Between the winter weather and a rather annoying sinus infection, I haven't felt too terrific lately. I hope my readers are in better shape! I'm certainly not sorry to be saying goodbye to January, and they're promising warmer temperatures for the first week of February, so fingers crossed.
I'm sure that as cold as it is here, though, it's much colder up in Monroe County at the gateway to the Poconos, where today's marker stands by the county courthouse.
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| The marker stands outside of the Monroe County Courthouse in Stroudsburg, by the intersection of North Seventh and Sarah Streets. |
He was born in White Haven, Luzerne County, on May 4, 1872; he was the third of four children born to Samuel and Caroline (Albert) Palmer. Theirs was a Quaker family, which would have some impact on Palmer's career trajectory later in life. He received part of his education at the Moravian Parochial School in Bethlehem, then graduated from Swarthmore College in 1891. After studying law at both Lafayette College and George Washington University, he was admitted to the bar in 1893 and began to practice law in Stroudsburg. In 1898 he married Roberta Dixon, the mother of his only child, Mary.
Palmer served in Congress multiple times in the early part of the 20th century, arguing in favor of lower tariffs and supporting the campaign of Woodrow Wilson. As President, Wilson offered Palmer the post of Secretary of War; Palmer declined, citing his Quaker upbringing and his people's staunch opposition to war. He instead remained in the House of Representatives for two more years before taking Wilson's advice to run for Senate instead. He lost the election, and left Congress altogether in 1915.
Meanwhile, history was happening. World War I broke out, which they thought would be 'the war to end all wars.' (Spoiler alert, it was not.) Before it concluded in 1918, the Russian revolution took the world by storm and ended the centuries of reign by the Romanov czars. Russia was now a communist country. This put the United States on high alert for the spread of communism to its own shores, a fear that would continue for decades. I've mentioned McCarthyism before, in my post about the ill-fated John Nelson, but the Palmer era predated that by a good quarter century.
Palmer was given the wartime appointment of Alien Property Custodian, which is not as X-Files as it sounds to us today. His job was to keep track of and, when necessary, sell "enemy property" in the United States. This was mostly German stuff - in 1918, he testified before the Senate that the brewing industry in the U.S. was overwhelmingly German and had very pro-German sympathies. The following year, Wilson took the advice of several members of the Democratic party and offered Palmer the vacant post of Attorney General, which he accepted.
In that same year, there came a series of mail bombings - explosive packages sent to certain members of Congress and law enforcement. Luckily, most of the packages didn't achieve their desired result. Several were prevented from reaching their intended targets thanks to a sharp-eyed postal clerk, while some of the others just failed to detonate. But a few actually did explode; one badly injured a housemaid working for former Senator Thomas Hardwick in Georgia, and two people were killed by a bomb at the home of Judge Charles Cooper Nott, Jr. in New York. Palmer's response to this was to create a special division of the Bureau of Investigation (forerunner to the FBI) which was to gather as much information as possible about leftist radicals. A young lawyer in the Justice Department by the name of J. Edgar Hoover was appointed to run this division.
The results of this were terrible. Hoover did his job with great zest, and under the Sedition Act, law enforcement used his analysis to invade a lot of places. Violent raids took place at social clubs, union halls, bookstores, and private homes, and people were arrested - often without warrants, frequently without being allowed legal representation and sometimes without even being told what the charges against them were. Many alleged Communist sympathizers were deported in December 1919, but the raids continued well into the following year; because they were done with Palmer's sanction, they were known as the Palmer Raids. Prisoners were beaten and tormented, and sometimes their family members were beaten in front of them as part of the torment. The ACLU was actually formed in 1920 in response to all of this violence, with one of the organization's first movements being to challenge the Sedition Act.
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| Portrait of A. Mitchell Palmer by Harris & Ewing, courtesy of the United States Library of Congress via WikiCommons. |
While all this was going on, Palmer was having other problems too. A railroad and coal strike caused shortages and price hikes, and Palmer attempted to use the Lever Act (a wartime rule which basically made hoarding a crime) to keep the strikes from happening. It didn't work, and efforts to mediate between Palmer and the United Mine Workers failed. Some of those who opposed the strike claimed it was another Communist plot, although Palmer himself didn't go quite that far; he did, however, make a political misstep by claiming that his use of the Lever Act was supported by the entire Cabinet. This was not true, and the Secretary of Labor (who didn't support it) never forgave him - and the Department of Labor interfered as much as possible in his efforts to deport radicals.
Palmer's biggest mistake was the claim that there would be a May Day uprising. He insisted that an armed Communist uprising had been planned for May 1, 1920, and used this as justification for more raids and attempts at deportation. There was no uprising, and as far as history has been able to determine, there had been no plans for one either. Palmer was mocked extensively for his false prediction, and lost the Democratic nomination for President that year. I don't know if he lost it because of the May Day debacle, but it's safe to say that it didn't help.
After the end of Wilson's Presidency in 1921, Palmer decided to resume private law practice, though he remained involved with the Democratic party. His wife Roberta died in 1922; the following year, Palmer remarried Margaret Fallon, a twice-widowed D.C. socialite, to whom he remained married for the rest of his life. He supported Franklin Roosevelt's Presidency and served on the Platform Committee of the 1932 Democratic National Convention. In the spring of 1936, he had his appendix removed; two weeks later, on May 11th, he suffered cardiac complications and died in Washington, D.C.'s Emergency Hospital. He is interred at Laurelwood Cemetery in Stroudsburg, and his historical marker stands outside of the courthouse where he first practiced law.
Sources and Further Reading:
Various editors. "Palmer Raids." History.com, 2018.
A. Mitchell Palmer in the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress
A. Mitchell Palmer's obituary in the Hagerstown, Maryland Morning Herald, May 12, 1936.
A. Mitchell Palmer at FindAGrave.com
Except where indicated, all writing and photography on this blog is the intellectual property of Laura Klotz. This blog is written with permission of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. I am not employed by the PHMC. All rights reserved.
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