Authors: Vincent J. Cannato
The case of the Red Special detainees was a false start in the government’s battle against suspected alien radicals. The next round of arrests and deportations, which were already underway during the Howe hearings, would be much different.
The next series of roundups had their genesis on the desk of A. Mitchell Palmer, the attorney general. But there was a problem: the power of deportation lay not with the Department of Justice but with the Department of Labor. William B. Wilson, who headed the newly created department, reminded Palmer of this fact in a letter, temporarily derailing Palmer’s crusade. But Wilson had become increasingly disengaged from his job and was in no position for bureaucratic infighting. His wife had recently suffered a stroke, so he took an extended leave from his job to care for her. Adding to his burdens, Wilson himself fell sick and was rarely seen in his office throughout most of 1919.
With Secretary Wilson turning over effective control of his department to subordinates, Palmer saw an opportunity. Commissioner-General Caminetti had already shown that he was committed to the idea of rounding up alien radicals. In Secretary Wilson’s absence, Caminetti made an end run around his superiors and worked directly with Palmer and the Justice Department. His liaison was the twenty-four-year-old head of the General Intelligence Division, J. Edgar Hoover, whom a congressman referred to as a “slender bundle of high-charged electric wire.” A direct phone line to Hoover’s Washington office would be installed at Ellis Island.
If the earlier roundups of suspected radicals consisted of mostly obscure figures from the West Coast, the main targets of the fall 1919 campaign were the country’s most notorious radicals: Emma Goldman and her former lover Alexander Berkman. Goldman was a notorious nonconformist known for her fiery rhetoric and anarchist beliefs. The U.S. attorney Francis G. Caffey referred to her as a “continual disturber of the peace.” Berkman’s claim to fame was his attempted murder of industrialist Henry Clay Frick, for which he served fourteen years in jail.
Both Berkman and Goldman had been born in Russia. Goldman had arrived at Castle Garden in 1886. Berkman was not a citizen, but Goldman claimed citizenship via a brief 1887 marriage to Jacob Kershner, a naturalized Russian immigrant. Goldman’s citizenship should have left her immune from deportation, but that was not to be.
Beginning in 1907, immigration officials began to monitor Goldman closely. Commerce and Labor secretary Oscar Straus began going after anarchists, in part to compensate for the criticism he was receiving from restrictionists. “There is no doubt about it that Emma Goldman, who is a woman of the French Revolution type, is dangerous by reason of her incendiary ability,” Straus wrote in his diary. Secret Service agents monitored Goldman’s public speeches.
For two years, Straus vacillated on the Goldman case. At one point, he ordered Robert Watchorn to take her into custody at Ellis Island for an administrative hearing. Yet that never happened. Straus claimed that Goldman’s speeches were “very skillfully worded so as not to be actionable.” He argued that although she was an anarchist, arresting her would only add to her prestige among radicals.
As Straus continued to debate action against Goldman, a federal judge revoked her ex-husband’s citizenship as fraudulent. It was a peculiar move. By 1909, Kershner was dead and it was not readily apparent why the government thought it necessary to pull the citizenship from a corpse. The move was not really about Kershner, who had been little more than a poor factory worker. The real target was Emma Goldman. In revoking Kershner’s citizenship, the government also revoked Goldman’s. By this dubious legal move, Goldman was now subject to deportation under the immigration law.
This did not put Goldman in immediate jeopardy, although she was more than capable of getting into trouble on her own. Before World War I, she was arrested for lecturing on birth control. Her real problems began after the United States entered the war, as officials continued to monitor her speeches for criticisms of the war effort. In 1917, Goldman and Berkman were arrested under the Espionage Act for speaking out against the draft. They were sentenced to two years in prison.
