US attacks on civil liberties nothing new

DURING the “Red Scare” that swept the US in the wake of Russia’s 1917 Bolshevik revolution, the justice department launched a cycle of raids against radicals and leftists.

The US attorney general, a once-celebrated progressive leader named A Mitchell Palmer, gave his name to this unfolding series of attacks against civil liberties.

Though initially supported by Congress, the courts, and the press, the 1919 Palmer raids revealed a darker side of the American psyche. They eventually provoked a national backlash, which inspired the formation of the American Civil Liberties Union; led to stirring dissenting opinions from Supreme Court Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr and Louis Brandeis; and ignited a political counter-movement determined to prevent similar civil liberties abuses in the future.