On the night of June 2, the moon was only a sliver in the clear skies above Washington, D.C. For the assistant secretary of the navy, Franklin Roosevelt, and his wife, Eleanor, the evening had begun with a dinner party on Capitol Hill. Four of their five children were away for the night in Hyde Park, New York, visiting Franklin’s mother. The fifth, eleven-year-old James, was at home studying for his entrance exams to Groton, a private school. Staying with James was the Roosevelts’ cook, Nora. Shortly before midnight, Franklin steered his Stutz into a rented parking garage several blocks from the Roosevelts’ house on R Street. Located between Dupont and Sheridan Circles in the fashionable neighborhood of northwest Washington known as the West End, R Street, with its fine three-and four-story brick townhouses, was home to diplomats, congressmen, top-ranking officers in the army and navy, and high-society Washingtonians. The Roosevelts lived at 2131 R Street, across from the home of the new U.S. attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, at 2132.
As the young couple began walking toward their home, they heard a thunderous explosion. Franklin commented, in jest, that perhaps the souvenir shell he had brought home from Europe had fallen off the mantel. But then a cacophony of screams and sirens coming from the direction of their house turned their casual walk into a panic-driven run. The sidewalks of R Street, they soon discovered, were covered with leaves and tree branches, shattered glass, burnt scraps of wood, and parts of a human body: a leg on the street in front of their house and another leg near a neighbor’s house. Pieces of bloody flesh lay upon the steps of their home. The smell of burning flesh and cordite filled the air. Then there was the sound of Nora crying. Between cries, she exclaimed that the world must be coming to an end. Roosevelt ran into his house and up the staircase, taking two steps at a time. What about James?
When the glass in the front bedroom window had shattered, James jumped out of bed and, though barefoot, ran across the glass-strewn floor to the window to see what had happened. It was there that his father found him. “I’ll never forget how uncommonly unnerved Father was when he dashed upstairs and found me standing at the window in my pajamas,” James wrote later. “He grabbed me in an embrace that almost cracked my ribs.”
Out of the Roosevelts’ windows was a scene that few politicians in Washington would ever witness. A bomb had exploded on the front steps of 2132 R Street, Attorney General Palmer’s four-story townhouse. It had blown in the entire front of the house. Both sides of the double front door were dangling in pieces, their hinges still hot from the fiery blast. All eleven windows were gone. And debris was everywhere. While Eleanor took James back to bed, Franklin walked across the street to check on his neighbor and to invite the Palmers to his house for the night. But Mrs. Palmer and their daughter did not want to spend the night on R Street. Roosevelt thus drove the two of them to the home of friends several miles away. As Roosevelt was leaving, the attorney general said something to him that he never forgot: “Thank thee Franklin.” At home later that night, Franklin told Eleanor, “I never knew before that Mitchell Palmer was a Quaker. He was ‘theeing’ and ‘thouing’ me all over the place.”
In a June 3 letter to Franklin’s mother, Eleanor wrote: “What a wonderful escape for the Palmers. If he had not gone to bed and had still been sitting in his sitting room in his usual chair he would have been blown to bits for there is nothing left of [his] chair.”
The Palmers had retired earlier than usual that night, a decision that clearly saved their lives. Palmer told a New York Times reporter:
I had been in the library on the first floor, and had just turned out the lights and gone upstairs with Mrs. Palmer to retire. I had reached the upper floor and undressed, but had not yet retired. I heard a crash downstairs as if something had been thrown against the front door. It was followed immediately by an explosion which blew in the front of the house. The door against which it was thrown leads into the library in which we had been sitting, and the part of the house blown in was in front of the library. The police and other agents who hurried to the residence to make an investigation found in the street in front of the house the limbs of a man who had been blown to pieces by the bomb. No papers were found and no evidence has yet been uncovered to indicate his identity, and it is not yet known whether the limbs were those of the person who threw the bomb or of a passerby. I hope sincerely that they were not portions of the body of some innocent person passing the house. No one inside the house was injured by the explosion. It cracked the upper part of the first story of the house, blew in the front of the lower floor, broke windows, and knocked pictures from the walls. The damage done was chiefly downstairs.
