One September evening just before six o’clock, Detectives Ford, Culhane, and Cavanagh of the New York City Bomb Squad were walking along Canal Street in lower Manhattan, likely at a relaxed gait after taking an early dinner near Centre Street. But as they headed west on Canal toward Lafayette Street, they were overwhelmed by a sudden shower of circulars. Landing on the windshields of passing cabs, on the heads and shoulders of pedestrians, and into the very hands of these three men, hundreds upon hundreds of leaflets fell from somewhere above. “Awake and change your old methods!” read the paper entitled “American Toilers—Where Is Your Freedom?” and signed by “A Group of Revolutionists.” Another one, which was more prevalent, was entitled “Constitutional Day—What It Means to US-Workers!” and signed by “American Anarchist Federated Commune Soviets.”
So dense was the deluge that its source was unclear. Moving to the other side of the street, Detective Walter Culhane was able to ascertain that a small human figure was flinging the flyers from the rooftop of a tenement at 245 Canal. Into the building ran the detectives and as they dashed up the stairs, they met a “black-eyed, demure looking girl” coming down just as fast. The detectives stopped her.
“What are you doing in this building?” asked Culhane.
“I am in the wrong house and was just leaving,” she said.
“Are you the one throwing these circulars?”
“No,” she said, not looking up as she continued her descent.
But then one of the other two detectives suddenly recognized the “girl anarchist” whose picture had been on front pages nationwide during the autumn of 1918 and again in March of 1919.
“Aren’t you Mollie Steimer?” he asked, running back down the stairs.
“Yes,” she said.
Before she reached the street, Detective Culhane arrested her on the charge of disorderly conduct. Throwing handbills from rooftops was considered a disturbance of the peace.
Steimer spent that night at the Tombs. It was the first time she had been arrested since March, when she was swept up in the raid of the Russian People’s House, detained briefly at Ellis Island, and then released. This time, on the morning of September 18, Steimer was arraigned. However, as with all legal proceedings involving the young anarchist, the hearing was hardly routine. In the courtroom were two men, a New York state judge and an assistant district attorney, who both had received anti-Constitution circulars through the mail two days before. The circulars were similar to the ones now covering the sidewalks of Canal Street. Both men had tried to question Steimer at the station house upon her arrival the previous evening—but without results. Also at the hearing were the three Bomb Squad detectives who arrested her, the head of the Bomb Squad, and two federal agents (Mortimer J. Davis and Frank Faulhaber) from the Bureau of Investigation. Steimer appeared alone, without her lawyer, Harry Weinberger, and when asked how she pleaded, she said, “I do not desire to make any plea whatsoever. I want an adjournment but if you desire to go on with the case now, I am totally indifferent.”
Bail was set for $500 and immediately after the formal hearing, Steimer was taken to an anteroom and questioned. In his report of the interrogation, agent Davis wrote that Steimer admitted to distributing the circulars at a building on the corner of 42nd Street and Sixth Avenue, a location she had selected, she said, because so many workers passed it daily. She wouldn’t tell them where the circulars were printed or who else was involved in the operation, Davis wrote, adding that he and others in the room that day were convinced that the printers of these recent leaflets were likely the same people who had been tried the year before for violating the Sedition Act. Because of this, agent Davis suggested that Steimer be “well shadowed upon her release,” and if the BI could not spare any agents at the moment, the police department must take care of it. Davis ended his report by saying that the hearing and the inquiry “consumed the entire morning.”
Agent Faulhaber wrote in his report that Steimer, in the anteroom, confessed that she had thrown the circulars off the roof of the Canal Street tenement building and that she said, “I am responsible for that circular and I stand by every line of it.” Bomb Squad head Sergeant Gegan, in his report, noted that Steimer “would answer questions about herself but she would not answer any questions about other people connected with her.” And Agent C. J. Scully, in his assessment of the other reports, wrote a few days after the hearing that “This woman is a menace to the community and…if possible, means should be devised whereby she be placed under a heavy bail bond…. She is of the type who have absolutely no respect for law and order. I, personally, have seen her openly defy the court and on several occasions refuse to leave her seat in the courtroom when a band outside was playing the national anthem.” The next hearing in the case was set for September 25 and Steimer returned to the Tombs.
