The Deportations Delirium of Nineteen-Twenty (Louis F. Post, 1923)

What It Is

The Deportations Delirium of Nineteen-Twenty is the memoir and documentary indictment that Louis F. Post — Henry George's ablest lieutenant and the single-tax movement's most senior federal officeholder — wrote about the first American Red Scare. Post edited the Georgist weekly The Public (1898–1913); by 1920 he was Assistant Secretary of Labor, and because deportation was an administrative matter run through the Labor Department's Bureau of Immigration, the flood of Palmer-raid cases landed on his desk. The book is his first-hand account of what he found there and what he did about it, published in 1923 by the co-operative labor press Charles H. Kerr & Company with an Introduction by the civil-libertarian lawyer Moorfield Storey, first president of the NAACP.

Its thirty-seven chapters run from the December 1919 sailing of the "Soviet Ark" (the army transport Buford, which deported 249 Russian residents) through the nationwide January raids, Post's case-by-case review of the deportation backlog, the impeachment attempt his review provoked, and a closing summary; an appendix collects the constitutional texts he invokes throughout. Applying ordinary standards of evidence and due process, Post cancelled well over 1,500 warrants as unlawfully obtained — arrests without warrants, coerced confessions, denial of counsel — and then, testifying before the House Rules Committee on 7–8 May 1920, dismantled the impeachment case against him.

Full Text

The book is public domain (published 1923 by Charles H. Kerr & Company; the author died in 1928). The complete transcription — all thirty-seven chapters and the appendix, roughly 79,000 words — is hosted in this repository per the wiki's public-domain program:

sources/publicdomain/deportations-delirium.md

Transcribed programmatically from Harvard Library's digitization (Harvard Immigration to the United States, 1789–1930 collection; DRS object urn-3:FHCL:879814), whose page-level OCR was fetched through the item's IIIF manifest. Running heads and page numbers were removed and chapter headings restored from the book's own table of contents; because the OCR carries no paragraph markers, paragraphs were rejoined by a line-width heuristic and a few may be merged, and scattered OCR artifacts remain. An image-proofread pass is queued.

Why It Matters Here

• It is the primary record of a Georgist statesman carrying single-tax principle into high office. Post held that the same commitment to justice that made land monopoly intolerable made the arbitrary deportation of immigrants intolerable too — and he acted on it against a popular Attorney General and the threat of impeachment. For a movement often caricatured as a single-issue tax crusade, the book is documentary evidence of its broader progressive and civil-libertarian character (see the Single Tax narrative).
• It is a contemporaneous insider account of the Palmer Raids by the official at their administrative center — the counter-narrative to A. Mitchell Palmer's and a young J. Edgar Hoover's, written while the events were fresh and while Post's own conduct was still contested.
• It supplies the primary-source spine for the biography of Louis F. Post: the acting-secretary role, the roughly 1,600-case review with about 71% dismissed, and the failed Hoch impeachment.

Reception and Limits

The book is at once history and self-defense: as Storey notes in the Introduction, it is "in part a defence of his own course in the crisis." Post writes as an advocate and a participant, not a detached historian, and the reader should weigh his account of his adversaries' motives accordingly. Its facts, however — the warrant cancellations, the raid methods, the impeachment testimony — are drawn from the official record he administered, and the work has long been treated as a standard first-hand source on the deportations phase of the Red Scare (it was reissued in a 1970 Da Capo Press scholarly reprint).

See Also

• Louis F. Post — the author; George's ablest lieutenant and the movement's most senior officeholder
• Henry George — the thinker whose principles Post carried into office
• The Life of Henry George — a companion public-domain primary text in the wiki's reading room
• Single Tax narrative — the movement whose civil-libertarian character this book documents

Sources

1. Louis F. Post, The Deportations Delirium of Nineteen-Twenty: A Personal Narrative of an Historic Official Experience (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1923), with an Introduction by Moorfield Storey. Public-domain full text: in-repo transcription; provenance: Harvard Library digitization, DRS object urn-3:FHCL:879814 (catalog record). — used for the book's structure, thesis, and the Storey Introduction quotation.