A Case Poorly Made
Thomas, Norman
The author of this book has a case to make. He argues that the "Palmer raids" and the Red scare of 1919-20 were not an aberration due to World War I and the Russian revolution. Rather,...
...Preston discusses and was very active in trying to defend civil liberties, I do not think the war hysteria of 1917-21 was primarily a consequence of feeling against aliens...
...In 1912 the Socialist Party convention adopted the following constitutional provision: "Any member of the party who opposes political action or advocates crime, sabotage or other methods of violence as a weapon of the working class to aid in its emancipation shall be expelled from membership in the party...
...As one who lived through the years Mr...
...But that Administration was not ready to revise any of the postwar legislation which virtually cut off immigration to the U.S...
...And by that time immigration had been almost shut off, and the radical leaders were nativeborn...
...That fact helped make it strong...
...This is grossly unfair...
...And the same Roosevelt was guilty of the most outrageous and discriminatory anti-alien action in our history: the evacuation of Japanese and Japanese-Americans without trial or hearing from the West Coast...
...Strangely, Preston stops his story, except for an epilogue, with President Roosevelt's 1933 Christmas pardon to all those convicted under the Draft and Espionage Acts of World War I. "Fifteen years after the prosecutions and during a much greater crisis, a New Deal Administration was ready to close those wounds opened by the antiradical hysteria of its Democratic forebears...
...there were also other reasons...
...When political neces sity or public hysteria required it, Progressives, Republicans, and Demo crats were equally eager proponents of a repressive antiradicalism...
...The author of this book has a case to make...
...But of course it was easier for the government and the public to focus its suspicions on the alien—and easier also to get rid of him...
...Preston dismisses the role of aliens or at least of the foreign-born in radical movements before World War I too lightly...
...Preston argues his case by stressing the persistent popular feeling that immigrants were potentially radical and the extensive use of deportation to punish the immigrant radical as it could not punish the native...
...The majority of immigrants were conservative enough, though not, as he reiterates, simply because they had been peasants...
...The Socialist anti-sabotage clause was the ideological forerunner of the criminal syndicalism laws and the deportation statutes aimed at dissident members of the com munity...
...Any meaningful sense of the plight of the deported alien must be supplied by the understanding sympathy of the reader...
...In brief, Preston's thesis is too superficially stated and argued...
...Nowadays we don't deport our radicals, who are mostly citizens...
...One final comment on it is in order...
...But the foreignborn furnished many of the most conspicuous leaders and more than their proportionate share of members of radical and socialist parties...
...is slighted...
...Roosevelt's amnesty required little courage in 1933...
...But it also had every right to set up standards for political action in its own name and for its own members...
...Even in the epilogue there is no reference to this event, and in general the racial aspect of the problem of aliens in the U.S...
...The Socialist Party opposed the Red raids before, during and after A. Mitchell Palmer's shocking administration of his office...
...By historical and contemporary standards, the U.S...
...Rather, these events stimulated the revival of an old American identification of aliens and subversives—an identification which had it roots in the period of the Alien and Sedition laws and had reappeared in the 1890's...
...Apropos of this provision Preston writes: "The Socialists were the first group to create an index of permissible belief and action within the framework of discontent...
...It was not surprising, more over, that the more conservative and moderate elements of society should rush in where the Socialists had not feared to tread...
...At the same time these people are entitled to the full protection of the law and certainly the right of residence in this country...
...Preston quotes the familiar provision of the naturalization laws that "any alien be ing a white person," is eligible for citizenship without commenting on the poisonous prejudice in the insistence on color, or even on the ex ceedingly liberal attitude toward white immigrants and the ease with which they could become citizens...
...But while the book is a well-documented account of events, it is an inadequate study of popular prejudice and its victims...
...Preston alleges, than the crisis of 1917-21 but it was of a different order...
...Whether or not the 1912 resolution was wise, it is entirely legitimate for a political party to exclude members because of their beliefs...
...On the contrary, we refuse them passports...
...It was, in fact, directed against radicalism...
...The crisis of 1933 may have been far more serious, as Mr...
...He argues that the "Palmer raids" and the Red scare of 1919-20 were not an aberration due to World War I and the Russian revolution...
...was freer of restrictive prejudice than the white countries from which the immigrant came...
Vol. 10 • September 1963 • No. 4
