Alexander Mitchell Palmer (May 4, 1872 – May 11, 1936) was an American attorney and politician who served as the 50th United States attorney general from 1919 to 1921. He is best known for overseeing the Palmer Raids during the Red Scare of 1919–20.
He became a member of the Democratic Party and won election to the United States House of Representatives, serving from 1909 to 1915. During World War I, he served as Alien Property Custodian, taking charge of the seizure of enemy property.
President Woodrow Wilson appointed Palmer to be Attorney General in 1919. In reaction to domestic unrest, Palmer created the General Intelligence Unit and recruited J. Edgar Hoover to head the new organization. Beginning in November 1919, Palmer launched a series of raids that rounded up and deported numerous suspected radicals. Though the American public initially supported the raids, Palmer's raids earned backlash from civil rights activists and legal scholars. He received further backlash when a series of attacks on May Day 1920 that he had raised grave concerns about did not materialize.
Palmer sought the presidential nomination at the 1920 Democratic National Convention, but he faced strong opposition from labor groups and the nomination went to James M. Cox. He resumed the private practice of law and remained active in Democratic politics until his death in 1936.
Early life and education Palmer was born into a Quaker family near White Haven, Pennsylvania, in the small town of Moosehead, on May 4, 1872. He was educated in the public schools and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania's Moravian Parochial School. Palmer graduated from Swarthmore College in 1891. At Swarthmore, he was a member of the Pennsylvania Kappa chapter of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity. After graduation, he was appointed court stenographer of Pennsylvania's 43rd judicial district. He studied law at Lafayette College and George Washington University, and continued his studies with attorney John Brutzman Storm."A. Mitchell Palmer Biography." Biography.com. N.p., n.d. Web. June 28, 2016. <http://www.biography.com/people/a-mitchell-palmer-38048>
Career He was admitted to the Pennsylvania Bar Association in 1893, and began to practice in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, in partnership with Storm. Palmer also had various business interests, including serving on the board of directors of the Scranton Trust Company, Stroudsburg National Bank, International Boiler Company, Citizens' Gas Company, and Stroudsburg Water Company. He also became active in politics as a Democrat, to include membership on the executive committee of the Pennsylvania State Democratic Committee.
U.S. House of Representatives Palmer was elected as a Democrat to the 61st, 62nd, and 63rd Congresses and served from March 4, 1909, to March 3, 1915. From the start he won important party assignments, serving as vice-chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in his first term and managing the assignment of office space in his second term.
As a congressman, Palmer aligned himself with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, advocating lower tariffs despite the popularity of tariffs in his home district and state. In his second term, he won a seat on the Ways and Means Committee chaired by Oscar Underwood. There he was the principal author of the detailed tariff schedules that a Republican Senator denounced as "the most radical departure in the direction of free trade that has been proposed by any party during the last 70 years." He argued that tariffs profited business and had no benefit for workers. Pennsylvania industry, notably the large mining and manufacturing firms, bellicosely opposed his tariff scheme. As Palmer stated: "I have received my notice from the Bethlehem Steel Company. ... I am marked again for slaughter at their hands."
Palmer defeated Pennsylvania's incumbent Democratic National Committeeman, Colonel , by a resounding margin of 110 to 71 at the State Party's annual convention in 1912. Guffey had been a dominant force in state Democratic politics for a half-century; his defeat at the hands of Palmer was seen as a major victory for the Progressive-wing of the State Party, though Guffey's nephew, Joe, would go on to succeed Palmer as the state's National Committeeman in 1920. Palmer served as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in both 1912 and 1916. At the 1912 Convention, he played a key role in holding the Pennsylvania delegation together in voting for Woodrow Wilson.New York Times: "Nominates Palmer Attorney General," February 28, 1919, accessed January 8, 2010 Following the election of 1912, Palmer hoped to join Wilson's Cabinet as Attorney General. When he was offered Secretary of War instead, he declined citing his Quaker beliefs and heritage. He wrote to the President:
In his third congressional term Palmer chaired his party's caucus in the House of Representatives and served on the five-man executive committee that directed the Democratic Party's national affairs. Continuing to champion tariff reduction, he even accepted lower tariffs on the one economic sector he had tried to protect, the wool industry. He proposed to pay for any lost revenue with a graduated income tax targeted only at the rich.Coben, 77ff. The New York Times said he gave "the ablest speech of the day" when the House debated the measure in April 1913. He said:New York Times: "Democrat Upsets the Tariff 'Class'," April 26, 1913, accessed January 21, 2010; see also New York Times: "Fear Trust Benefit from a Low Tariff", January 12, 1913, accessed January 21, 2010
Palmer's work became part of the Underwood Tariff Act of 1913, signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson.