When Harry Weinberger heard the news that Mollie was in trouble again, he was in the midst of writing his brief for his appeal in the Abrams case to the U.S. Supreme Court. This was a fifty-one-page document and in it Weinberger repeated one of his arguments from the trial: that the defendants, Abrams, Steimer, Lipman, and Lachowsky, had not protested the war with Germany nor had they interfered with wartime production of machinery and weapons nor had they even tried to discourage conscription. Their focus, he wrote, was to stop American intervention in Soviet Russia. America was not officially at war with Russia nor was it legal for America to have sent troops there. It was this illegal war that the young people were protesting in the allegedly incendiary circulars, which got them into trouble in August of 1918. Weinberger stressed that his defendants did nothing more than criticize their government, and “the right to criticize is the foundation of our Government.” Perhaps his strongest argument was that his clients had been charged with violating a law that, he argued, was itself a violation of the Constitution. The government, in Weinberger’s opinion, did not have the right to restrict free speech at any time, even during war, for the sake of national security. If it could, then that freedom could “be taken away in peacetime on the same pretext.” Moving to higher ground than his specific case, Weinberger stressed that for the nation this was a dangerous precedent. “Absolute freedom of speech is the only basis upon which the Government can stand and remain free.”
On the 20th of September, Weinberger sent thirty copies of his brief to the clerk of the U.S. Supreme Court, posted bail for Steimer, and requested a postponement of her September 25 hearing. On that same day, the Bureau of Investigation was all abuzz about “Miss Stimer.” Frank Burke, assistant BI director, sent a memo to the bureau’s New York City office saying that Hoover’s new division had learned that during the past three months Steimer had become very active in the Workers’ Defense Union, which was closely affiliated with another radical group, the League for Amnesty for Political Prisoners, which was headed by a friend of Steimer’s and a “well-known radical,” Eleanor Fitzgerald. “It is the consensus of opinion of all officials, both Government [federal] and municipal that Mollie Steimer is a dangerous woman and that she should be deported immediately.”
Weinberger too was pushing for the deportation of Steimer and all of her co-defendants. If he could not persuade the Supreme Court to reverse the convictions, then he would use the 1918 Alien Act to argue for the deportation of his clients to spare them twenty years in prison in the United States. To spend so many years incarcerated for distributing leaflets was a cruel fate. Besides, Weinberger knew that as soon as they served their time, the government would deport them. In August he had met with Palmer to urge him to drop the case and if not, then to deport them as soon as possible. As anarchist aliens, they were in violation of the 1918 law. Unless the government was intent on subjecting Weinberger’s clients to unduly harsh punishments, then it seemed logical to deport them.
Weinberger also began a campaign to enlist the help and power of Ray Stannard Baker. First, he asked a friend, Mary Heaton Vorse, who knew Baker, to beseech him to try to persuade Palmer to give these young people a break. Then, on the same day that Weinberger sent his brief to the Supreme Court, he sent a copy of the brief to Baker with a cover letter in which he urged Baker to talk to President Wilson about the case. “With [Wilson’s] expressed beliefs, especially at Paris, that the nation must stop and listen to the humblest member, I think there can be only one thing to do and that is to direct the Attorney General to confess error [in proceeding with the Abrams case],” Weinberger wrote.
Baker responded almost immediately. On September 23 he sent out two letters, one to Weinberger and one to the attorney general on behalf of Weinberger’s clients. “I do not believe the doctrines which these young people preached,” he wrote to Weinberger, “but I do agree with you in thinking that the punishment meted out to them was excessive and should be modified. This sort of treatment is no way of dealing with the problem involved in these cases. I sincerely hope you will be successful in your attempts to have the cases reconsidered and that these foolish young Russians may be allowed to return to their homes.”
In his very diplomatic letter to the attorney general, Baker said that he believed the harsh sentences were a mistake because it made the defendants martyrs and helped to rally more radicals to their point of view. He said also that the case made the Justice Department look silly at a time when there were so many other crusades more worthy of the agency’s focus. Baker seemed particularly appalled by the idea of sending a twenty-one-year-old woman to jail for fifteen years just for passing out leaflets. It “seems a kind of monstrosity,” he wrote. “I do not know [the Russians] personally at all; I do not believe in their doctrines; I have no sympathy for their methods. But it seems to me that such a punishment for a group of foolish youths, scarcely more than of age (with one exception) for an act of political agitation which in peace times would have passed unnoticed, is excessive…. I believe that thousands of old-stock Americans like myself, to whom free speech is one of the most precious heritages of our institution, will feel just as I do about it.”
A week later Palmer answered Baker in a brief note that said the case must be carried forward “to completion.” It was not just about political agitation, not just about trying to interfere with the war, he said. It was also about a threat to overthrow America’s form of government. It simply could not be dismissed.
