May 24, 2025 • 24 mins
Part one of this 2016 classic covers the social unrest in the U.S. after WWI. There was a fear that Communist revolutionaries would try to take over the country. Adding fuel to the fear were two bomb plots in 1919.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Today's Classic is a request from listener Amy,
who asked us to replay it because of how applicable
it is to current events. This is our episode on
the Palmer Raids, which originally came out in twenty sixteen.
This is a two part episode, and we haven't been
rerunning two parters of Saturday Classics lately unless the original
(00:25):
episodes are so short, like from an earlier time when
our episodes tended to run a little shorter that they
could add up into one regular length episode today, but
that's not really the case with these, so we're running
the two parts on separate Saturdays. These episodes also each
have their own arc, so today's involves some historical context
(00:46):
and a series of bombings that were carried out in
nineteen nineteen, and then next week, part two on Saturday
will cover the federal response to those bombings. So this
first part of the Palmer Raids originally came out December fifth,
twenty sixteen. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class
(01:07):
a production of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. So after
World War One, the United States was in the midst
of a lot of social unrest. There were a lot
(01:29):
of financial issues facing the nation in the form of
inflation and unemployment and labor strikes. In nineteen seventeen, the
Bolshevik Revolution, which established the world's first communist nation, terrified Americans,
and after the war ended in November of nineteen eighteen,
there was a very pervasive fear, which came to be
(01:52):
known as the Red scare, that radicals in the United
States would try to stage a similar revolution. Additional, the
Spanish flu pandemic that had started in nineteen eighteen also
had people on edge. Additionally, there was a lot of
racism that was blowing up in the form of violence.
(02:12):
In short, the US was in this state of feeling
helpless and uncertain and uneasy all the time. And this
is kind of the setting of what we were talking
about today, which is the Palmer Raids. And this is
going to be a two part episode, and there are
a lot of moving parts to it, Like we're kind
of jumping around a little bit where we'll talk about
(02:34):
one thing for a moment, and then another thing for
a moment, and then another they're sort of in separate sections,
but they eventually all become part of this bigger picture.
And so the first thing that we're going to talk
about is actually the Sedition Act of nineteen eighteen. On
May sixteenth, nineteen eighteen, the Sedition Act was passed by
the US Congress, and this act expanded on the previously
(02:57):
existing Espionage Act of nineteen seventeen. The Espionage Act had
made a crime to traffic and information with the intention
that that sharing would harm the United States and the
war effort, or assist any enemies of the United States,
and the Sedition Act was both more expansive and more focused.
(03:18):
Anti war activists, pacifists, and socialists were all targeted in
its wording, and under the Sedition Act, it became illegal
to make false statements that interfered with the war effort.
It was illegal to insult or in any way abuse
the US government or its representative, flag, military, or the Constitution.
Agitating against the production of war materials was also covered,
(03:41):
as well as teaching or defending any of the actions
that were made illegal in the language of the Act.
The punishments outlined in the Sedition Act were the same
as those described in the Espionage Act. If anyone was
found guilty of the crimes described, they could be fined
up to ten thousand dollars jailed for twenty years, and
(04:02):
both of these punishments could be sentenced at the same time.
So keep the Sedition Act and the Espionage Act in mind.
But next we are going to hop to a different thing,
and we are going to talk briefly about a postal clerk.
And that man was named Charles Kaplan, and he was
a postal clerk working in New York City's main post
(04:23):
office in nineteen nineteen. And on April twenty seventh of
nineteen nineteen, over the course of his normal work, he
encountered sixteen small parcels, and they were all virtually identical,
both visually and in the fact that they all had
insufficient postage. And Kaplan set these parcels aside to be
returned to the sender at the return address on the package,
(04:45):
which was an address that was Gimbal Brothers, thirty second
Street in Broadway, New York City, and they were marked
novelty samples. A few days later, while riding the train
home from work in the wee hours of April thirtieth
nightnineteen nineteen, Caplan read the paper and one of the
stories he read detailed a small parcel, and the description
(05:07):
of this parcel was almost identical to these he had
set aside. On the twenty seventh, this parcel was delivered
to former US Senator Thomas Hardwick in Atlanta, Georgia, and
when Hardwick's maid open the package, it exploded. Both the
maid and Hardwick had survived, although the maid had been
really injured by the blast and there was a lot
(05:28):
of property damage. Yeah, descriptions of her injuries very a
little bit. They're pretty brief. Some will say that her
hands were actually blown off, Others will say that they
were crippled in some way, but she was very, very injured.
