November 7 is the anniversary of the start of The Palmer Raids in 1919. Quite deliberately on the second anniversary of the birth of the Soviet Union, the US regime raided the offices of the Union of Russian Workers and began the process to exile their members to the Russian SFSR. It was the start of many raids.

There were two causes for this sequence of events. The first and most obvious was the red scare. Earlier that year, anarchists had conducted a series of bombings which targetted government officials and top ranking oligarchs. This had worked up the populace into thinking that it was a Bolshevik conspiracy and everything possible must be done to stop it. The second reason was racism/anti-immigrant sentiment. Immigration had been increasing from Asian countries, as well as Eastern European countries. This of course was cause for alarm, as the then US President Woodrow Wilson put it a mere 7 years earlier during his election campaign:

“In the matter of Chinese and Japanese coolie immigration I stand for the national policy of exclusion (or restricted immigration). The whole question is one of assimilation of diverse races. We cannot make a homogeneous population out of people who do not blend with the Caucasian race… Oriental coolieism will give us another race problem to solve, and surely we have had our lesson.”

And it wasn’t restricted to just Asians. There was a growing movement to restrict citizenship to only “white” people. Senator Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee suggested sending native born Americans to Guam if they weren’t behaving in an American way. The American Legion demanded the deportation of anyone who dodged the draft in the first World War. The Immigration Restriction League were quick to suggest a constitutional amendment to restrict citizenship to immigrants from desirable countries (just being white was no longer racially pure enough).

Of course, these two elements when combined, lead to paranoid white Americans who think that anyone not like them is out to get them. When Attorney General Alexander Palmer’s house was bombed by an Anarchist, that was all the evidence he needed to launch his campaign. Every immigrant who didn’t look like him or talk like him started to look like a Bolshevik. He estimated that there were over 300,000 living in the US, and he wanted to find every one, as he was sure that a communist uprising was coming on May Day of the following year. He arrested non-“white” immigrants by the thousands for deportation.

This continued until by complete chance, a principled man by the name of Louis Post came to be the acting Secretary of Labour. He called the raids as a witch hunt, and was able to stall the deportations. He was promptly impeached. But after 10 hours of testimony, they couldn’t find any technicality to remove him for. Eventually when May Day came around and not much happened… the movement largely fizzled out. It would be replaced in later years with many immigration restrictions, and the House Un-American Committee, which I have talked about a few times.

Today, the US regime is still proudly arresting political dissidents for exercising their right to speak, and the movement to restrict citizenship to desirable races is still ongoing.