Inside the First Red Scare: How the Palmer Raids Redefined “Radical”
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 18 December 2025
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, every country has moments it would rather not rewatch, and the Palmer Raids sit high on America’s list. What began as scattered bomb scares and loud political rhetoric slowly slid into mass arrests, borderless investigations, and a government convinced that civil liberties were optional when the stakes felt high enough. Larry Reed unpacks how fear, politics, and a restless Justice Department collided in nineteen twenty, turning a national anxiety spike into one of the clearest case studies of how the rule of law can warp under pressure.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.6 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:19.2 | And we return to our American stories, and now it's time for another rule of law story |
| 0:24.4 | as a part of our rule of law series, where we show you what happens when there's either |
| 0:29.7 | an absence or presence of the rule of law in our lives. |
| 0:34.3 | Here's our own Monty Montgomery with the story of a particularly dark time in our |
| 0:38.6 | nation's history. We value our rights. They're important. And for the most part, they're protected. |
| 0:48.2 | But on January 3rd, 1920, the rule of law in this country faced an unprecedented threat. |
| 0:56.3 | Here's Larry Reed, President Emeritus of the Foundation for Economic Education, or Fee, with more. It was on the morning of January |
| 1:03.9 | 3rd, 1920, that Americans woke up to discover just how little their own government regarded the cherished |
| 1:12.8 | Bill of Rights. It was during the night that some 4,000 of their fellow citizens were |
| 1:17.9 | rounded up and jailed for what amounted in most cases to no good reason at all and no due process |
| 1:25.3 | either. This was the worst night of the Palmer raids. |
| 1:30.3 | They're largely forgotten today, but unfortunately they shouldn't be. |
| 1:34.1 | They were a horrific, shameful episode in American history, one of the lowest moments for liberty |
| 1:40.0 | since King George III quartered troops in private homes. |
| 1:48.8 | The terror during the wee hours of January 3rd, 1920, |
| 1:52.2 | literally shocked and frightened Americans from coast to coast. |
| 1:57.7 | But to understand why the palmer raids occurred, |
| 2:00.5 | you have to understand the times in which they happened and know about |
| 2:01.4 | the other infractions on civil liberties that occurred in tandem with them. During this time, |
| 2:07.4 | roughly from the start of the First World War, or American entry, I should say, into World War I, |
... |
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