There is Power in a Union by Philip Dray

Author:Philip Dray [Dray, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-53360-7
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-09-06T16:00:00+00:00

The November 7 raids were roundly applauded. “A fine looking bunch they are,” Buffalo’s chief of police said of fifty arrested radicals in his city. “It’s too bad we can’t line them up against a wall and shoot them.”89 The mayor of Davenport, Iowa, was even more explicit: “Load up the riot guns for immediate use and give them a reception with hot lead. We don’t want any Reds here and we will go to the limit to keep them out.”90 Humane by comparison was Tennessee senator K. D. McKellar’s suggestion that America erect a penal colony on Guam for the nation’s political undesirables.91

Despite public and official applause for the Justice Department’s actions, the raids had scored little in the way of actual radicals. Most of the Union of Russian Workers’ upper echelon had repatriated to Russia following the Bolshevik Revolution, and the members who had stayed in the United States were chiefly engaged in nonpolitical work such as reading circles, musical events, and English-language classes. As historian Richard Gid Powers details, “Of the 650 arrested in New York [there was] evidence to hold only 39 after their initial interrogation.”92

There remained considerable pressure on Palmer from Congress, however, to carry through with the deportation of more then two hundred radicals seized in recent months and held at New York’s Ellis Island, particularly after November 25, when a supposed “bomb factory” was discovered in New York City and linked by investigators to the Union of Russian Workers. Deportations required the complicity of the U.S. Department of Labor, which governed issues related to immigration, and soon, with the coordination of the Labor and Justice departments, the first of what was assumed would be many large deportations was scheduled. Hoover had found the vessel necessary for the job in an aging troop transport, the Buford, bought by the United States from Britain in 1898 to ferry military personnel home from the Spanish-American War.

On December 20, after a last supper on American soil of frankfurters, cabbage, rice pudding, apple sauce, and coffee, the 249 deportees at Ellis Island were told to ready themselves for departure. The three best-known were Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and Peter J. Bianki, general secretary of the Union of Russian Workers. “Lugging their grips and old-fashioned, foreign-looking portmanteaus,” it was reported,

the Reds trooped into … the brilliantly lighted [waiting] room. They put their belongings down in heaps and squatted down on them. Some sat with hands under chin, elbows on knees; some read books; others glanced through tattered copies of newspapers. Groups talked noisily in Russian. Here and there a man strummed the melancholy strains of Russian peasant songs upon a battered banjo, guitar, or mandolin.93

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