And he told the Washington Post: “Had I remained at that window a few moments longer or had the explosion been timed a little earlier, I would certainly have been killed.”
Throughout the neighborhood there was considerable damage. The front doors of the townhouses on both sides of the Palmers’ were blown in. The facades with their intricate stonework and Juliet balconies were ruined. Part of a human body crashed into the front window of 2137 R Street, the home of the envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary from Norway, shattered the glass, and then landed on the floor next to a cot where a baby was sleeping. Even in the next block, at 2201 R Street, the home of an Illinois congressman, every front window was smashed. In her June 3 letter, Eleanor Roosevelt described her own house: “The roof of our sun parlor and our front windows on the lower floor don’t exist, all our front curtains and shades on all 3 floors were down, plaster fell promiscuously inside and out!”
By 1:30 A.M., on June 3, a Tuesday, police had failed to find the complete head of a man, though the parts of one man’s head, or perhaps two, were everywhere, now neatly placed on a sheet of canvas in the Palmers’ front yard beneath the shade trees still dripping with blood and fragments of human flesh. With the aid of twenty large searchlights, police had succeeded in finding other pieces of this gruesome puzzle, including what appeared to be the remnants of two left legs; the collar of a shirt, Arrow brand, size fifteen, bearing the mark of a Chinese laundry, and the monogram “KB”; a soft brown fedora from a Philadelphia haberdasher that appeared to be brand-new; shreds of brown socks and brown garters; tattered remnants of a black suit, with a green pin stripe, of an expensive grade of cloth—no label yet found—and also new; a small section of a rubber heel; the butt end of an automatic revolver; and the bottom and sides of one small suitcase made of cloth-mounted pasteboard with cheap brass clasps. “Of the 98-cent variety,” police noted.
Scattered across R Street between the Roosevelts’ and the Palmers’ were about fifty or so leaflets, measuring six by ten inches, printed in black ink on pink paper and resembling those that had been found five months before in Boston around the site of the great molasses disaster. Under a pile of the pink leaflets was an Italian-English dictionary. Entitled “PLAIN WORDS,” the flyers, in good English, effectively were declarations of class war and were signed “THE ANARCHIST FIGHTERS.”
Now that the great war, waged to replenish your purses and build a pedestal to your saints, is over, nothing better can you do to protect your stolen millions and your usurped fame, than to direct all the power of the murderous institutions you created for your exclusive defense, against the working multitudes rising to a more human conception of life…. Do you expect us to sit down and pray and cry? We know that all you do is for your defense as a class. We know also that the proletariat has the same right to protect itself. Since their press has been suffocated, their mouths muzzled, we mean to speak for them the voice of dynamite, through the mouths of guns…. We know how we stand with you and know how to take care of ourselves. Besides, you will never get all of us and we multiply nowadays. Just wait and resign yourselves to your fate, since privilege and riches have turned your heads. Long live social revolution! Down with tyranny!
On that Tuesday morning, by the time most of the residents of R Street would normally be going to work, police were confident that only one man had been blown apart in the explosion. Whether it was the bomber or a passerby, they could not comment—and they did not know—although they speculated that it was the bomber and that he had tripped on the front stoop while positioning the bomb, which then exploded prematurely.
By then, they did know that there had been explosions within the same hour in eight U.S. cities that night, killing two people. The home of the mayor of Cleveland had been dynamited as well as the residences of a municipal judge in Boston; a state legislator in Newtonville, Massachusetts; a silk manufacturer in Paterson, New Jersey; a federal judge and a police inspector in Pittsburgh; and a federal judge in New York City. In Philadelphia, the home of a prominent jeweler was targeted as well as a church, the Rectory of Our Lady of Victory. In New York, the bomb killed a night watchman who had been walking in front of the judge’s four-story brown-stone at 151 East 61st Street, where the bomb exploded in the vestibule and tore out the entire front of the first and second stories. The other death was the man whose body parts were scattered across the stoops and sidewalks of R Street.