Kaplan immediately exited the train. He jumped off at the
next stop, and he ran back to the post office
and those sixteen brown paper wrapped parcels that were in
(05:51):
the storeroom that he had set aside. The parcels, which
indeed matched the description that Kaplan had just read in
the paper, had not moved on to their next step
in the of being returned, so Caplan notified Postal Inspector W. E. Cochran,
and the authorities were immediately called. The New York City
Bureau of Combustibles, which is sort of a fabulous name
(06:12):
and no longer exists in that particular nomenclature, opened some
of the parcels along with Cochrane because he was extremely
good at this. Apparently, upon examination by the Combustibles Bureau,
these parcels were deemed infernal machines, another kind of great
name for something really terrible they were. Today they would
(06:34):
be labeled as incendiary devices. They were addressed to J. P.
Morgan Junior, John D. Rockefeller, Mayor John F. Hyland, Police
Commissioner Richard Enwright, and a number of other well known businessmen,
politician and judges. So Caplan had unwittingly discovered a serial bombing.
(06:55):
So after receiving all of this information, Postmaster General Albert
Burlison's out an alert to all postal offices describing these
bomb parcels with instructions to be on the lookout for
similar packages. The next day, one turned up in Salisbury,
North Carolina, addressed to State Senator Lee Slater Overman. Additional
(07:15):
parcels that all were identical, were identified in Nebraska and Utah.
In total, three dozen mail bombs were eventually found and identified.
When the bombs are taken apart. They were all identical
in construction, and experts were unable to find a single
fingerprint on any of the components. Manufacturers of the type
(07:36):
of paper that was used to wrap the boxes shared
a list of all the dealers who had been sold
that type of paper in the preceding twelve months, and
the government authorities followed up on all of those leads
in an effort to identify who ultimately bought the paper
from the dealers, and it was determined as well that
an Oliver brand typewriter with a misaligned lowercase W key
(08:00):
and a defective lowercase K key was used to type
the address labels on the boxes. The labels with the
Novelty samples Gimbal Brothers Return Address were determined to be
forgeries and not the actual stationery of that company. The
investigation next led to a house on West forty fifth Street,
where a number of other explosives were cached, but what
(08:23):
wasn't clear was who was collecting all this material, Although
investigations continued. We'll talk more about the mail bombs and
they're coverage in the press in just a moment, but
first we are going to pause for a word from
a sponsor. The discovery of those bomb parcels, which came
(08:47):
to be known as the May Day bomb plot, led
to a panic. A front page story in the New
York Times on May fourth read quote, there are more
than two thousand radical agitators in New York City who
have been preaching bullism and the overthrow of the United
States government, and every one of these persons is now
under investigation by federal and local authorities. According to that
(09:10):
same news article, more than seventy five percent of those
two thousand people were quote, citizens or subjects of foreign nations.
Many were expected to be deported with the process described
in the following manner. Quote. It is generally understood that
a large number of them are now being considered for
deportation as persons whose presence in this country is undesirable.
(09:33):
All persons recommended for deportation have to be passed upon
by the Attorney General and Secretary of Labor in Washington
before the recommendation can be carried into effect. An official
from the Department of Justice gave statements to the press
that it was believed that Bolshevik and Industrial Workers in
the World IWW papers were not only circulating in abundance
(09:55):
in the United States, but that the Bolshevik movement in
North America was being funded directly from the Lenin Trotsky government.
The IWW for Information was and still is a labor
union that was founded in nineteen oh six in Chicago,
and the IWW was believed by the Department of Justice
to have a large reserve fund of its own to
(10:15):
promote an agenda of government sabotage. This brings us around
to the Attorney General at the time, Attorney General Alexander
Mitchell Palmer or A. Mitchell Palmer, and He was born
on May fourth, eighteen seventy two in Moosehead, Pennsylvania. He
grew up a Quaker, first attending public schools and then
Moravian Parochial School before moving on to Swathmore College in Pennsylvania.
(10:39):
He graduated summa cum laude in eighteen ninety one and
went on to study law at Lafayette College and George
Washington University. Although he didn't finish his law degree, he
did pass the bar exam in Pennsylvania and started his
law career in eighteen ninety three in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. Early
on in his professional career, he also became involved in politics.
(11:01):
Palmer was elected to the US House of Representatives in
nineteen oh five, and he held that role for a
number of years. His last reelection bid that he won
was nineteen twelve, and during that period that he served
as a representative, he was instrumental as a steady supporter
and campaigner in securing the nineteen twelve Democratic presidential nomination
(11:21):
for Woodrow Wilson. Once Wilson was in office, Palmer made
the move to run for a seat in the Senate
in nineteen fourteen, but he lost the election. Although he
lost that race, he was soon given a different sort
of promotion by appointment, because Woodrow Wilson appointed him to
the US Court of Claims as a judge. But only
a few months into that appointment, Palmer changed his mind
(11:44):
about the job and decided that instead he wanted to
go back into private law practice. Later, Woodrow Wilson offered
him another position, that of Secretary of War, but Palmer
turned it down, citing his Quaker beliefs is the reason
that he could not take that job. Since the United
States entered World War One, Palmer was named Alien Property
Custodian by President Wilson and he did take that job.
