The Palmer Raids: A Theatrical Construction
For all of the 20th century and a good part of the 19th it was assumed that radical theater served subversive ends. Think of Bertolt Brecht, breaching the fourth wall in order to get his hands on the capitalist state. Or Julian Beck and Judith Malina, putting their bodies on the line for free love. Or little Alfred Jarry, inventing absurdism basically just to piss off his schoolmaster.
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The Palmer Raids: A Theatrical Construction is a 90-minute mix of text and movement that tells the true story of our country’s first great Red scare. In 1919–not coincidentally, two years after the Russian Revolution, a year after the end of World War I, and square in the middle of the struggle for workers’ rights in America–somebody sent 36 package bombs to some of the nation’s biggest Brahmins and fattest cats. Included on the mailing list were J.P. Morgan, J.D. Rockefeller, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and the attorney general at the time, A. Mitchell Palmer. Most of the bombs were intercepted (some, interestingly enough, for lack of proper postage), and there were only two casualties, but this act of terrorism lit a fire under Attorney General Palmer–aka the “Fighting Quaker”–who initiated a crusade against the Bolsheviks, anarchists, and labor agitators he believed were conspiring to overthrow American democracy. With the help of his young special assistant, J. Edgar Hoover, Palmer carried out a series of raids that netted thousands of real and suspected dissidents, many of whom were aliens and thus vulnerable to deportation. Indeed, he shipped them back by the boatload. Convinced that the situation demanded extreme measures, Palmer never hesitated to trash his captives’ civil rights. His namesake raids were often carried out with illegal warrants, or none at all, based on trumped-up charges–or none at all. Many of his victims were held for long periods without recourse or trial.
We hear from an array of interested parties, ranging from an anarchist who blew himself up trying to kill Palmer to Palmer’s Washington neighbor Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But the show’s coherence depends on the testimony of four major figures: Emma Goldman, the great fire-breathing anarchist whom Palmer succeeded in deporting to the Soviet Union; Louis F. Post, an assistant secretary of labor who distinguished himself by refusing to cave in to Palmer’s demands to rubber-stamp deportations; Horace Peters, an incredible shlimazel (could he have been real?) who became one of Palmer’s victims because he had an amateur interest in America’s interurban highway system; and of course Palmer himself.
