Alexander Mitchell Palmer - Attorney General

Attorney General

When President Wilson needed to fill the position of Attorney General at the start of 1919, party officials, including Palmer's colleagues on the Democratic National Committee and many recipients of his patronage during his tenure as Alien Property Custodian, backed him against other candidates with stronger legal credentials. They argued that the South was over-represented in the Cabinet and that Palmer's political intelligence was critical. Joseph Tumulty, the President's private secretary, advised the President that the office had "great power politically. We should not trust it to anyone who is not heart and soul with us." He pressed the President several times. He cabled Wilson in Paris: "Recognition of Palmer ...would be most helpful and cheering to young men of the party....You will make no mistake if appointment is made. It will give us all heart and new courage. Party know of need in tonic like this." He called Palmer "young, militant, progressive and fearless." The President sent Palmer's nomination to the Senate on February 27, 1919 and Palmer took office as a recess appointment on March 5.

Palmer served as Attorney General from March 5, 1919, until March 4, 1921. Before assuming office, he had opposed the American Protective League (APL), an organization of private citizens that conducted numerous raids and surveillance activities aimed at those who failed to register for the draft and immigrants of German ancestry who were suspected of sympathies for Germany. One of Palmer's first acts was to release 10,000 aliens of German ancestry who had been taken into government custody during World War I. He stopped accepting intelligence information gathered by the APL. Conversely, he refused to share information in his APL-provided files when Ohio Governor James M. Cox requested it. He called the APL materials "gossip, hearsay information, conclusions, and inferences" and added that "information of this character could not be used without danger of doing serious wrong to individuals who were probably innocent." In March 1919, when some in Congress and the press were urging him to reinstate the Justice Department's wartime relationship with the APL, he told reporters that "its operation in any community constitutes a grave menace."