Following the Russian Revolution and a wave of domestic labor strikes in 1919, social panic swept across the United States. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and his ambitious young intelligence chief, J.
Edgar Hoover, leveraged this fear to expand the authority of the Department of Justice's Bureau of Investigation. To build cases against radical leftist organizations, foreign-born anarchists, and union organizers, the department deployed a vast network of undercover informants and agent provocateurs. Rather than merely observing fringe political meetings, these government operatives actively manipulated them.
Informants frequently volunteered for leadership positions within radical factions, authored inflammatory flyers, and encouraged members to adopt violent rhetoric. In several documented instances, DOJ agents helped organize logistics for meetings where bomb-making or government overthrow was discussed, essentially creating the illegal conspiracy from scratch. Once the trap was set, federal agents conducted massive warrantless dragnets known as the Palmer Raids.
Thousands of immigrants and political dissidents were arrested, held in brutal conditions without access to legal counsel, and targeted for summary deportation. While portrayed to the public as necessary actions against imminent revolution, later congressional hearings revealed that many of the supposed threats were manufactured or amplified by the very agents tasked with preventing them.