(12:08):
That office was established on October twelfth, nineteen seventeen, under
authority of the Trading with the Enemy Act to assume
control and dispose of enemy owned property in the United
States and its possessions. So President Wilson ultimately put Palmer
into an even higher position in nineteen nineteen when he
named him Attorney General of the United States, and Palmer
(12:30):
started that job on March fifth of nineteen nineteen. And
initially there was criticism from Republicans that Palmer wasn't aggressive
enough in pursuing subversives who might wish to take down
the US government, But Palmer, eager to gain favor as
he had plans for a presidential bid, would eventually earn
the nickname the Fighting Quaker for the fervor with which
(12:52):
he carried out his duties. On the night of June second,
nineteen nineteen, just a few months into Palmer's time as
a turney in General, a man named Carlo Valdinocci approached
Attorney General Palmer's Washington, d c. Home. He had a
parcel with him, and the parcel contained a bomb. Palmer
himself had gone upstairs to retire for the evening about
(13:14):
fifteen minutes earlier, but Valdenochi's in sundiary device went off
while he was carrying it, and the front and a
significant portion of the bottom level of Palmer's home was damaged.
This also killed Valdinocci. Yeah, Palmer had been in office
during that made a plot uncovery, but people thought he
was not very strong about it about following up on it. However,
(13:38):
this suddenly came to his own door and things changed significantly.
That bomb had been quite powerful, so it had, in
addition to blowing up the bottom floor of his house,
it had blown out the windows of the home across
the street as well, which was where Franklin and Eleanor
Roosevelt were living at the time. And it was Roosevelt
who had run across the street to offer assistance and
Palmer who had run downstairs who found the remains of
(14:01):
Valdanocci's body and anarchist literature that he had been carrying,
which led to the conclusion that this had been a
terrorist plot gone wrong. Also, this bomb at Palmer's home
was not an isolated incident. In the ninety minutes that
followed Valdinoci's explosions. Seven other bombs exploded in New York, Pittsburgh, Boston, Cleveland, Philadelphia,
(14:25):
and Patterson, New Jersey, and among the targets were three judges,
a mayor, a state legislator, legislator, a Catholic priest, and
a prominent police officer, along with two businessmen. The coordinated
bombings had resulted in the death of a night watchman
named William Bayner in New York, although he had not
been one of the targets. Yeah, none of the actual
(14:46):
targets were killed in those bombings. There are also some
accounts that suggest there were some other bystanders that were injured,
and some will even say they were killed, but I
couldn't verify any of those. The night watchmen is the
only one that consistently comes up over and over. So
along with each bomb that had been delivered, there were
also several copies of flyers with the title Plain Words,
(15:09):
and I'm going to read part of it. It's quite long,
but I'm taking excerpts, and it reads, the powers that
be make no secret of their will to stop here
in America the worldwide spread of revolution. The powers that
be must reckon that they will have to accept the
fight that they have provoked. Do not expect us to
sit down and pray and cry. We accept your challenge
(15:32):
and mean to stick to our war duties. We know
that all you do is for your defense as a class.
We know also that the proletariat has the same right
to protect itself. Since their press has been suffocated, their
mouths muzzled, we mean to speak for them the voice
of dynamite through the mouth of guns. Do not say
that we are acting cowardly because we keep hiding. Do
(15:54):
not say it is abominable. It is war, class war,
and you were the first to wage it under cover
of the powerful institutions you call order, in the darkness
of your laws, behind the guns of your boneheaded slave.
Our mutual position is pretty clear. What has been done
by us so far is only a warning that there
are friends of popular liberties still living. Only now are
(16:17):
we getting into the fight, and you will have a
chance to see what liberty loving people can do. Do
not seek to believe that we are the Germans or
the devil's paid agents. You know well we are class
conscious men with strong determination and no vulgar liability. And
never hope that your cops and your hounds will ever
succeed in ridding the country of the anarchistic germ that
(16:40):
pulses in our veins. We know how we stand with
you and how to take care of ourselves. Besides, you
will never get all of us, and we multiply nowadays.
Just wait and resign to your fate, since privilege and
riches have turned your heads. Long live social revolution, Down
with tyranny, and it is Sun the anarchist fighters. So
(17:03):
next up we will detail the bombs in the second
attack as compared to those from the earlier incidents we
talked about, you know, tying those together. And before we do,
we will take a quick break to talk about one
of our fantastic sponsors. The June bombs were significantly more
(17:25):
powerful than the bombs that had been discovered in the
late Spring. They contained approximately twenty five pounds that's eleven
point three kilograms of dynamite wrapped in a package, each
of them with metal slugs to create destructive shrapnel. As
you may recall, one of those springtime bombs maimed but
did not kill the woman who opened it, whereas this
(17:46):
bomb that went off while Valdenocci was carrying it killed him.
