The Palmer Raids

With chilling accuracy, The Palmer Raids mines yesterday’s headlines to reveal today’s critically endangered balance between the needs of national security and the promise of American freedom. A bomb, left in the mailbox of a prominent Georgia Senator, blew off the hands of a maid opening the mail. Over the course of the next several days, Manhattan postal officials intercepted 34 more identical mail bombs targeting influential figures such as J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. When another bomb exploded in front of the home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, the anarchists seemed to be the most likely, and in the eyes of the American public, convenient suspect.