Welcome to America, 1920

What a country! In America, gangsters controlled the ballot box. Don't take my word for it. Here's the featured cartoon in the Jewish Daily Forward from Election Day, November 2, 1920. Republican Warren Harding beat Democrat James Cox that day, but the Forward rejected both of them. It's candidate was the Socialist, Eugene V. Debs, running his campaign from prison, serving a term for wartime sedition. Debs would get over a million votes.



November 1920 was also the month that my grandfather landed at Ellis Island, having fled Eastern Europe a step ahead of the law (see prior posts). Having left wife and children behind, he found himself rootless and moniless, stranded in the biggest, freest city on earth -- a far cry from backwoods Poland. It would take six years to bring over the rest of the family.

It wasn't just politics that must have seemed strange to him. Here's a cartoon that month from another Yiddish Daily, The Day (Deer Taag). Here, the corrupt goon is the fat, rich landlord squeezing pennies from his impovished slum tenants.

Want more goons? Try the police. Earlier in 1920, New York coppers backed by Justice Department agents had rounded up over 5,000 recent immigrants in the notorious Palmer Raids, holding them for weeks on vague charges of disloyalty, deporting almost a thousand, then freeing the rest. "Third degree" tactics were normal back then; "civil liberties" was mostly still just a fancy word on college campuses.

Did I mention organized crime? Let's see. There were the gangs under Lucky Luciano, Dutch Schultz, and Legs Diamond, not to mention Albert Anastasio and Murder Incorporated over in Brooklyn. And they were just the celebrities.

Want to cross the street? Try walking through this: Driving around New York.

We have built a ridiculously nostalgic image of life for immigrants reaching America in the early Twentieth Century. Don't be fooled. It was hard, raw, painful, and unforgiving: the back- breaking strain of sweatshop labor, the squalor of tenements, and disdain of the native born. By 1921, "old" Americans grew so hostile against newcomers that they imposed the most restrictive peacetime immigration quotas in history.

Psychologists use a phrase to describe how people can take a painful experience and color their own memory to justify it by turning it into something glorious and honorable -- cognitive dissonance. That's the American immigrant experience.

New film on 1919 Red Scare

That's William J. Flynn standing there in the dapper hat and trenchcoat. Back in 1919, he was very hot stuff. They called him "Big Bill," the most famous detective in America, former chief of the U.S. Secret Service, former top gumshoe in New York City, recognied as the country's top spy catcher, Red hunter, counterfeit tracker, enemy of gangsters, kidnappers, bank robbers, gamblers, and criminals of every type.

You could barely pick up a newspaper in the 1910s without seeing his name. He loved splashy midnight raids, and helped terrify the country against German saboteurs during World War I. In his spare time, he even wrote detective novels, mostly making himself the hero.

In 1919, Flynn landed in Washington, D.C. The Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, asked him, begged him, to leave New York and become the new Director of the Justice Department's Bureau of Investigation (later renamed the FBI). Flynn would hold the job for two years. One of his lieutenants would be a skinny young kid named J. Edgar Hoover who later would head the FBI for 48 years, the most controversial law enforcement figure in Twentieth Century America.

Depite all his big headline-grabbing cases, nobody much remembers Bill Flynn these days. But that could change. A new movie is being made about Flynn's Justice Department days that, if done right, could nicely poke a rarely-esposed sensitive raw nerve in the American past.

Mitchell Palmer had a special job in mind for Flynn when he invited him to come to Washington in 1919 and head the Bureau of Investigation. Palmer intended to launch a massive crackdown against subversives -- communists, anarchists, labor radicals, and a few truly dangerous people -- that would culminate in one of the worst civil liberty abuses in American history. Between late 1919 and early 1920, Justice Department agents, working with local police and vigilantees, rounded up some 10,000 people, locked them in overcrowded prisons, had them beaten, abused, cut off from lawyers, threatened with deportation, and then, months later, the large majority simply released, never accused of a crime. The reason? A massive case of paranoia and guilt by association known as the First Red Scare.

Flynn's direct role in this affair has always been a mystery. Palmer himself and young Hoover played the visible leads -- hence the "Palmer Raids"-- but Flynn was the person actually in charge of the Bureau at the time. I tell the story of the Raids from Hoover's point of view in my book Young J. Edgar: Hoover, the Red Scare, and the Assault on Civil Liberties. Now it's time for Flynn's.

The new movie, called No God, No Master, recently began shooting in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, (which has several streets that look like 1919 New York City). To play Flynn, it casts actor David Strathairn -- who played Edward R. Murrow in the 2005 George Clooney film Good Night, and Good Luck. The production team describes the story this way:

"No God, No Master is the story of U.S. Bureau of Investigation agent William Flynn who is swept into the world of homegrown terrorism during the Red Scare of the early 1900s. His journey into the culture of anarchism sets the stage for a timely drama with rsounding parallels to the politics and issues of contemporary society."

Let's hope they do a good job. This is an important story, full of lessons clearly forgotten during the hysteria of our own generation's War on Terror following the attacks on our country of September 11, 2001. Too often, movies get it wrong. I have my fingers crossed that this will be the exception.

J. Edgar Hoover

In honor of the new movie
Public Enemies starring JohnnyDepp and based on the terrific book by Bryan Burrough, here is my favorite picture of that tough, gruff, civil-liberties-stomping autocratic crime-fighter J. Edgar Hoover.

The dark side: Hoover would grow up to be Director for Life of the FBI, holding the job for 48 years under nine presidents (Calvin Coolidge to Richard Nixon) from 1924 till his death in 1972. Hoover would use his secret FBI files to blackmail presidents, senators, and movie stars, and felt no scruples conducting sabotage, black bag jobs, or secret wiretaps against any person or group he considered "subversive." By the 1960s, this included mostly civil rights leaders and anti-Viet Nam War dissenters.

Earlier, he aided Senator Joe McCarthy on his anti-Communist witch hunts. He remains one of the most-hated figures in American history.

On the good side, he used his organizational brilliance in the 1930s to build the then-disfunctional Bureau into a modern professional force with scientific methods, a national academy and lab, a Most Wanted List, finger print files, and a strict agent code of conduct. At his peak, he made the G-Man brand so popular that it was tougher to be accepted as a rookie FBI agent than it was to get into an Ivy League college.

How did he get this way? Here, we see young J. Edgar as a shockingly-normal boy playing with his bike. Hoover grew up in the Capitol Hill section of Washington, D.C., son of a lifelong government clerk, youngest of four siblings, spoiled, his mother's favorite. He was smart, eager, sang in a church choir, carried groceries for old ladies, and was the star of his high school track, debate, and cadet teams. His classmates elected him their valedictorian. He worked his way through Law School and graduated in 1917 as America entered World War I.

What changed him from this normal, smart, eager child of the Jazz Age into the corrupt autocrat of later years was the question behind my own book Young J. Edgar, which tells the story of Hoover's first big assignment in the 1919 Justice Depatment, running the notorious anti-Communist crackdown known as the Palmer Raids.

In between, though, he brought in John Dillinger, the bank robber-- played by Johnny Depp in the new movie. Enjoy.