A Road Paved with Reds
On the evening of Saturday, December 20, 1919, cold winds swept New York Harbor as 249 leftist radicals waited on Ellis Island to board USS Burford. The Army transport was to carry the deportees, most of whom were not American citizens, to Soviet Russia. The Soviet state formed after the overthrow of the czar in a 1917 revolution led by the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, aka the Bolsheviks. Some deportees’ families, on hand to say goodbye, tried for one last moment with loved ones, but police officers pushed them back. Spectators included members of Congress, a crowd of journalists, and the youthful director of the U.S. Justice Department’s General Intelligence Division, also known as the Radical Division, John Edgar Hoover.
The event’s most famous deportee, Emma Goldman, was an anarchist, feminist, and advocate of free love. Unlike many of her companions, arrested the month before in raids Hoover had planned and executed, Goldman had been behind bars since 1918 for opposing United States participation in World War I and the draft. She also stood apart from the crowd on the wharf because she was a U.S. citizen, having immigrated from Russian-controlled Lithuania in 1885. Nonetheless, Hoover had dubbed Goldman “the Red Queen of Anarchy,” ordering her arrest under the 1918 Alien Act. She argued that citizenship precluded deportation, but Hoover persuaded fellow bureaucrats that because in 1908 the United States had revoked the citizenship of Goldman’s equally radical Russian-born spouse, Alexander Berkman, also among those being sent away, Goldman shared Berkman’s alien status. About to be exiled by her adopted country, the anarchist stood face to face with the bureaucrat who was deporting her.
“Haven’t I given you a square deal, Miss Goldman?” Hoover asked.
“Oh, I suppose you’ve given me as square a deal as you could,” the activist replied. “We shouldn’t expect from any person
