Red Scare Scholarship, Class Conflict, and the Case of the Anarchist Union of Russian Workers, 1919

On Friday night, 7 November 1919, U.S. government personnel raided dozens of Union of Russian Workers (URW) locals in at least 18 cities and towns across eight states, arresting 1,182 Russian immigrants suspected of being anarchist members of the URW. Nearly all were beaten up and bloodied while agents ransacked the buildings, smashing windows, furniture, and stairwells. Orchestrated by the Justice Department via its Bureau of Investigation (BI), the objectives of the so-called Palmer raids, named after U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, were to round up everyone present, secure internal URW papers, and eventually deport as many members as possible to destroy the organization. Of the people detained during the raids that night, 439 were held for formal deportation hearings.¹

Following the 7 November raids, in the early hours of 21 December 1919, approximately 200 URW members were deported to Soviet Russia alongside roughly 35 unaffiliated Russian anarchists, notably the famous pair Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman.² Imprisoned at Ellis Island, the deportees were then placed on Coast Guard cutters, taking them down New York Harbor to the military camp Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island, where they boarded the USS Buford, labeled the “Soviet Ark” by an amused press. Present at the scene was the young J. Edgar Hoover, a key behind-the-scenes engineer of the events. The Buford passage remains the only mass deportation of political dissidents in American history.³

Yet an account of the Palmer raids from the perspective of their first target, the URW, has never been told, even though members documented the ordeal and events leading up to the raids in their New York–based Russian-language newspaper Khlieb i Volia,or Bread and Freedom, a title inspired by the writings of anarchist Peter Kropotkin. The newspaper’s last editor, L. Lipotkin, also wrote an account of the affair in an unpublished book-length manuscript on Russian anarchism in North America.⁴ With the use of these sources, which supplement existing historiographical accounts of the Palmer raids and more broadly the Red Scare of 1917–20, this article relays a more comprehensive history of the URW and events surrounding the group’s suppression in 1919.

Drawing on this material enables one to challenge the consensus of scholarly opinion, which dismisses the URW as a social club and denies the group its political character.⁵ Among numerous examples is Robert K. Murray’s influential study on the Red Scare of 1919 that claimed the URW members “belonged to the organization for almost every conceivable reason except to promote revolution.”⁶ A more subtle assertion is that the URW abandoned its revolutionary principles in 1917: for example, Christopher M. Finan writes that the URW “had declared its belief in revolution when it was founded in 1907, but by 1919 it had largely become a social club whose members were unaware of its founding principles.”⁷ Such claims are made to strengthen arguments against the abuses of the Palmer raids in the defense of civil rights: the more the URW’s political essence can be denied, the more illegitimate the raids appear to be.

However, from reading URW newspapers, memoirs, and other sources, it is clear that the group was, from beginning to end, primarily a revolutionary anarchist organization that actively resisted the anti-Red campaign of 1919.⁸ My intention here is not to justify the repression of radicals but to illustrate that the Red Scare, at least in the case of the URW, was not simply hype lacking in any substance. By highlighting the URW’s radical politics and substantial organizing, this article argues that the group has been routinely misinterpreted in Red Scare and labor historiography over the last century in such a way that obscures the group’s connections to both the North American labor and transnational anarchist movements.

Unaided by a review of URW sources, the historiography depicts members as unfortunate migrants who, through no fault of their own, were caught up in the vortex of a society, or at least...