As Julius Goldman was about to find out, the mere attendance at an Emma Goldman speech could place one in legal jeopardy. No relation to Emma, Julius was a nineteen-year-old deli clerk on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He had been in the country since 1913. One night after seeing a movie, he walked down East Broadway for dinner when he saw a large crowd at Forward Hall, the headquarters of the city’s Yiddish-language, socialist paper. Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were speaking. After their speech, all men in the audience were stopped by police and asked to show their draft registration cards. Having been caught up in the crowd, Julius Goldman was interrogated by police. Was he an anarchist, one policeman asked? More questions followed: “Do you believe in the overthrow of law and government by force? Do you believe in organized government? Do you believe in free love?” Because he had admitted to being an anarchist and since he was a nonnaturalized immigrant, Julius was sent to Ellis Island.
Officials quickly realized that Julius was hardly a bomb thrower. His lawyer argued that Julius’s appearance “does not stamp him as one who has been given over to too much study.” He had simply wandered into the meeting and mistakenly said he was an anarchist out of fear. Caminetti called Julius a “somewhat unsophisticated lad” with no knowledge of anarchism and he was released on bond. Julius had come to find that even a random association with Emma Goldman could be dangerous to one’s liberty. A short time later, with government officials and policemen monitoring their every utterance, Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were arrested and convicted of obstructing the draft by speaking out against the war. The two were each sentenced to two years in jail.
When released from jail in September 1919, Goldman, stripped of her citizenship for a decade, knew that deportation was a possibility. She was ordered to appear at Ellis Island for a hearing on October 27 to answer charges that she was actively advocating anarchy and the violent overthrow of the government. At the hearing, Goldman asserted her citizenship, going so far as to state that her name was Emma Goldman Kershner. She submitted a long statement for the record, denouncing the “star chamber hearing,” and then proceeded to refuse to answer most of the questions officials put to her. To question after question, Goldman responded: “I refuse to answer.” A subsequent hearing in November produced much the same result, and officials recommended deportation.
Goldman and Berkman were asked to arrive at Ellis Island on December 5 to await their imminent deportation to Russia. There they joined eighty-eight other suspected radical aliens. For more than two weeks, Goldman and Berkman would remain in detention, to be joined by more radicals rounded up by the government. After thirty-three years here, Ellis Island was to be Emma Goldman’s last home in America.
Detained at Ellis Island alongside Goldman and Berkman was Joseph Poluleck, who had already been there for almost a month. While Goldman was famous or infamous, Poluleck was an anonymous figure. A packer at the American-European Distributing Company on the Lower East Side, he had arrived in America from Russia six years earlier. He was arrested in early November while attending math classes at the People’s House night school run by the Union of Russian Workers, one of the radical organizations targeted by government officials.
At his hearing, Poluleck adamantly denied being an anarchist and claimed to like the United States and support the country. “There is not a word of truth in the charges,” he told immigration officials, “I am not an anarchist and I am not affiliated with any organization of that kind.” He had only been taking classes at the People’s House since September and the only organization he belonged to was the Methodist Episcopal Church.
The case against Poluleck was weak. Even Byron Uhl admitted there was no evidence to substantiate the main charges against him. The government’s case rested on the fact that each student at the school received a book from the Union of Russian Workers, which implied membership in the organization. Though Labor Department officials had declared earlier that mere membership in a radical organization was not grounds for deportation, by late 1919, the Justice Department reversed the policy and Poluleck was ordered deported.
Meanwhile, Goldman called the conditions at Ellis Island “frightful” and argued that little had changed in the treatment of immigrants since she had arrived at Castle Garden more than thirty years earlier. While in detention, Goldman suffered an attack of neuralgia, a painful condition affecting her jaw and teeth. The Ellis Island doctor could not help with the pain and, as she later put it, for “forty-eight hours, my teeth became a federal issue.” Eventually, officials allowed her to visit a dentist in New York, accompanied by a male guard and female matron. Goldman called her ailment “very timely,” since the visit allowed her friends a chance to visit her. At Ellis Island, detainees were allowed only occasional visits conducted behind screens and with the oversight of guards.