Presumably instantly blew out a significant amount of the building
he was in front of and caused minor damage to
other structures on that same street, so a significant increase
in power. The pink flyers and the plain words writing
were traced to a print shop run by two men,
typesetter Andrea Salcedo and compositor Roberto Alia. Both men were
(18:12):
followers of an anarchist named Luigi Galliani and Carlo Valdanocci.
The man who had his bomb go off as he
approached Palmer's residence, had been an editor of one of
Galliani's publications, which advocated the use of violence to affect change.
One of the addresses in the Mayday bomb plot had
(18:32):
been Raimi Weston Finch, who was an FBI agent who
had been investigating Galliani and his followers. So at this
point Galliani was heavily implicated in these bombings. For an
incredibly brief overview, just to try to contextualize this connection
to Luigi Galliani's tempestuous life, he was from Vircelli, Italy,
(18:54):
and studied law at the University of Turin. During his
time in school, he became increasingly in politics, and eventually
his anarchist beliefs made him a wanted man in Italy,
so he fled his home country in eighteen eighty before
he was able to finish his degree. He ended up
living in France on and off for the next twenty years.
(19:14):
He then moved briefly to Switzerland but was deported. He
once again went to France, but then was deported back
to Italy and was ultimately imprisoned. After an escape from
confinement on the island pantell Pentelliera, which I may or
may not be butchering, he went to England and then
he emigrated from there to the United States, and he
(19:35):
lived in Patterson, New Jersey, and until an indictment for
inciting a riot when he tried to flee to Canada,
but he was refused entry. Allegedly he was literally just
pushed back across the border. He found a group of
like minded people eventually in Vermont, and from there he
began publishing an anarchist periodical in nineteen oh three, which
ran for fifteen years from various locations before the US
(19:58):
government shut it down. You have probably as a listener,
heard of the more well known anarchists Sacho and Vanzetti,
Galiani and his circle had ties to them, as well
as for the men who had made the flyers. Salsado
jumped or fell from the window of his cell in
the DJ's building on Park Row in New York. He
had been held there secretly for eight weeks, and there
(20:20):
were rumors that he died by suicide. To keep himself
from giving up names of collaborators, Alio was offered a
deal where his deportation would be canceled if you testified
about the anarchists and their organization, but he refused, so
two days after Salsado's death, Ali was given up to
the Department of Labor and moved to Ellis Island. The
(20:41):
Department of Justice contended that the men had both turned
state's evidence and then had been held secretly for their
own protection. The investigation into this second set of bombings
was led by Todd Daniel, who was a special Agent
of the FBI, as well as the acting head of
the FBI, William Flynn. Flynn, who had been Chief of
(21:02):
the Secret Service, was lauded by Attorney General Palmer as
quote the leading organizing detective in America. Flynn is an
anarchist chaser, the greatest anarchist expert in the United States,
but just days after the June second bombings, a number
of people were being tracked as suspects an active participation
in the attacks. Over the next several months, Palmer invoked
(21:25):
both the Espionage Act of nineteen seventeen and the Sedition
Act of nineteen eighteen that we talked about at the
top of the show to assemble a special team led
by a lawyer from the Justice Department named Jay Edgar Hoover.
This team would go on to work closely with the
Immigration Bureau, both to investigate existing suspects and identify others.
(21:46):
Hoover and his team went after every possible scrap of
intelligence they could find to identify persons that they felt
were the most likely to take violent action. So at
this point they were not just tracking who possibly participated
in this bombing act, but anyone that they thought might
one day think that doing something similar was a course
(22:09):
of action they would try so. When all of their
research was collected, Palmer was utterly convinced that there was
a communist plot to overthrow the US government and that
there were tens of thousands of people in the US
working to that end, and he had compiled a list
of them that he was going to go after. In
(22:29):
the next episode, we will talk about the steps that
Palmer and his team took to address this perceived communist threat,
But for now, this is where we are going to
leave the story. Yeah, so at this point, there's a
lot of fear that there are communists literally lurking everywhere
in your neighborhoods, trying to slowly overtake the entire US
(22:51):
way of life. Like these two bombing plots are legitimately
casts for concern. To be very clear, we're not saying yes,
you know, we're not saying they shouldn't have investigated the
bomb plots. Obviously that was a big deal. But like
this took on a much much greater scope for sure.
Like I said, it really did transition to I think
(23:12):
you might be shady onto the list you go. Yeah,
there's there's an episode in the archive already about McCarthy
and the Red Scare and how that ties together. I
feel like this this part is not as well known
as that. Like today, I feel like the McCarthy era
is a lot better known than the Palmer raids that
(23:33):
we're going to talk about. Yeah, and part of that
is just a matter of documentation, Like there is a
lot of documentation on the Palmer Raids, but then the
McCarthy era stuff was later enough that there were more
forms of communication that were more common, so more people
knew about it instantly. Yeah, the Palmer Raids are one
of those points in history that does not often get
(23:55):
a lot of attention. Yes, thanks so much for joining
us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us
a note, our email addresses History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com,
and you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Happy Saturday. Today's Classic is a request from listener Amy,
who asked us to replay it because of how applicable
it is to current events. This is our episode on
the Palmer Raids, which originally came out in twenty sixteen.
