He was distributing boilerplate propaganda to the press, containing pictures of horrid-looking Bolsheviks with bristling beards, and asking if such as these should rule over America. In public statements he was reminding the twenty million owners of Liberty bonds and the nine million farm-owners and the eleven million owners of savings accounts, that the Reds proposed to take away all they had. Palmer’s office that new evidence of a gigantic plot against the safety of the country had been unearthed and although the steel strike was failing, the coal strike was failing, and any danger of a socialist régime, to say nothing of a revolution, was daily fading, nevertheless to the great mass of the American people the Bolshevist bogey became more terrifying than ever. But at the time the newspapers were full of reports from Mr. Ultimately, too, it was divulged that in the whole country-wide raid upon these dangerous men-supposedly armed to the teeth-exactly three pistols were found, and no explosives at all. Ultimately a considerable proportion of the prisoners were released for want of sufficient evidence that they were Communists. In Hartford, while the suspects were in jail the authorities took the further precaution of arresting and incarcerating all visitors who came to see them, a friendly call being regarded as prima facie evidence of affiliation with the Communist party. In Detroit, over a hundred men were herded into a bull-pen measuring twenty-four by thirty feet and kept there for a week under conditions which the mayor of the city called intolerable. At least one American citizen, not a Communist, was jailed for days through some mistake-probably a confusion of names-and barely escaped deportation. Over six thousand men were arrested in all, and thrust summarily behind the bars for days or weeks-often without any chance to learn what was the explicit charge against them.

On this and succeeding nights other Communists and suspected Communists were seized in their homes. Every conceivable bit of evidence-literature, membership lists, books, papers, pictures on the wall, everything-was seized, with or without a search warrant.

Palmer’s agents and police and voluntary aides fell upon them-fell upon everybody, in fact, who was in the hall, regardless of whether he was a Communist or not (how could one tell?)-and bundled them off to jail, with or without warrant. “In scores of cities all over the United States, when the Communists were simultaneously meeting at their various headquarters on New Year’s Day of 1920, Mr.

Only Yesterday by Frederick Lewis Allen