J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets by Curt Gentry Page B

Palmer’s career.” 5 And not necessarily in that order. A. Mitchell Palmer’s one great obsession was to become president of the United States.
    The new BI chief, William J. Flynn, was a former head of the Secret Service. He was also, Palmer noted in announcing his appointment, the country’s leading “anarchist chaser”: “He knows all the men of that class. He can pretty nearly call them by name.” 6
    To this trio would soon be added a fourth and, in time, much more famous member.
    One of John Lord O’Brian’s last tasks before leaving Justice had been to cut the department’s staffing back to prewar size. But now, armed with a new menace, Palmer saw an opportunity to restore the cuts. On June 13 he asked Congress for an emergency supplemental appropriation of $500,000, bringing the department’s yearly budget up to $2 million.
    When the House balked at the increase, Palmer and Garvan went to the Senate.
    Senator Smoot of Utah: “Do you think that if we increased this to $2,000,000 you could discover one bomb thrower—just get one?”
    Mr. Garvan: “I can try; that’s all I can say.”
    Palmer, however, had a hole card. He revealed that the recent bombings were part of a vast conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States. Not only that, but the danger was imminent. He told the senators, “We have received so many notices and got so much information that it has almost come to be accepted as fact that on a certain day, which we have been advised of, there will be another [attempt] to rise up and destroy the government at one fell swoop.” 7 Privately Palmer leaked the information that the date of the attempted revolution would be July 4.
    He got the money.
    On June 17, 1919, the attorney general held an all-day meeting with Garvan, Flynn, and their assistants. The best way to deal with the new menace, it wasdecided, would be a mass roundup and deportation of alien radicals.
    There were several problems with this decision. Not all the radicals were aliens; many were either native-born or naturalized Americans. And the Justice Department had no authority whatsoever when it came to deportations, this being the province of the Immigration Department, which was under the secretary of labor. Moreover, since the expiration of the Espionage Act at the end of the war, there was no federal law which prohibited being a Socialist, Communist, IWW member, or anarchist.
    Despite these slight obstacles, the group began making secret plans for the raids.
    As in any war, up-to-date intelligence on the enemy was essential. It was decided that the additional funds Congress had appropriated would be used to set up a General Intelligence Division (GID) in the Justice Department, its function to collect and correlate information on radicals supplied by the Bureau of Investigation, other governmental agencies, the military, local police, and the private sector.
    Garvan had just the man in mind to head the new division—the twenty-four-year-old John Edgar Hoover, a two-year veteran of the Justice Department, whom Garvan had noticed while he was heading a unit in Enemy Alien Registration.
    On July 2, pressed by reporters as to what progress had been made in the bombing investigations, BI Chief Flynn, apparently still fighting the last war, announced that the men who had committed these vile outrages were “connected with Russian Bolshevism, aided by Hun money.” 8 In truth, the Bureau still didn’t know who the bombers were.
    July 4 came and passed, with the biggest explosion that of fireworks. But Palmer hinted at later dates, and the press built upon the hysteria, seeing portents of revolution in everything from the recent race riots in Washington and Chicago, which had left hundreds wounded and scores dead, to the “labor unrest” which had erupted in almost every major industry. Since 1914 the cost of living had doubled, but during that same five-year period wages had dropped 14 percent, while with the war’s