This is a two part episode, and we haven't been
rerunning two parters of Saturday Classics lately unless the original
(00:25):
episodes are so short, like from an earlier time when
our episodes tended to run a little shorter that they
could add up into one regular length episode today, but
that's not really the case with these, so we're running
the two parts on separate Saturdays. These episodes also each
have their own arc, so today's involves some historical context
(00:46):
and a series of bombings that were carried out in
nineteen nineteen, and then next week, part two on Saturday
will cover the federal response to those bombings. So this
first part of the Palmer Raids originally came out December fifth,
twenty sixteen. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class
(01:07):
a production of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. So after
World War One, the United States was in the midst
of a lot of social unrest. There were a lot
(01:29):
of financial issues facing the nation in the form of
inflation and unemployment and labor strikes. In nineteen seventeen, the
Bolshevik Revolution, which established the world's first communist nation, terrified Americans,
and after the war ended in November of nineteen eighteen,
there was a very pervasive fear, which came to be
(01:52):
known as the Red scare, that radicals in the United
States would try to stage a similar revolution. Additional, the
Spanish flu pandemic that had started in nineteen eighteen also
had people on edge. Additionally, there was a lot of
racism that was blowing up in the form of violence.
(02:12):
In short, the US was in this state of feeling
helpless and uncertain and uneasy all the time. And this
is kind of the setting of what we were talking
about today, which is the Palmer Raids. And this is
going to be a two part episode, and there are
a lot of moving parts to it, Like we're kind
of jumping around a little bit where we'll talk about
(02:34):
one thing for a moment, and then another thing for
a moment, and then another they're sort of in separate sections,
but they eventually all become part of this bigger picture.
And so the first thing that we're going to talk
about is actually the Sedition Act of nineteen eighteen. On
May sixteenth, nineteen eighteen, the Sedition Act was passed by
the US Congress, and this act expanded on the previously
(02:57):
existing Espionage Act of nineteen seventeen. The Espionage Act had
made a crime to traffic and information with the intention
that that sharing would harm the United States and the
war effort, or assist any enemies of the United States,
and the Sedition Act was both more expansive and more focused.
(03:18):
Anti war activists, pacifists, and socialists were all targeted in
its wording, and under the Sedition Act, it became illegal
to make false statements that interfered with the war effort.
It was illegal to insult or in any way abuse
the US government or its representative, flag, military, or the Constitution.
Agitating against the production of war materials was also covered,
(03:41):
as well as teaching or defending any of the actions
that were made illegal in the language of the Act.
The punishments outlined in the Sedition Act were the same
as those described in the Espionage Act. If anyone was
found guilty of the crimes described, they could be fined
up to ten thousand dollars jailed for twenty years, and
(04:02):
both of these punishments could be sentenced at the same time.
So keep the Sedition Act and the Espionage Act in mind.
But next we are going to hop to a different thing,
and we are going to talk briefly about a postal clerk.
And that man was named Charles Kaplan, and he was
a postal clerk working in New York City's main post
(04:23):
office in nineteen nineteen. And on April twenty seventh of
nineteen nineteen, over the course of his normal work, he
encountered sixteen small parcels, and they were all virtually identical,
both visually and in the fact that they all had
insufficient postage. And Kaplan set these parcels aside to be
returned to the sender at the return address on the package,
(04:45):
which was an address that was Gimbal Brothers, thirty second
Street in Broadway, New York City, and they were marked
novelty samples. A few days later, while riding the train
home from work in the wee hours of April thirtieth
nightnineteen nineteen, Caplan read the paper and one of the
stories he read detailed a small parcel, and the description
(05:07):
of this parcel was almost identical to these he had
set aside. On the twenty seventh, this parcel was delivered
to former US Senator Thomas Hardwick in Atlanta, Georgia, and
when Hardwick's maid open the package, it exploded. Both the
maid and Hardwick had survived, although the maid had been
really injured by the blast and there was a lot
(05:28):
of property damage. Yeah, descriptions of her injuries very a
little bit. They're pretty brief. Some will say that her
hands were actually blown off, Others will say that they
were crippled in some way, but she was very, very injured.
Kaplan immediately exited the train. He jumped off at the
next stop, and he ran back to the post office
and those sixteen brown paper wrapped parcels that were in
(05:51):
the storeroom that he had set aside. The parcels, which
indeed matched the description that Kaplan had just read in
the paper, had not moved on to their next step
in the of being returned, so Caplan notified Postal Inspector W. E. Cochran,
and the authorities were immediately called. The New York City
Bureau of Combustibles, which is sort of a fabulous name
(06:12):
and no longer exists in that particular nomenclature, opened some
of the parcels along with Cochrane because he was extremely
good at this. Apparently, upon examination by the Combustibles Bureau,
these parcels were deemed infernal machines, another kind of great
name for something really terrible they were. Today they would
(06:34):
be labeled as incendiary devices. They were addressed to J. P.
