Today in Labor History June 2, 1919: Anarchist Galleanists carried out a series of 9 coordinated bombings across the Eastern United States. They damaged the homes of U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, as well as then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt. They also targeted a number of judges. None of the targeted men died, although a night watchman, a former editor of the Galleanist publication “Cronaca Sovversiva,” did accidentally get killed. The bombs were delivered in packages that included the following note: “War, Class war, and you were the first to wage it under the cover of the powerful institutions you call order, in the darkness of your laws. There will have to be bloodshed; we will not dodge; there will have to be murder: we will kill, because it is necessary; there will have to be destruction; we will destroy to rid the world of your tyrannical institutions.”
The response by Palmer included mass illegal search and seizures, unwarranted arrests and the deportation of several hundred suspected radicals and anarchists. He also carried the nationwide witch hunts known as the Palmer raids in November 1919 and January 1920, arresting 10,000 anarchists, communists, and labor leaders, imprisoning 3,500, and deporting 556, including Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), was founded in response to the raid, by IWW organizer Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Helen Keller, and others.
