One Summer: America, 1927

minutes to acquit a man who had shot an immigrant for speaking ill of America.
    Crazily, it became riskier to say disloyal things than to do them. A person who refused to obey the draft law could be imprisoned for one year, but a person who urged others to disobey the draft law could be imprisoned for twenty years. More than a thousand citizens were jailed under the terms of the Espionage Act in its first fifteen months. It was hard to know what could get you in trouble. A filmmaker named Robert Goldstein was imprisoned for showing the British in a bad light in a movie about the American War of Independence. The judge allowed that such a depiction would be ‘permissible or even commendable’ in ordinary times, but ‘in this hour of national emergency’ Goldstein enjoyed ‘no right to subvert the purposes and destiny of the nation’. For insulting a foreign armyfrom 150 years earlier, Goldstein was sentenced to twelve years in prison.
    Though the espionage and sedition laws were intended only as wartime measures, matters actually worsened with peace. The return home of two million job-seeking soldiers and the simultaneous dismantling of the wartime economy gave America a severe recession. Racial tensions erupted into riots in two dozen cities where blacks had moved in search of better jobs. In Chicago, where the black population had doubled in a decade, a black youth who fell asleep on a raft on Lake Michigan and drifted on to a white beach was stoned to death by a white crowd, provoking two weeks of bitter rioting in which thirty-eight people were killed and whole neighbourhoods razed.
    At the same time much of the nation was rocked by industrial unrest. Longshoremen, clothworkers, cigar makers, construction workers, steel workers, telephone operators, elevated rail and subway workers, coal miners and even Broadway actors all walked off their jobs. At one point in 1919 two million people were out on strike.
    Foreign agitators and radical organizations like the Industrial Workers of the World (or Wobblies, as the members were known for reasons that have never been determined) were widely blamed for the troubles. In Boston and Cleveland, the police helped citizens beat up May Day paraders, then the police in Boston went out on strike themselves (the event that propelled Calvin Coolidge to national prominence). In Washington state, Wesley Everest, an IWW employee, was hauled into the street by a mob, which beat him and cut off his genitals. As he begged to be put out of his misery, his tormentors took him to a city bridge, dangled him over the side on a rope, then shot him. His death was ruled a suicide. No charges were brought.
    At the height of the tumult, someone – a disgruntled alien, it was presumed – began sending bombs. In Atlanta, a maid in the home of Senator Thomas R. Hardwick, head of the SenateImmigration Committee, had just taken delivery of a small brown package and was carrying it to the kitchen when it exploded, blowing off her hands. The next day a New York postal employee read about the bombing and realized that the description of the parcel exactly matched sixteen parcels he had put aside at a sorting office for insufficient postage. He rushed back to work and found the packages still there. All were addressed to prominent public figures – John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and several governors and congressmen. All bore return address labels to Gimbel Brothers department store at Thirty-Second and Broadway in Manhattan. It was subsequently discovered that several other packages had already been posted. In one bizarre incident, a package was returned to Gimbel Brothers for insufficient postage. A Gimbel’s clerk opened the package, examined the odd contents – bottle of acid, timer, explosives – then packed it all up again, added the necessary postage and mailed it on. Altogether thirty-six bombs were found. Apart from the unfortunate maid, no one else was injured and no arrests were made.
    But that was not the end of it. Just over a month later, on a balmy evening in a quiet, well-to-do neighbourhood of Washington, DC, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and his wife were preparing to retire in their house at 2132 R Street NW when they heard a thump downstairs – ‘as if something had been thrown against the front door’, Palmer related afterwards. A moment later the night was