Morgan Junior, John D. Rockefeller, Mayor John F. Hyland, Police
Commissioner Richard Enwright, and a number of other well known businessmen,
politician and judges. So Caplan had unwittingly discovered a serial bombing.
(06:55):
So after receiving all of this information, Postmaster General Albert
Burlison's out an alert to all postal offices describing these
bomb parcels with instructions to be on the lookout for
similar packages. The next day, one turned up in Salisbury,
North Carolina, addressed to State Senator Lee Slater Overman. Additional
(07:15):
parcels that all were identical, were identified in Nebraska and Utah.
In total, three dozen mail bombs were eventually found and identified.
When the bombs are taken apart. They were all identical
in construction, and experts were unable to find a single
fingerprint on any of the components. Manufacturers of the type
(07:36):
of paper that was used to wrap the boxes shared
a list of all the dealers who had been sold
that type of paper in the preceding twelve months, and
the government authorities followed up on all of those leads
in an effort to identify who ultimately bought the paper
from the dealers, and it was determined as well that
an Oliver brand typewriter with a misaligned lowercase W key
(08:00):
and a defective lowercase K key was used to type
the address labels on the boxes. The labels with the
Novelty samples Gimbal Brothers Return Address were determined to be
forgeries and not the actual stationery of that company. The
investigation next led to a house on West forty fifth Street,
where a number of other explosives were cached, but what
(08:23):
wasn't clear was who was collecting all this material, Although
investigations continued. We'll talk more about the mail bombs and
they're coverage in the press in just a moment, but
first we are going to pause for a word from
a sponsor. The discovery of those bomb parcels, which came
(08:47):
to be known as the May Day bomb plot, led
to a panic. A front page story in the New
York Times on May fourth read quote, there are more
than two thousand radical agitators in New York City who
have been preaching bullism and the overthrow of the United
States government, and every one of these persons is now
under investigation by federal and local authorities. According to that
(09:10):
same news article, more than seventy five percent of those
two thousand people were quote, citizens or subjects of foreign nations.
Many were expected to be deported with the process described
in the following manner. Quote. It is generally understood that
a large number of them are now being considered for
deportation as persons whose presence in this country is undesirable.
(09:33):
All persons recommended for deportation have to be passed upon
by the Attorney General and Secretary of Labor in Washington
before the recommendation can be carried into effect. An official
from the Department of Justice gave statements to the press
that it was believed that Bolshevik and Industrial Workers in
the World IWW papers were not only circulating in abundance
(09:55):
in the United States, but that the Bolshevik movement in
North America was being funded directly from the Lenin Trotsky government.
The IWW for Information was and still is a labor
union that was founded in nineteen oh six in Chicago,
and the IWW was believed by the Department of Justice
to have a large reserve fund of its own to
(10:15):
promote an agenda of government sabotage. This brings us around
to the Attorney General at the time, Attorney General Alexander
Mitchell Palmer or A. Mitchell Palmer, and He was born
on May fourth, eighteen seventy two in Moosehead, Pennsylvania. He
grew up a Quaker, first attending public schools and then
Moravian Parochial School before moving on to Swathmore College in Pennsylvania.
(10:39):
He graduated summa cum laude in eighteen ninety one and
went on to study law at Lafayette College and George
Washington University. Although he didn't finish his law degree, he
did pass the bar exam in Pennsylvania and started his
law career in eighteen ninety three in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. Early
on in his professional career, he also became involved in politics.
(11:01):
Palmer was elected to the US House of Representatives in
nineteen oh five, and he held that role for a
number of years. His last reelection bid that he won
was nineteen twelve, and during that period that he served
as a representative, he was instrumental as a steady supporter
and campaigner in securing the nineteen twelve Democratic presidential nomination
(11:21):
for Woodrow Wilson. Once Wilson was in office, Palmer made
the move to run for a seat in the Senate
in nineteen fourteen, but he lost the election. Although he
lost that race, he was soon given a different sort
of promotion by appointment, because Woodrow Wilson appointed him to
the US Court of Claims as a judge. But only
a few months into that appointment, Palmer changed his mind
(11:44):
about the job and decided that instead he wanted to
go back into private law practice. Later, Woodrow Wilson offered
him another position, that of Secretary of War, but Palmer
turned it down, citing his Quaker beliefs is the reason
that he could not take that job. Since the United
States entered World War One, Palmer was named Alien Property
Custodian by President Wilson and he did take that job.