Palmer wouldn’t dare change the Justice Department’s position in the Abrams case, especially considering the pressure he was facing by October. Using words like “lethargic” and “negligent,” businessmen, legislators, and patriotic leagues were sending petitions to the government that derided the Justice Department for appearing to back off the war on radicals. Palmer, who was on the trail of food hoarders and conducting raids of sugar warehouses that month, was hardly passive. But still what impressive action was he taking against the rising threat of radicals? The petitions cited the evidence of such a threat: the formation of both the Communist Party of America and the Communist Labor Party, the nationwide steel strike, the bomb threats in Gary, Indiana, and other steel centers, the race riots, and the highly publicized exploits of anarchists like Steimer. What exactly was the Justice Department doing to prevent the overthrow of the government? Where was the attorney general?
In mid-October in the U.S. Senate, Miles Poindexter, a Republican from Washington who planned to run for president in 1920, accused the Wilson administration of being “soft on Bolshevism.” The onslaught of labor strikes was based “on a desire to overthrow our Government, destroy all authority, and establish Communism.” Pointing the finger at Palmer and Wilson, Poindexter lowered his voice and uttered a grave caveat: “Government will be overthrown when it ceases to defend itself.” In a move that was more about political maneuvering than protecting the nation from revolutionaries, he introduced a resolution that required Palmer to tell the Senate about any legal proceedings the Justice Department was taking for the arrest, punishment, and even deportation of the people in the U.S. who were attempting “to bring about the forcible overthrow of the Government.”
As naturally as a flower seeks the sun, a man seeking the presidency will turn his attention toward the resources he needs to succeed: public opinion, campaign funding, and legislative support. This was a motivating factor for Poindexter, the Republican, and also for Palmer, the Democrat—both presidential hopefuls. It was not surprising then that Palmer began to focus once again on radicals and the strategy of mass deportations. Considering that the government believed that close to 90 percent of suspected radicals in the U.S. were indeed aliens, Palmer closed in on immigrant radicals and used the Alien Act as his legal weapon.
The pressure on Palmer must have pleased Hoover, who was already on the task. In fact, he and his colleague William Flynn, the head of the BI, were as aggressive as the petitioners and congressmen in pressing Palmer to get tough on radicals. By October, using every resource ranging from military intelligence reports to Emma Goldman’s mailing list to files of private detectives shadowing striking workers, Hoover had an index of 150,000 names. He also employed translators to read alien publications and to pluck names and incendiary quotes for his ever-fattening files.
Hoover saw the deportation crusade as a way to please his superiors and to get some press attention. Toward that end, in October, he presented the government’s cases against the anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, both notorious among government officials and the American public. The BI had started its files on Berkman and Goldman as early as 1916 when Berkman, who already had served fourteen years in prison for having shot and wounded Henry Frick of the Carnegie Steel Company in 1892, started an anarchist publication called Blast. Goldman’s association with Berkman and her anti-government speeches gave her a file. And so when the war began in the spring of 1917, the BI sent agents to infiltrate their No-Conscription League and to report on their antiwar speeches. In June of 1917, a month after Congress enacted the Selective Service Act, both Goldman and Berkman were arrested for violating it and barely two weeks later were sentenced to two years in prison and a $10,000 fine. On the day of the sentences, the process began for the deportation of both as soon as they had served their time in prison. Although the fate of Berkman and Goldman was sealed long before the deportation hearings in October of 1919, the ambitious new head of the Radical Division gave an impressive presentation, even tying both of them to the assassination of William McKinley. Their writings and speeches had had a direct influence on the assassin, Leon Czolgosz, Hoover claimed.
Hoover also took a keen interest in Mollie Steimer, whom he was certain knew exactly who had printed the Soviet Anarchist Bulletin, which Hoover and other government officials had been targeting as dangerously influential in recruiting Bolshevists. Steimer was a perfect target for Hoover. Her name was frequently in the news. She was an alien. She was an anarchist. Thus she must be deported—with great fanfare. And so by early October, Hoover had put together a thick file on Steimer based on information from agents and reports coming in from local and federal agencies. Hoover’s agent who used the name “Winslow” had her on his list of most dangerous Bolshevists. “Lamb” knew of her activities in the Worker’s Defense Union. “Tucker” reported on the March raid during which Steimer was detained at Ellis Island. BI report No. 38495 noted that she had spent most of the summer in Stalton, New Jersey, with Jacob Abrams, among others, at a “well-known community of anarchists” known as the Ferrar Colony. Harry Weinberger had visited in June and Eleanor Fitzgerald was there quite often. Another file quoted verbatim the words of the Canal Street leaflets and contained excerpts of affidavits from Culhane, Cavanagh, Davis, Gegan, Ford, and others who attended the anteroom interrogation. It also contained a memo bemoaning the fact that the BI did not have a sample of Steimer’s handwriting—a detail noted several times in BI memos.
