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A Mitchell Palmer was born near White Haven, Pennsylvania on May 4, 1872. He graduated from Swarthmore College in 1891, and became the court stenographer for Pennsylvania's 43rd judicial district. He studied law at Lafayette College and George Washington University, and continued his study of law under attorney John Brutzman Storm. Palmer was admitted to the bar in 1893, and joined Storm in the practice of law in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania.
Palmer became active in politics with the Democratic Party and rose to a position as a member of the executive committee of the Pennsylvania State Democratic Committee. He was elected to the House of Representatives as a Democrat and was a member of the 61st, 62nd, and 63rd Congresses, serving from March 4, 1909, to March 3, 1915. While a congressman, he served as vice-chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in his first term and managing the assignment of office space in his second term.
Palmer supported the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, and also supported lower tariffs, even though this was not the prevailing view in his home state. In his second term, he became a member of the Ways and Means Committee and as a member of that committee he authored a controversial detailed tariff schedules which called for a significant lowering of tariffs. Palmer took the view that tariffs profited business but had no benefit for workers. In his home state he was opposed by Pennsylvania mining and manufacturing firms. Palmer seemed unconcerned about this.
Palmer served as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in both 1912 and 1916. At the 1912 Convention, he played a key role in delivering the Pennsylvania delegation for Woodrow Wilson and following Wilson's victory in the election of 1912, Wilson offered Palmer a position in his Cabinet as Secretary of War. Palmer declined the offer, because of his religion. He was a practicing Quaker and in a letter to the President, he wrote:
"As a Quaker War Secretary, I should consider myself a living illustration of a horrible incongruity. In case our country should come into armed conflict with any other, I would go as far as any man in her defense; but I cannot, without violating every tradition of my people and going against every instinct of my nature, planted there by heredity, environment and training, sit down in cold blood in an executive position and use such talents as I possess to the work of preparing for such a conflict."
He remained in Congress and continued to fight for tariff reduction, and he contributed to the Underwood Tariff Act of 1913. He supported other progressive positions, including outlawing the employment of under-age workers in rock quarries. He also sponsored a bill to promote women's suffrage and another to end child labor in most American mines and factories. The House voted 232 to 44 in favor of the bill on February 15, 1915, but the bill did not get through the Senate.
In 1914, Wilson convinced Palmer to give up his House seat and run instead for the United States Senate. Palmer finished last in the three-man race, likely because of his support for tariff reduction, something very unpopular in his home state.
In March 1915, Wilson offered Palmer a lifetime position on the Court of Claims, which Palmer accepted, but asked that the appointment be delayed so that he could continue serving on the Democratic National Committee. He worked for the Wilson in the 1916 elections, but Pennsylvania voted Republican. Ultimately Palmer did not take the position.
Following the United States' entry into World War I in April 1917, Palmer chaired his local draft board and in October, he accepted an appointment from Wilson as Alien Property Custodian an office he held from October 22, 1917, until March 4, 1919. In this position he had responsibility for the seizure, administration, and disposition of enemy property in the United States. In this position Palmer was responsible for almost 30,000 trusts with assets worth $500 million. Some of the materials seized were used in the war effort, such as medicines, glycerin for explosives, and charcoal for gas masks. He distributed jobs in the management of these assets as patronage to fellow Democrats.
In 1919 President Wilson needed to fill the position of Attorney General and he selected Palmer for the job. Wilson sent Palmer's nomination to the Senate on February 27, 1919, and Palmer took office as a recess appointment on March 5. He served as Attorney General from March 5, 1919 until March 4, 1921. As Attorney-General, Palmer is best known for "The Palmer Raids". These occurred as part of what became known as "the Red Scare", the term given to fear communist radicals in the United States immediately following World War I.
Labor unrest and strikes became more prevalent after the war and race riots also occurred in over 30 US cities. Two sets of bombings took place in April and June 1919, including an attack on Palmer's home. A first booby-trap bomb directed at assassinating Palmer was mailed by anarchists but was intercepted and defused. Two months later, Palmer and his family narrowly escaped death when an anarchist exploded a bomb on their porch. The bomb detonated early, killing the bomber. In total, there were 36 dynamite-filled bombs mailed to other leading figures in April of 1919, including justice officials, newspaper editors and businessmen, including John D. Rockefeller.
