One Summer: America, 1927

powerfully inclined to listen to a young adviser in the Justice Department who had developed a private theory that America’s immigrant subversives, in league with international communists, were planning a coup. The young man’s name was J. Edgar Hoover,and he convinced Palmer that the plotters existed in vast numbers and were planning an imminent strike.
    Hoover, who had only just graduated from law school, was put in charge of a hitherto inconsequential corner of the Alien Registration Section known as the Radical Division. He assembled an index file containing more than 200,000 names of individuals and organizations, all neatly cross-referenced. Forty translators were taken on to pore over radical publications, of which the tireless quantifier Hoover counted more than six hundred.
    Palmer had high hopes of being his party’s presidential nominee in 1920. Dealing decisively with radical elements became his strategy for showing what a muscular individual he was. In a series of apocalyptic speeches, he warned that the flames of revolution were sweeping across the country, ‘licking the altars of the churches, leaping into the belfry of the school bell, crawling into the sacred corners of American homes, seeking to replace marriage vows with libertine laws, burning up the foundations of society’. Palmer claimed that some five million communists and fellow travellers were planning the overthrow of America. With his thrusting jaw and tough rhetoric, Palmer became known to his admirers as ‘the Fighting Quaker’. He had just launched what was quickly dubbed the Great Red Scare.
    Eagerly encouraged by J. Edgar Hoover, Palmer prepared a series of raids on radical gathering spots. The first were held on 7 November 1919 – the second anniversary of the Russian Revolution – and mostly involved federal agents and police in twelve cities storming selected clubs and cafés, smashing furniture and arresting everyone in sight. In New York, police raided the Union of Russian Workers, beating anyone who protested or even questioned what they were doing. The union was merely a social club, where members could go to play chess or take classes to improve their English; it had never had any connection to radical affairs. In Hartford, Connecticut, police arrested a large number of suspects – the exact number is uncertain – then arrested anyonewho came to ask after them. In Detroit, an entire orchestra and all the patrons of a particular restaurant were among eight hundred detainees who were held for up to a week in a windowless corridor without adequate water, toilets or space to lie down. Eventually all were released without charge.
    Palmer was so pleased with the publicity his raids generated and the fear they instilled that he ordered a second, larger set of raids in the new year. This time some 6,000 to 10,000 people (accounts vary widely) were arrested in at least seventy-eight cities in twenty-three states. Again, there was much needless destruction of property, arrests without warrants and beating of innocent people.
    The Great Red Scare proved to be not so scary after all. In total, the authorities seized just three pistols and no explosives. No evidence of a national conspiracy was uncovered. The failure to catch any bombers or unearth any trace of planned insurrection ended Palmer’s political prospects. At the Democratic convention in 1920, the delegates selected James M. Cox, governor of Ohio, to run against another Ohioan, Warren G. Harding. Although the Palmer raids didn’t achieve anything, they had a powerful effect on national sentiment, which is almost certainly why Chief Stewart of Bridgewater decided, without benefit of evidence, that the murderers on his patch were foreign anarchists. And it is why Sacco and Vanzetti never really stood a chance.
     
    Between 1905 and 1914, 10 million people, mostly from southern and eastern Europe, poured into the United States – a country that had only 83 million people to begin with. The numbers of immigrants changed the face of urban America utterly. By 1910, immigrants and the children of immigrants made up almost three quarters of the populations of New York, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland and Boston.
    Sacco and Vanzetti were among 130,000 Italians who arrived in 1908 alone. Sacco, from Torremaggiore in south-eastern Italy, was just sixteen years old on arrival. Vanzetti, who came from Piedmont,in the more prosperous north and not far from France, was three years