Jamestown no stranger to civil rights abuses
In 1920, federal agents burst into the home of Olga Jager, a Russian weaver in Pawtucket, and seized her while she was holding her 1-year-old baby.
They also apprehended Mathias Korman, a German brewer at the Narragansett Brewing Company, and searched his house, revealing subversive literature.
They arrested about 50 Rhode Island immigrants as part of a nationwide raid on 6,000 alien Communists and Socialists across 36 cities. The 1918 Immigration Act allowed deportation of immigrants for political views—belonging to any organization opposed to the U.S. government.
Swept up in the raids were laborers and trade unionists, including textile workers, mechanics and tailors. The dozens of Jamestown employees at the Newport Torpedo Station watched three Machinist Union coworkers removed, Newport residents Frank Cronk, Isaac Friedman, and Charles Bachunas. They were Norwegian and German immigrants and Communists. The union threatened to strike over the dismissals but ultimately protested instead.
The U.S. Department of Justice agent in Providence said, “when this raid is over, this district will be cleared of every radical leader on whom we have anything.”
Providence Mayor Joseph Gainer vowed he would ban “Red propagandists” from speaking in public “free speech does not mean license.” Habeas corpus also was suspended.
The raid was the brainchild of A. Mitchell Palmer, who was the U.S. attorney general and presidential hopeful, and his Rasputin, J. Edgar Hoover, soon to lead the FBI for almost 50 years. The government launched a massive campaign spurred by fear of the victorious socialist revolution in Russia, a surge in American labor militancy, a general strike in Seattle and bombings by Italian anarchists.
Today, the FBI admits the Palmer raids were, “a nightmare, marked by poor communications, planning and intelligence about who should be targeted and how many arrest warrants would be needed. The constitutionality of the entire operation was questioned, and Palmer and Hoover were roundly criticized.”
Prosecutors found thousands of warrants were illegal and released detainees for lack of evidence. Nevertheless, they deported 556 for advocating socialism.
Two decades later, during the 1936 Presidential electoral campaign, 500 Jamestown residents crammed into the Palace Theatre on Narragansett Avenue to hear Congressman Charles Risk. He warned that “a strong bond of sympathy exists between the Communists in the U.S. and the New Deal administration,” as evidenced by the dangerous people advising President Franklin D. Roosevelt, such as attorney Felix Frankfurter.
The Newport Mercury echoed, “New Deal Connected with Reds.” Frankfurter was both Jewish and an immigrant, a convenient target for America’s persistent dread of “alien radicals.”
Years earlier, he and another Harvard law professor, Zechariah Chafee, authored a devastating indictment of the Palmer raids of 1920. Their affidavit blocked the deportation of 18 Communist immigrants and ended Hoover’s scheme. Hoover, now director of the FBI, called Frankfurter “the most dangerous man in the United States” and a “disseminator of Bolshevik propaganda.” He soon became a U.S. Supreme Court justice. Chafee’s nephew and great-nephew both were elected senators from Rhode Island.
While charges of foreign subversion flew about the Palace Theatre, Socialist Labor Party organizer Arthur Hinckley organized a committee of unemployed workers in Depression-era Jamestown, most of them Portuguese. They claimed mistreatment by a corrupt public works project, whose road construction “is degrading enough without those in charge resorting to favoritism.”
Hinckley was a Clarke High School graduate and moved to High Street with his bride, Olga MacFarland. Both were Rhode Island electors for the Socialist Labor presidential candidates in 1932.
Olga Hinckley ran for general treasurer in 1934. In the Newport Mercury, she defended socialism’s superior educational and family support systems for the working class in the Soviet Union. Her husband later became a machinist at the torpedo station in Newport.
They protested the town “refusing their use of the town hall,” so the party met at their home. Likewise, Mrs. Hinckley challenged Newport’s denial of their right to assemble at public parks. A “Comrade Hull” distributed the socialist newspaper in Jamestown. Later, as the Communist Party became the leading socialist group, the Daily Worker was distributed throughout the town.
Arthur Hinckley joined the U.S. Navy during the war as a Seabee, moving to California after the war. His son, Earl, wrote to The Jamestown Press in 2006 asking about his family friend, Hannah Caswell, who had lived with Arthur’s parents in town.
In hindsight, violations of civil rights in America were a bipartisan affair. Democrats launched deportation raids in 1920 and tried for 20 years to deport the longshoreman’s president. In the late 1940s, a Democratic administration attempted to deport 100 Communists. The Eisenhower administration that followed continued the strategy.