Palmer initially a series of raids to locate the source of the bombings. A raid in July 1919 against a very small anarchist group in Buffalo failed when a federal judge tossed out his case. In August, Palmer organized the General Intelligence Unit within the Department of Justice and recruited J. Edgar Hoover, a 24-year-old law school graduate who had worked in the Justice Department's Enemy Alien Bureau, to head up the new unit. On November 17, 1919, Palmer told the senate about the threat anarchists and Bolsheviks posed to the government. He launched a campaign against radicals and in January 1920, he instituted a series of police actions known as the Palmer Raids. Federal agents supported by local police rounded up large groups of suspected radicals, often based on membership in a political group rather than any actions of the group.
Assistant Secretary of Labor Louis Freeland Post refused to approve many of the deportations called for by Palmer, limiting the number to 556. At a Cabinet meeting in April 1920, Palmer called on Secretary of Labor William B. Wilson to fire Post, but Secretary Wilson would not support this. The President ended the meeting by telling Palmer that he should "not let this country see red." Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, later wrote that Palmer "was seeing red behind every bush."
The American public initially supported the raids, while some civil rights activists and legal scholars raised protests. Officials at the Department of Labor, especially Louis Freeland Post, opposed Palmer's campaign, citing the rule of law in opposition to it. Palmer was called before Congress and testified for two days in defense of his position. The press generally supported Louis Post's position on the issue and were critical of Palmer.
In the fall of 1919 strikes were threatened in the railroad and coal industries. These two industries faced disruption as the presidential election year of 1920 approached. The railroad union postponed its strike but the United Mine Workers under John L. Lewis went ahead with theirs. Palmer invoked the Lever Act, a wartime measure that made it a crime to interfere with the production or transportation of necessities. The law was passed to punish hoarding and profiteering, and had never been used against a union. Palmer obtained an injunction on October 31 and 400,000 coal workers struck the next day. Both Palmer and the mine owners attempted to portray the strikers as communists and Bolsheviks. Lewis, faced criminal charges, and withdrew his strike call, in the face of this pressure, but many strikers ignored his action. As the strike dragged on into its third week, coal supplies were running low and public sentiment was against the striking miners. However Secretary of Labor William B. Wilson opposed Palmer's obtaining an injunction and the rift between the Attorney General and the Secretary of Labor led to dysfunction in the cabinet.
Palmer's General Intelligence Division (GID), headed by J. Edgar Hoover, had become a storehouse of information about radicals. It had infiltrated a number of organizations and had interrogated thousands of those arrested and seized documents and publications. Agents in the GID told Palmer that they had evidence of plans for an attempted overthrow of the U.S. government on May Day 1920, even though there was dubious support for this assertion. With Palmer's backing, Hoover warned the nation to expect the worst and Palmer told the nation on April 29, 1920, that American radicals were "in direct connection" with European counterparts. Cities prepared their police forces and some states mobilized their militias. But May Day came and went without incident. In response, the media mocked Palmer and he lost credibility as a result.
In 1920 Palmer sought the Democratic Party's nomination for President. The field of potential candidates was crowded, in part because Wilson held on to the thin hope of seeking a third term, despite having significant health issues that made this a near impossibility. During the campaign, Palmer told his audiences: "I am myself an American and I love to preach my doctrine before undiluted one hundred percent Americans, because my platform is, in a word, undiluted Americanism and undying loyalty to the republic."
During the campaign, Palmer won delegates in the Michigan and Georgia primaries but his support did not extend much beyond that. He ran a respectable third until his support collapsed on the convention's 39th ballot and the nomination shortly thereafter went to Ohio Governor James Cox.
In 1921, in the closing weeks of the Wilson administration, Palmer asked the President to pardon imprisoned Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs, whose health was said to be failing. Debs had been arrested and convicted for speaking out against the draft during the war. Palmer suggested to Wilson that the birthday of President Abraham Lincoln was an appropriate day for the announcement. Wilson was adamantly opposed to any sort of leniency for Debs and he wrote "Denied" across Debs' clemency petition.
After retiring from government service in March 1921, Palmer went into the private practice of law and continued to act the role of a senior statesman of the Democratic Party. His wife Roberta Dixon died on January 4, 1922, and he married Margaret Fallon Burrall in 1923. Palmer backed Governor Al Smith of New York for the Democratic nomination in 1928. He served on the Platform Committee of the 1932 Democratic National Convention and authored the original draft of the platform. In the platform, he supported forgiving the debts of America's allies in World War I.
Palmer died on May 11, 1936, at Emergency Hospital in Washington, D.C., from cardiac complications following an appendectomy two weeks earlier. He was buried at Laurelwood Cemetery in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania.