Congressman Calls for Impeachment of Secretary of Labor for Not Deportating Radicals
U.S. Rep. Homer Hock of Kansas on this day called for his impeachment of Louis F. Post, Assistant Secretary of Labor, because he had opposed the mass deportation of suspected radicals during the 1919–1920 “Red Scare.”
As Commissioner of Immigration in President Woodrow Wilson’s administration, Post was one of the few government officials to oppose the anti-radical, anti-labor hysteria of the WWI years and the later Red Scare. See the infamous Palmer Raids on November 7, 1919, and January 2, 1920. In April 1920, for example, he reviewed 1,600 deportation cases and dismissed 71 percent of them. He also ruled that aliens were entitled to deportation hearings, which had not been the policy of the Bureau of Immigration until he arrived.
See Post’s book The Deportation Delerium of 1920 (below).
Little has been written about Louis F. Post, but he stands as perhaps the one and only civil liberties heroes in the Wilson administration.
Read Post’s own account: Louis F. Post, The Deportations Delirium of Nineteen-Twenty: A Personal Narrative of an Historic Official Experience (1923); in paperback (2003)
Read the 1920 ACLU pamphlet “Seeing Red” on the post-WW I hysteria: http://www.marxists.org/history/usa/groups/aclu/1920/0800-nelles-civilliberty.pdf
Learn about “America’s Forgotten History of Illegal Deportations” here
Read about the Palmer Raids and their Legacy: Christopher M. Finan, From the Palmer Raids to the Patriot Act: A History of the Fight for Free Speech in America (2007)
Read: Paul L. Murphy, World War I and the Origins of Civil Liberties in the United States (1979)