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ensured the deportation of Emma Goldman, known to modern moviegoers as the anarchist, critic of organized religion and campaigner for birth control featured in the film Reds . She was also an active proponent of free love, whose intercepted letters were, Edgar said, ‘spicy reading.’ As an extreme radical and scarlet woman, she was anathema to him.
    Getting Goldman deported was a tall order. She had been living in the United States for thirty-four years, since long before Edgar was born, and her father and former husband had become U.S. citizens. Edgar achieved it, however, following a massive probe, claiming that the husband’s citizenship had been obtained by fraud and that Goldman’s speeches inspired the assassin who killed President McKinley eighteen years earlier.
    Four days before Christmas 1919, at two o’clock in the morning, Edgar and Bureau Chief William Flynn boarded a cutter to Ellis Island, in New York Harbor. There they confronted Goldman, her lover, Alexander Berkman, and 247 other deportees, as they boarded the troopship that was to carry them to Russia. Edgar described the experience to the press the next day with relish, promising that ‘other Soviet Arks will sail for Europe, just as soon as it is necessary, to rid the country of dangerous radicals.’
    On New Year’s Day, Edgar had little time to celebrate his birthday. The countdown had started for the biggest Red Raid of all. On January 2, police and Bureau agents arrested some 10,000 people in twenty-three cities – again with brutality and violations of civil rights. Most of those seized turned out to be innocent and were eventually released.
    Attorney General Palmer and his department came under intense criticism. Louis Post, the Assistant Secretary of Laborwho ruled on the deportations, described the operation as a ‘gigantic and cruel hoax.’ Though Edgar was to claim he had ‘nothing to do with the raids,’ had ‘no responsibility,’ it is clear he and Ruch were the key men at headquarters on the night of the raids.
    Bureau orders, sent to field offices by Assistant Bureau Chief Frank Burke, told agents to ‘communicate by long distance to Mr Hoover any matters of vital importance which may arise during the course of the arrests.’ Burke, according to Agent James Savage, had long since ‘taken a shine to Hoover, taught him everything he knew, trained him and developed what talents he had.’
    Edgar used the Bureau to spy on lawyers who represented those arrested or worked to expose the abuse of civil rights. The investigation of the latter, he ordered, was to be ‘discreet and thorough.’ One of the targets was future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, then a distinguished Harvard Law School professor. Edgar was to keep tabs on Frankfurter for half a century, referring to him privately as ‘the most dangerous man in the United States.’ As late as 1961, when Frankfurter was on the Court, an old report surfaced to haunt Edgar. Dated 1921 and signed ‘J. E. Hoover,’ it identified Frankfurter as a ‘disseminator of Bolshevik propaganda.’ In the flap that followed, Edgar tried to say the report had been issued by someone else.
    â€˜Hoover lies when he denies responsibility for the Red Raids,’ Frankfurter told his law clerk Joseph Rauh. ‘He was in it – up to his ass.’ 1
    Edgar claimed he had only been carrying out policy as instructed by others. This was a man, John Lord O’Brian would recall, ‘willing to carry out orders at any time.’ Judge Anderson, who presided at the deportation hearings, had no time for such officials. ‘Talk about Americanization!’ he snorted. ‘It is the business of every American citizen who knows anything about Americanism to resign if given such instructions.’
    Neither Edgar nor Attorney General Palmer and the rest of his staff suffered the disgrace that should