibet to search for the legendary Shambhala. A natural question arose: what could the Bolshevik commissar have to do with all this? The story of the life and death of the Bolshevik secret police officer Bokii and his friend intrigued me…

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      8·
      6 months ago

      The thing about science is, you don’t know if it’s bullshit until you measure it under controlled circumstances, and sometimes that means you spend three months hanging out with Sergei the psychic goat on a farm six hours west of St. Petersberg trying to figure out if Sergei’s uncanny ability to tell when the mail is coming can help your cause.