(12:08):
That office was established on October twelfth, nineteen seventeen, under
authority of the Trading with the Enemy Act to assume
control and dispose of enemy owned property in the United
States and its possessions. So President Wilson ultimately put Palmer
into an even higher position in nineteen nineteen when he
named him Attorney General of the United States, and Palmer
(12:30):
started that job on March fifth of nineteen nineteen. And
initially there was criticism from Republicans that Palmer wasn't aggressive
enough in pursuing subversives who might wish to take down
the US government, But Palmer, eager to gain favor as
he had plans for a presidential bid, would eventually earn
the nickname the Fighting Quaker for the fervor with which
(12:52):
he carried out his duties. On the night of June second,
nineteen nineteen, just a few months into Palmer's time as
a turney in General, a man named Carlo Valdinocci approached
Attorney General Palmer's Washington, d c. Home. He had a
parcel with him, and the parcel contained a bomb. Palmer
himself had gone upstairs to retire for the evening about
(13:14):
fifteen minutes earlier, but Valdenochi's in sundiary device went off
while he was carrying it, and the front and a
significant portion of the bottom level of Palmer's home was damaged.
This also killed Valdinocci. Yeah, Palmer had been in office
during that made a plot uncovery, but people thought he
was not very strong about it about following up on it. However,
(13:38):
this suddenly came to his own door and things changed significantly.
That bomb had been quite powerful, so it had, in
addition to blowing up the bottom floor of his house,
it had blown out the windows of the home across
the street as well, which was where Franklin and Eleanor
Roosevelt were living at the time. And it was Roosevelt
who had run across the street to offer assistance and
Palmer who had run downstairs who found the remains of
(14:01):
Valdanocci's body and anarchist literature that he had been carrying,
which led to the conclusion that this had been a
terrorist plot gone wrong. Also, this bomb at Palmer's home
was not an isolated incident. In the ninety minutes that
followed Valdinoci's explosions. Seven other bombs exploded in New York, Pittsburgh, Boston, Cleveland, Philadelphia,
(14:25):
and Patterson, New Jersey, and among the targets were three judges,
a mayor, a state legislator, legislator, a Catholic priest, and
a prominent police officer, along with two businessmen. The coordinated
bombings had resulted in the death of a night watchman
named William Bayner in New York, although he had not
been one of the targets. Yeah, none of the actual
(14:46):
targets were killed in those bombings. There are also some
accounts that suggest there were some other bystanders that were injured,
and some will even say they were killed, but I
couldn't verify any of those. The night watchmen is the
only one that consistently comes up over and over. So
along with each bomb that had been delivered, there were
also several copies of flyers with the title Plain Words,
(15:09):
and I'm going to read part of it. It's quite long,
but I'm taking excerpts, and it reads, the powers that
be make no secret of their will to stop here
in America the worldwide spread of revolution. The powers that
be must reckon that they will have to accept the
fight that they have provoked. Do not expect us to
sit down and pray and cry. We accept your challenge
(15:32):
and mean to stick to our war duties. We know
that all you do is for your defense as a class.
We know also that the proletariat has the same right
to protect itself. Since their press has been suffocated, their
mouths muzzled, we mean to speak for them the voice
of dynamite through the mouth of guns. Do not say
that we are acting cowardly because we keep hiding. Do
(15:54):
not say it is abominable. It is war, class war,
and you were the first to wage it under cover
of the powerful institutions you call order, in the darkness
of your laws, behind the guns of your boneheaded slave.
Our mutual position is pretty clear. What has been done
by us so far is only a warning that there
are friends of popular liberties still living. Only now are
(16:17):
we getting into the fight, and you will have a
chance to see what liberty loving people can do. Do
not seek to believe that we are the Germans or
the devil's paid agents. You know well we are class
conscious men with strong determination and no vulgar liability. And
never hope that your cops and your hounds will ever
succeed in ridding the country of the anarchistic germ that
(16:40):
pulses in our veins. We know how we stand with
you and how to take care of ourselves. Besides, you
will never get all of us, and we multiply nowadays.
Just wait and resign to your fate, since privilege and
riches have turned your heads. Long live social revolution, Down
with tyranny, and it is Sun the anarchist fighters. So
(17:03):
next up we will detail the bombs in the second
attack as compared to those from the earlier incidents we
talked about, you know, tying those together. And before we do,
we will take a quick break to talk about one
of our fantastic sponsors. The June bombs were significantly more
(17:25):
powerful than the bombs that had been discovered in the
late Spring. They contained approximately twenty five pounds that's eleven
point three kilograms of dynamite wrapped in a package, each
of them with metal slugs to create destructive shrapnel. As
you may recall, one of those springtime bombs maimed but
did not kill the woman who opened it, whereas this
(17:46):
bomb that went off while Valdenocci was carrying it killed him.
Presumably instantly blew out a significant amount of the building
he was in front of and caused minor damage to
other structures on that same street, so a significant increase
in power. The pink flyers and the plain words writing
were traced to a print shop run by two men,
typesetter Andrea Salcedo and compositor Roberto Alia. Both men were
(18:12):
followers of an anarchist named Luigi Galliani and Carlo Valdanocci.
