What did ACLU lawyer and future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter say about the Palmer Raids?
Answers
Answer:
Mitchell Palmer saw thousands of people detained without warrants merely upon general suspicion. This occurred during the “Red Scare” of the 1920s, a period of anti-Communist fervor in the United States.
Facilitated by a young Justice Department official, J. Edgar Hoover, what became known as the Palmer Raids peaked on the night of January 2, 1920, when between 3,000 and 10,000 people in 35 cities were detained on suspicion of sympathizing with Communists or anarchists.
Earlier raids were smaller and one led to the deportation of anarchist Emma Goldman. “A. Mitchell Palmer, Attorney General, personally directed the raids tonight in radical centers throughout the country,” reported the New York Tribune, repeating Justice Department statements. The department said the arrests were lawful because the suspects advocated the overthrow of the United States government. Specifically, the department said their alleged membership in the Communist Party or the Communist Labor Party qualified them for deportation, subject to final decisions made by immigration officials.
Prominent lawyers protested that the arrests were unconstitutional. A group of legal scholars including future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, Ernst Freund, and Harvard Law School Dean Roscoe Pound published a scathing critique of the raids, saying they lacked arrest warrants, directed officers to seize documents at will, and permitted unrestrained force. The newly formed American Civil Liberties Union was a sponsor of the critical report.
“For more than six months we, the undersigned lawyers, whose sworn duty it is to uphold the Constitution and Laws of the United States, have seen with growing apprehension the continued violation of that Constitution and breaking of those Laws by the Department of Justice of the United States government,” the group said.
“We are concerned solely with bringing to the attention of the American people the utterly illegal acts which have been committed by those charged with the highest duty of enforcing the laws - acts which have caused widespread suffering and unrest, have struck at the foundation of American free institutions, and have brought the name of our country into disrepute,” they argued, citing numerous Fourth Amendment, Fifth Amendment, and Eighth Amendment violations.
Explanation:
Explanation:
Among the ACLU's proudest moments are those in which it has come to the defense of civil liberties in times of national crisis.
That defense began in the early part of the 20th century, in response to the massive suppression of freedom of speech and of the press by President Woodrow Wilson during World War I. At the time, labor strikes in our nation's cities terrified millions of Americans who feared that law and order were collapsing. Growing anti-war sentiment also caused unrest, and Congress responded by passing the infamous Espionage Act of 1917, which was amended with the Sedition Act of 1918 to additionally criminalize any activity that threatened the administration in power. In 1918, riots broke out, paralyzing the country, and federal troops were called in to restore order in many cities. In June of that year, the country was shaken by politically motivated bombings, including an explosion at the home of Attorney General Mitchell Palmer.
What followed was one of the worst violations of civil liberties in American history. Law enforcement officials swooped down on suspected radicals in 33 cities, arresting 6,000 people, most of them immigrants. The raids involved the wholesale abuses of the law: arrests without a warrant, unreasonable searches and seizures, wanton destruction of property, police brutality, and prolonged detention.
In the midst of this crisis the National Civil Liberties Bureau was formed – the predecessor of the ACLU, and the only national organization to speak out in defense of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the rights of conscientious objectors, and the due process rights of radical labor leaders. The Bureau was led by Roger Baldwin, who went on to found the ACLU in January, 1920 along with Crystal Eastman, Arthur Garfield Hayes, and others.