Apart from the minidrama with Goldman’s dental pain, there was little else for detainees at Ellis Island to do but wait for their day of deportation, which was kept secret from them. To pass the time, Goldman did something she was especially good at. She wrote. Most of her efforts were directed toward a pamphlet she was writing with Berkman entitled “Deportation: Its Meaning and Menace,” further subtitled, accurately but melodramatically as the “Last Message to the People of America by Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman.”
Afraid that officials would confiscate their material, they wrote in their cells at night while their roommates kept watch for guards. On their morning walks, the two would discuss the material and trade suggestions for the next night’s writing. The pamphlet included an introduction by fellow radical and political cartoonist Robert Minor, who called the impending deportation, the first effort of “the War Millionaires to crush the soul of America and insure the safety of the dollars they have looted over the graves of Europe.” A mixture of melodrama, grandiosity, and conspiratorial history pervaded the pamphlet. Goldman and Berkman saw their tribulations as nothing less than another form of czarism. “Now reaction is in full swing,” they wrote. “Liberty is dead, and white terror on top dominates the country. Free speech is a thing of the past.”
While Goldman was angry at her detention, she was especially saddened to find out that Assistant Secretary of Labor Louis Post had signed her order of deportation. The seventy-year-old Post had been a noted liberal journalist and possessed none of the traditional starchy appearance of most public men of the time. With his thick, unkempt head of hair, bushy, gray Van Dyke beard, and thin wire-rimmed glasses, at a quick glance Post looked a little like an American-born Trotsky. More philosopher than bureaucrat, he called himself a rational spiritualist and had been an early supporter of Henry George’s single-tax theory, a plan popular with utopian thinkers disheartened by the vast accumulations of wealth in the industrial age.
Years earlier, Post had come to Goldman’s defense when she was accused of involvement in President McKinley’s assassination. Not only did he defend her in the pages of his magazine, but Goldman had also once been a guest in his house.
In his waning professional years, Post went to work in the Wilson administration. Like Howe, he was uncomfortable having to enforce laws that went against his beliefs. Coming to the Labor Department in 1914, Post had hoped to work on issues dealing with the condition of workers, but instead found that some 70 percent of the department’s appropriations and more than 80 percent of its staff went toward enforcing the immigration laws. One of the nation’s few advocates of an open-door policy for immigrants, Post had little interest in this work, which put him in a depressive mood for the rest of his tenure. “I found myself moving about in a cloud of gloom from the beginning to the end of my service in the Department of Labor,” Post later wrote.
Post complained about the administrative nature of immigration law. While serving as assistant secretary, he published an article arguing that the exclusion or deportation of aliens “should not be determined finally by administrative decision.” It was unusual for a serving political appointee to write in an academic journal criticizing policies he was bound to uphold, but Post had few good options.
Still in office in late 1919 and taking on more responsibility with the continuing absence of his boss, Labor Secretary Wilson, Post was faced with the cases of the radical detainees. The decision to deport Goldman rested in his hands. He spent a great deal of time contemplating her case and came to the conclusion that the only issue that mattered under the law was whether or not Goldman was an anarchist, not whether she had ever participated in revolutionary or violent actions. On that question, Post could only answer yes; the result had to be deportation. Post signed the order.
Post found that he had to enforce the law even if it clashed with his own beliefs. To do otherwise would be a violation of his oath of office and, as he wrote, “essentially repugnant to the developing democratic principles of our Republic.” Such thinking did not impress Emma Goldman, who thought Post had another option open to him: resignation. Since he chose to remain in office and carry out the deportations, Goldman “felt that Post had covered himself in ignominy.”
Post, however, could do something for Goldman. The deportation called for her to be brought back to Russia, where the civil war was raging. To send Goldman back to areas controlled by White Russians would have been a death sentence, so Post ordered her deported to Soviet-controlled Russia.
In the early morning hours of December 21, Emma Goldman was in her cell, which she shared with two other female detainees. She was doing what she had been doing for most of her detention: writing. At the sound of guards approaching their cell, Goldman hid her notes under her pillow and pretended to be asleep. The guards were there for another reason. The hour of deportation—that inevitable, yet carefully guarded secret—had finally arrived.