The media consensus, as expressed on the front page of the New York Times on Tuesday, was that “the attempt to blow up his [Palmer’s] house bore every evidence of having been the work of anarchists or Bolsheviki.” An editorial in the Washington Post said “The first sample of Soviet government on R Street ought to be highly satisfactory to the American champions of the Bolsheviki.” But the who, why, and how of what happened on R Street that Monday night would not be easy to establish. Suspects and motives abounded. All parts of government intelligence communities, from the Military Intelligence Division of the army to local police departments, pledged cooperation with the Department of Justice and the Bureau of Investigation to solve the mystery.
The initial “K.B.” on the collar fragment alerted military intelligence operatives to a Cleveland anarchist, Karl Blum, for whom they had an outstanding warrant and who had been missing from the area since Memorial Day. Others in Cleveland, subsequently coming under investigation, included anarchist groups called the Double Trinity and the Group of Avengers. In Pittsburgh, local police investigators and army intelligence agents found the same type of pink leaflets as the ones scattered along R Street and they were particularly interested in a phrase that read “you have deported us.” Knowing that most deportees from the United States at that time were Russians, they deduced Russian immigrants were the culprits. Thus they targeted the Union of Russian Workers, rounded up fifteen members, detained them for several days, and placed a covert MID agent in a cell with them. By the summer of 1919 the Union of Russian Workers was mostly a social club and educational center for young, unmarried Russian males, who had little if any interest in revolutionary activity. Once, indeed, it had been a meeting place for radical leaders but after the Revolution most of them had returned to Russia. Although the MID agent gained the trust of his cell mates, what he learned was not helpful. The Russians knew nothing of the bombing and in fact they thought it was a rather stupid move on the part of anyone seeking change. Such violence would cause a reactionary response by the government, “a bommerang to the cause,” so wrote the Pittsburgh intelligence agent in his June 12 report describing his conversations with the jailed Russians.
Radical leaders such as the journalist John Reed and Algernon Lee, the director of the Rand School of Social Science, a socialist school in New York City, agreed. They believed that no radical political group with any sense would have planned the bombings. The kind of social change envisioned by these radicals required the political mobilization of the vast majority of working men and women—not the acts of a small terrorist clique. From their point of view, the night of June 2 had to have been orchestrated by provocateurs who, according to Reed, were “interested in terrifying the ruling class into destroying the radical labor movement in this country.” Lee believed that private detective agencies working for unofficial patriotic organizations volunteering to wage a war against radicals and immigrants were behind the bombings. They were all zealous nationalists, in Lee’s opinion. They were people who wanted the American public to be afraid enough to demand that their government increase security measures and shut out foreigners. One government agent would eventually go so far as to say, years later, that he believed that the June 2 explosions were designed for the purpose of gaining national attention for the urgent need to enhance and revamp the government’s intelligence capabilities. They might have been planned by some fringe group within the government, he suggested—a group wanting to incite Palmer to make drastic moves—or perhaps by one of those independent patriotic groups that had operated covertly during the war and believed themselves to be the nation’s watchdogs and saviors. He was of the firm belief that foreign nationals were not the culprits. Even Palmer himself was suspicious to some observers; after all, he had retired early that night, breaking his usual routine.
