Just before midnight on June 1, 1919, an Italian immigrant and anarchist named Carlo Valdinoci walked up the steps of the home of US Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, a noted opponent of radical politics and uncontrolled European immigration. In his hands, Valdinoci held a briefcase containing a homemade bomb. Valdinoci likely became the first suicide bomber in American history that night, dying as his package exploded prematurely, ripping apart both himself and Palmer’s stately home. Within three hours of this unprecedented attack, other bombs exploded simultaneously in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and several other northeastern US cities, many at the homes or offices of prominent capitalists or political leaders. These attacks were quickly linked to an Italian anarchist group that had threatened American institutions. Amazingly, only three people died, including Valdinoci. Despite the relatively low impact of these attacks, they tapped into a strong undercurrent of xenophobia and fear: a culturally alien immigrant group suspected of radical political views and violent tendencies had struck spectacularly and widely. The gates, many believed, were undefended. More attacks seemed inevitable unless immigration was restricted – immediately, selectively, and severely.In the aftermath of the brutal coordinated assault on Paris, we have seen similar reactions. Although most of the Paris attackers appear to have been French nationals, Americans have turned against permitting the immigration of Syrian refugees who are themselves fleeing Daesh. Thirty-one governors have publically stated they will oppose any resettlement of Syrian refugees in their states, while several members of the Republican presidential field have criticized the Obama administration for going ahead with its asylum plans. Recent polling shows that over half of Americans now oppose accepting refugees, and the House of Representatives recently passed a bill with bi-partisan support and a veto-proof majority making the process for refugees to gain entry nearly impossible. A major Presidential candidate has discussed surveilling mosques and as a consequence has gained support rather than lost it. As the public and their representatives seem ever more willing to use the state to repress in the name of security, it is worth looking back at the aftermath of those 1919 bombings, when a political opportunist tried and failed to capitalize on xenophobic fear, leaving his career in ruins and only a legacy of oppression in his wake.
The 1919 bombs were delivered at a time of great tumult in the United States. World War I, and the country’s brief but transformative involvement in it, had ended; indeed, at the time of the bombings, President Wilson was still in Paris negotiating the Treaty of Versailles. Yet even as Wilson proposed a new world order based on international cooperation and oversight, many Americans wanted only to pull back from global affairs. The Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 remained in effect, punishing and marginalizing suspect political views. The Influenza Pandemic of 1918, which had killed more people than the war itself, was still subsiding; its transmission was often blamed on America’s rejection of its traditional isolation and exposure to European slums. America’s cities had, in recent decades, grown more and more like their European counterparts as new immigrants crowded into them. The Russian, Italian, Greek, and Jewish immigrants who had been streaming through Ellis Island between 1890 and 1919 were seen as culturally different from the older German, Scandinavian, and especially Irish immigrants who had begun to establish themselves in American society. Labor unrest in the United States, coupled with the recent Russian Revolution, gave rise to fears of class war and radical bolshevism. That many south and east European immigrants were active in labor unions did not escape the notice of conservative commentators of the day. In 1919, for example, a general and crippling steel strike was attacked broadly in the press as an example of the radicalism of recent immigrants.