Hoover advised the immigration commissioner, Anthony Caminetti, that because Steimer was back in action and was clearly a dangerous alien, she must be deported. Thus on October 2, Caminetti approved a deportation warrant against Steimer with a $15,000 bail bond. The plan was to serve her with the warrant if she was not convicted on the disorderly conduct charge. The disorderly conduct hearing was set for October 7. If she was convicted, then they would wait until she served her prison sentence and then issue the deportation warrant. One way or another Hoover was determined to get Steimer off the streets. Soon she would be just another name in Hoover’s index. That was the plan. But when the BI agents arrived in court that day accompanied by immigration officials who carried the deportation warrant, they learned that Weinberger had gotten a postponement of the hearings and that Steimer was still out on the $500 bond.
The more aggressive Hoover and the feds were, the bolder Steimer became. The more they wanted her, the more she taunted them. On October 10, for example, Steimer attended a trial in New York State Court involving anarchists the Lusk Committee had exposed. When the judge entered the court, everyone stood up, as they are supposed to do—everyone except Steimer. Steimer was escorted out of the courtroom and into the judge’s chamber. After the judge found out who she was, he told her he would let her go so that she would not get another chance to look like a martyr and she would not be allowed in the courthouse except “as a prisoner.”
Three days later, Steimer, accompanied by another woman and a man, dropped three envelopes into a mailbox at the corner of 17th Street and Broadway. As the three walked away, Steimer’s shadows for the day from the Bomb Squad, Jerome Murphy and Louis Herman, approached the box and deposited some sort of marker that would allow them to later determine which letters were the suspicious three. Each of the envelopes, the Bomb Squad soon learned, contained an appeal to the steel strikers entitled “Arm Yourselves.” They were addressed to Sergeant Gegan, the head of the Bomb Squad, to the assistant district attorney who was prosecuting Steimer’s disorderly conduct case, and to the Lusk Committee’s star witness, Archibald Stevenson. Steimer apparently had no idea she had been watched—not until five days later, on October 18, when she was arrested on charges of distributing seditious literature in violation of Section 118 of the Postal Laws. She returned yet again to the Tombs, and on the 20th of October she was arraigned. Bail was set at $5,000.
By the time Weinberger was standing before the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court on October 21 and 22, presenting his arguments in Case No. 316 on behalf of Steimer, Abrams, Luchowsky, and Lipman, the “girl anarchist” had racked up quite a list of illegal activities. She had allegedly violated the Sedition Act, for which she had been released on $10,000 bail, had been charged with disorderly conduct, for which a $500 bail bond had freed her, and now was being held for violating federal postal laws with a $5,000 bail bond pending. On top of that, Caminetti and Hoover had prepared the deportation warrant, just in case she found someone to put up the $5,000 bond and was out on the streets again. It required a $15,000 bail bond. The New York City Bomb Squad, the New York City Police Department, the Bureau of Investigation, the Military Intelligence Division of the Army, the Lusk Committee, the American Protective League, the U.S. Secret Service had all been involved at one point or another in the quest to silence Mollie Steimer. Certainly spending so much time and expending so many resources—local, state, and federal agents, prosecutors, judges, and officials—the Justice Department would be able to put a stop to the rebellious behavior of this now twenty-two-year-old “slip of a girl.” Not necessarily.
On October 22, “the little Red,” as one magazine called her, was sitting in her cell on an upper tier at the Tombs planning a ruse. After writing two encoded notes, she stuck one in her right stocking and the other under the collar of her blouse. One read: “EWOAE VAHOAOW TOAER OMOAST NESER POAYDAE ROAROFOAU OYOA.” Soon two investigators from the Justice Department came to her cell. Steimer said nothing to them. Looking even smaller than her barely hundred-pound physique, she sat on the edge of her cot dangling her legs and avoiding eye contact with her visitors, as if she were a shy little girl. While they inspected her cell, Steimer mischievously removed the note in her stocking. Pretending to be secretive, she quickly moved her hands behind her back, where she tore up the note. The detectives pretended not to see the little pieces of paper falling on the floor behind and beneath the cot. They then asked her to move to a corner of the cell and face the wall, at which time they gathered the fragments of the note. Steimer then took the other note out of her blouse and began to eat it. Asked to spit it out, she obliged. When her visitors left they must have felt that they had accomplished far more than usual from such a routine inspection.