The man who had his bomb go off as he
approached Palmer's residence, had been an editor of one of
Galliani's publications, which advocated the use of violence to affect change.
One of the addresses in the Mayday bomb plot had
(18:32):
been Raimi Weston Finch, who was an FBI agent who
had been investigating Galliani and his followers. So at this
point Galliani was heavily implicated in these bombings. For an
incredibly brief overview, just to try to contextualize this connection
to Luigi Galliani's tempestuous life, he was from Vircelli, Italy,
(18:54):
and studied law at the University of Turin. During his
time in school, he became increasingly in politics, and eventually
his anarchist beliefs made him a wanted man in Italy,
so he fled his home country in eighteen eighty before
he was able to finish his degree. He ended up
living in France on and off for the next twenty years.
(19:14):
He then moved briefly to Switzerland but was deported. He
once again went to France, but then was deported back
to Italy and was ultimately imprisoned. After an escape from
confinement on the island pantell Pentelliera, which I may or
may not be butchering, he went to England and then
he emigrated from there to the United States, and he
(19:35):
lived in Patterson, New Jersey, and until an indictment for
inciting a riot when he tried to flee to Canada,
but he was refused entry. Allegedly he was literally just
pushed back across the border. He found a group of
like minded people eventually in Vermont, and from there he
began publishing an anarchist periodical in nineteen oh three, which
ran for fifteen years from various locations before the US
(19:58):
government shut it down. You have probably as a listener,
heard of the more well known anarchists Sacho and Vanzetti,
Galiani and his circle had ties to them, as well
as for the men who had made the flyers. Salsado
jumped or fell from the window of his cell in
the DJ's building on Park Row in New York. He
had been held there secretly for eight weeks, and there
(20:20):
were rumors that he died by suicide. To keep himself
from giving up names of collaborators, Alio was offered a
deal where his deportation would be canceled if you testified
about the anarchists and their organization, but he refused, so
two days after Salsado's death, Ali was given up to
the Department of Labor and moved to Ellis Island. The
(20:41):
Department of Justice contended that the men had both turned
state's evidence and then had been held secretly for their
own protection. The investigation into this second set of bombings
was led by Todd Daniel, who was a special Agent
of the FBI, as well as the acting head of
the FBI, William Flynn. Flynn, who had been Chief of
(21:02):
the Secret Service, was lauded by Attorney General Palmer as
quote the leading organizing detective in America. Flynn is an
anarchist chaser, the greatest anarchist expert in the United States,
but just days after the June second bombings, a number
of people were being tracked as suspects an active participation
in the attacks. Over the next several months, Palmer invoked
(21:25):
both the Espionage Act of nineteen seventeen and the Sedition
Act of nineteen eighteen that we talked about at the
top of the show to assemble a special team led
by a lawyer from the Justice Department named Jay Edgar Hoover.
This team would go on to work closely with the
Immigration Bureau, both to investigate existing suspects and identify others.
(21:46):
Hoover and his team went after every possible scrap of
intelligence they could find to identify persons that they felt
were the most likely to take violent action. So at
this point they were not just tracking who possibly participated
in this bombing act, but anyone that they thought might
one day think that doing something similar was a course
(22:09):
of action they would try so. When all of their
research was collected, Palmer was utterly convinced that there was
a communist plot to overthrow the US government and that
there were tens of thousands of people in the US
working to that end, and he had compiled a list
of them that he was going to go after. In
(22:29):
the next episode, we will talk about the steps that
Palmer and his team took to address this perceived communist threat,
But for now, this is where we are going to
leave the story. Yeah, so at this point, there's a
lot of fear that there are communists literally lurking everywhere
in your neighborhoods, trying to slowly overtake the entire US
(22:51):
way of life. Like these two bombing plots are legitimately
casts for concern. To be very clear, we're not saying yes,
you know, we're not saying they shouldn't have investigated the
bomb plots. Obviously that was a big deal. But like
this took on a much much greater scope for sure.
Like I said, it really did transition to I think
(23:12):
you might be shady onto the list you go. Yeah,
there's there's an episode in the archive already about McCarthy
and the Red Scare and how that ties together. I
feel like this this part is not as well known
as that. Like today, I feel like the McCarthy era
is a lot better known than the Palmer raids that
(23:33):
we're going to talk about. Yeah, and part of that
is just a matter of documentation, Like there is a
lot of documentation on the Palmer Raids, but then the
McCarthy era stuff was later enough that there were more
forms of communication that were more common, so more people
knew about it instantly. Yeah, the Palmer Raids are one
of those points in history that does not often get
(23:55):
a lot of attention. Yes, thanks so much for joining
us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us
a note, our email addresses History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com,
and you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
© 2025 iHeartMedia, Inc.