Perhaps the soundest of the theories, and the one that would eventually be substantiated enough to be accepted by some local and national intelligence networks—though never officially confirmed—identified Italian anarchists as the perpetrators. There were clues pointing to Italian anarchists in nearly every location of the June 2 bombings, not just in Washington. The federal judge in New York who had been the target that day, for example, had sentenced two Italian anarchists accused of plotting to blow up St. Patrick’s Cathedral. In Washington, the revolver found at the scene of the Palmer incident had been purchased by Luigi Calisieri at the Iver Johnson Sporting Goods House in Boston. Washington agents dispatched to Boston soon learned that Calisieri had been missing from Boston for several weeks. The motive seemed obvious. The Justice Department in March had arrested Luigi Galleani, the leader of a group of fifty or sixty Italian anarchists, and was planning to deport him on June 24. The MID, the BI, and the local authorities suspected that Galleani’s followers had orchestrated the June 2 bombings to protest his arrest and the prosecution of anarchist leaders in general. In fact, BI agents had been tailing Galleanists since early 1918 as possible suspects in several explosions and bomb threats, including most recently the mail bombs of late April and the January explosion of the molasses tank in Boston.
On June 4, when the president was informed of the bombings, he sent a cablegram to Palmer saying “My heartfelt congratulations on your escape. I am deeply thankful that the miscreants failed in all their attempts.” High up in the Wilson administration, perhaps as high as the president himself, it was well known that a rather small conspiracy of anarchists, the Galleanists, who were no more than fifty strong, or perhaps another group of about the same size, was likely behind the recent bombings. Even the president’s doctor knew something of the motives for the latest violence. On June 4 in Paris, Dr. Grayson wrote in his diary that the incidents were “apparently being carried on in an effort to force the Government to stop its prosecution of the anarchistic leaders and the IWW, who have tried to terrorize the country.” And, as early as June 7, the New York Times reported that the Justice Department had identified the man who blew himself up in Palmer’s front yard. He was, in fact, an Italian anarchist who belonged to a group that was “well known to the Federal and local authorities,” the Galleanists.
In short, three main theories would emerge from those days in early June. First, American radicals and socialists would believe that the bombings were the work of agents provocateurs designed to bring on government repression of all groups seeking change in America. They would continue to hammer away at the point that such individual acts of violence and terror did not serve their aims or benefit their movement. In the second theory, the federal law enforcement agencies continued to build their case identifying the Galleanists, the anarcho-terrorists whose motive was retaliation for the prosecution of their leaders.
But before the case was resolved, the American public would be exposed to a third theory: that what happened on R Street on June 2 was one act of a far larger drama, a nationwide conspiracy of radicals to overthrow the U.S. government. In fact, the Justice Department, in sharing information about the culprits with the New York Times on June 6, actually for the first time linked the Italian anarchists to Bolshevism in America, saying that the Italians were “known to be sympathetic with the ideals of the Bolsheviki.” Hence, the Palmer bombing, though clearly thought by most investigators to be an act of targeted retaliation by a specific group, became an expansive plot tied to the new enemy, Bolshevism. As one historian later wrote, “Despite strong suspicions that the bombings were the work of a small group of anarchists who were retaliating against government policies, Justice Department and Bureau officials sought to portray the attacks as the first step in a nationwide radical uprising.”
There was no question that the bombings were real and terrifying for everyone in America, but those who had the strongest suspicions and the best access to information, those who were the closest to the truth, those who had the authority to quell the rising fears, did not do so. Instead, they allowed the scariest reel of all to run through the mind of every American, a narrative of death and destruction, a doomsday tale of a vast radical conspiracy, a story that would become more and more impossibly entangled with distortions and lies, forcing politicians and public officials to respond, encouraging opportunists to surface, and adding act after act to the dangerous play that in the end might hurt more individuals than the heinous schemes of the Italian anarchists. “I remember the morning after my house was blown up,” Attorney General Palmer told a Senate committee. “I stood in the middle of the wreckage of my library with Congressmen and Senators, and without a dissenting voice they called upon me in strong terms to exercise all the power that was possible…to run to earth the criminals who were behind that kind of outrage.”
The night of June 2 was the opening act in a sweeping drama of paranoid politics, extravagant patriotism, and spiraling fears that would one day be known as the Red Scare of 1919, not the Revolution of 1919.