Later, they sent the shredded notes to police experts who discovered that by taking out all of the combinations “OA” and then reading the notes backward, they could see the message. The first, from her stocking, read “We have two more presents ready for you.” The second one, using the same code, accused the police of brutality, likely based on Steimer’s belief that her friend and co-defendant Jacob Schwartz had died as a result of rough treatment after his arrest in August of 1918.
On the 23rd, yet another drama unfolded. At her court hearing on the postal case, Weinberger persuaded the judge to apply the $10,000 bail from the 1918 case, which he had just appealed, to the current case. Thus, Mollie would be free to go. Attending the hearing, which began at 2 P.M., were Sergeant Gegan and BI agent Davis. Both men were stunned by the decision and caught without any way to stop Steimer from being free once again. Worried that she would prepare yet another handbill as soon as she could—an act they believed to be threatening and dangerous—they sent an urgent message to Ellis Island to deliver the deportation warrant before Steimer left the federal courthouse at Foley Square. They then tried to stall Steimer and Weinberger, who even asked them if they had any more warrants to serve on his client. An agent named Jones was on his way from Ellis Island carrying the much-desired warrant but didn’t arrive soon enough. And so that evening, at about 7 P.M., three policemen and Jones stopped Steimer in front of her apartment and served her with the warrant calling for her deportation. She spent the night of the 23rd at the Tombs and the next morning was sent to Ellis Island. As she would say years later, “I never saw the streets of New York anymore.”
The arrest clearly surprised Weinberger, who had walked out of Foley Square on the 23rd with a sense of accomplishment for having secured Steimer’s release with the bond from a previous case—one of the few satisfying moments in the Abrams case, if not the only one. He had no idea there was a deportation warrant prepared for Steimer. On the morning of the 24th he typed a note to his client that read “My dear Miss Steimer, We tried to find out last night where you were but without avail. We finally located you at Ellis Island, and understand that you are held on Fifteen Thousand Dollars bail. I am taking this up in Washington to have the bail reduced, and will advise you further. If there is anything you need, advise me, and I will forward the message. Sincerely yours.”
That same morning Steimer sent a handwritten note to Weinberger at his 261 Broadway office. At the time she didn’t know whether Weinberger even knew where she was. Her note exuded a tone of anxiety and urgency, very different from her usual air of confidence and control. “Dear Sir, I wish to have a personal interview with you on very important matters. Would you please come down to the Island to see me as soon as possible?”
Steimer was the only female prisoner on Ellis Island and because of that she was segregated from the other prisoners. She was not allowed to converse with them at mealtime and she was kept in solitary confinement. Since her last visit to the island prison, in March, a new commissioner had been appointed, one who believed in rigid rules and who ordered the guards to carry nightsticks. After just a few hours, the isolation was unnerving for Steimer. By the end of the second day, Steimer and eight male prisoners started a hunger strike to protest the conditions. Considering that Steimer was already so thin, Weinberger urged the immigration commissioner to release Steimer from solitary confinement. When he refused, Weinberger gave his letter to the New York Times and the New York Tribune. “Miss Steimer weighs now about 75 pounds and this may mean death to her,” he told the New York World. “And if it happens you and your department and the Secretary of Labor will have to share the responsibility.” He told the Times that she was ill and suffering from a fever.
The hunger strike lasted four days. It was cut short by Steimer’s conviction on the disorderly conduct charges resulting from throwing leaflets on Canal Street in September. By the last day of October, Steimer would be serving her first day of a six-month sentence at the workhouse on Blackwell’s Island in the East River. Not long after her arrival, she sent a handwritten letter to Weinberger telling him to stop working on her behalf. “I have just received your letter from which I can see how much energy you are devoting for my release—I appreciate that very much; however, it is my sincere wish that you should abandon all your activities on the disorderly conduct charge,” she wrote, adding that she believed that no sooner would she be out of jail than the government would find a way to throw her back in again. “I have therefore decided to remain in the Work House and by that I avoid much trouble for my people.” She signed the letter, “Yours for a world without oppressors.”