Other progressive legislation Palmer proposed included a bill outlawing the employment of workers below a certain age in quarries and requiring quarries to be inspected. He noted that recent Welsh victims of quarry accidents were "a high class of workman –not cheap foreign labor." Late in his congressional career, he sponsored a bill to promote women's suffrage. On behalf of the National Child Labor Committee he offered another to end child labor in most American mines and factories. Wilson found it constitutionally unsound and after the House voted 232 to 44 in favor on February 15, 1915,New York Times: "Child Labor Bill Passed," February 16, 1916, accessed January 20, 2010 he allowed it to die in the Senate. Nevertheless, Arthur Link has called it "a turning point in American constitutional history" because it attempted to establish for the first time "the use of the commerce power to justify almost any form of federal control over working conditions and wages."Arthur Link, Wilson: The New Freedom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956), pp. 255–257
In 1914, President Wilson persuaded him to give up his House seat and run instead for the United States Senate. The depression of that year highlighted his controversial tariff position. He came in last in the three-man race, behind second-place finisher Gifford Pinchot, who was later a Republican Governor and ran on the Progressive Party line, and incumbent Republican Boies Penrose.
Alien Property Custodian Leaving Congress in March 1915, Palmer decided to leave public office. When Wilson offered him a lifetime position on the Court of Claims, he at first accepted, but then arranged for a postponement so he could continue serving on the Democratic National Committee. His attachment to party affairs eventually forced him to withdraw from consideration for a judicial post. He sought other positions without success while continuing to fight for control of patronage positions in Pennsylvania. He worked for the Wilson campaign in the 1916 elections, but Pennsylvania voted Republican as usual.
Palmer proved out of step with the public mood when, after the sinking of the Lusitania in May 1915, he offered reporters his opinion that "the entire nation should not be asked to suffer" to avenge the deaths of passengers who had ignored warnings not to travel on ships that carried munitions.
Following the United States' entry into World War I in April 1917, Palmer volunteered, despite his Quaker background, to "carry a gun as a private" if necessary, or to "work in any capacity without compensation." He chaired his local draft board for a time, while Herbert Hoover, head of the new Food Administration refused to appoint him to a post in his agency. In October, he accepted an appointment from Wilson as Alien Property Custodian an office he held from October 22, 1917, until March 4, 1919. A wartime agency, the Custodian had responsibility for the seizure, administration, and sometimes the sale of enemy property in the United States. Palmer's background in law and banking qualified him for the position, along with his party loyalty and intimate knowledge of political patronage.
The size of the assets the Custodian controlled only became clear over the next year. Late in 1918, Palmer reported he was managing almost 30,000 trusts with assets worth $500 million. He estimated that another 9,000 trusts worth $300 million awaited evaluation. Many of the enterprises in question produced materials significant to the war effort, such as medicines, glycerin for explosives, charcoal for gas masks. Others ranged from mines to brewing to newspaper publishing. Palmer built a team of professionals with banking expertise as well as an investigative bureau to track down well-hidden assets. Below the top-level positions, he distributed jobs as patronage. For example, he appointed one of his fellow members of the Democratic National Committee to serve as counsel for a textile company and another the vice-president of a shipping line. Always thinking like a politician, he made sure his group's efforts were well publicized.
In September 1918, Palmer testified at hearings held by the U.S. Senate's Overman Committee that the United States Brewers Association (USBA) and the rest of the overwhelmingly GermanMittelman, 83 liquor industry harbored pro-German sentiments. He stated that "German brewers of America, in association with the United States Brewers' Association" had attempted "to buy a great newspaper" and "control the government of State and Nation", had generally been "unpatriotic", and had "pro-German sympathies".U.S. Senate, Brewing and Liquor Interests, v. 1, pp. 3–4
As Alien Property Custodian, Palmer campaigned successfully to have his powers to dispose of assets by sale increased to counter Germany's long-term plan to conquer the world by industrial expansion even after the war. Even after Germany's surrender, Palmer continued the campaign to make American industry independent of German ownership, with major sales in the metals industry in the spring of 1919, for example.New York Times: "Break German Hold on American Metal," April 8, 1919, accessed January 22, 2010 He offered his rationale in a speech to an audience of lawyers: "The war power is of necessity an inherent power in every sovereign nation. It is the power of self-preservation and that power has no limits other than the extent of the emergency."
Attorney general