Bisbee Deportation - Aftermath

Aftermath

From the day of the deportations until November 1917, the Citizens' Protective League ruled Bisbee. Operating from a building owned by the copper companies, its representatives interrogated residents about their political beliefs with respect to unions and the war and determined who could work or obtain a draft deferment. Sheriff Wheeler established guards at all entrances to Bisbee and Douglas. Anyone seeking to exit or enter the town over the next several months had to have a "passport" issued by Wheeler. Any adult male in town who was not known to the sheriff's men was brought before a secret sheriff's kangaroo court. Hundreds of citizens were tried and most of them were deported and threatened with lynching if they returned. Even long-time citizens of Bisbee were deported by this "court". Only a handful of deportees ever returned to Bisbee.

When ordered to cease these activities by the Arizona Attorney General, Wheeler fumbled to explain his actions. Asked what law supported his actions he answered: "I have no statute that I had in mind. Perhaps everything that I did wasn't legal....It became a question of 'Are you American, or are you not?'" He told the Attorney General: "I would repeat the operation any time I find my own people endangered by a mob composed of eighty percent aliens and enemies of my Government."

National press reaction to the Bisbee Deportation was muted. Although many newspapers carried stories about the event, most newspapers editorialized that the workers "must have" been violent and therefore "gotten what they deserved." Some major papers said that Sheriff Wheeler had gone too far, but declared that the sheriff should have imprisoned the miners rather than deported them. The New York Times criticized the violence on the part of the mine owners and suggested that mass arrests "on vagrancy charges" would have been appropriate. Former President Theodore Roosevelt announced his view that "no human being in his senses doubts that the men deported from Bisbee were bent on destruction and murder."

Deported citizens of Bisbee pleaded with President Wilson for protection and permission to return to their homes. In October 1917, Wilson appointed a commission of five individuals, led by Secretary of Labor William B. Wilson (with support from Assistant Secretary of Labor Felix Frankfurter), to investigate labor disputes in Arizona. The commission heard testimony during the first five days of November 1917. In its final report, issued on November 6, 1917, the commission denounced the Bisbee Deportation. "The deportation was wholly illegal and without authority in law, either State or Federal," the commissioners wrote.

On May 15, 1918, the U.S. Department of Justice ordered the arrest of 21 Phelps Dodge executives, Calumet and Arizona Co. executives, and several Bisbee and Cochise County elected leaders and law enforcement officers. The arrestees included Walter Douglas. Sheriff Wheeler was not arrested only because he was serving in France with the American Expeditionary Force during World War I. A pre-trial motion by the defense led a federal district court to release the 21 men on the grounds that no federal laws had been violated. The Justice Department appealed, but in United States v. Wheeler, 254 U.S. 281 (1920), Chief Justice Edward Douglass White wrote for an 8-to-1 majority that the U.S. Constitution did not empower the federal government to enforce the rights of the deportees. Rather it "necessarily assumed the continued possession by the states of the reserved power to deal with free residence, ingress and egress." Only in a case of "state discriminatory action" would the federal government have a role to play.

Arizona officials never initiated criminal proceedings in state court. Some workers filed civil suits, but in the first case the jury determined that the deportations represented good public policy and refused to grant relief. Most of the other suits were quietly dropped, although a few workers received payments in the range of $500 to $1,250.

The Bisbee deportations were later used as an argument in favor of stronger laws against unpopular speech. Such laws would empower the government to suppress disloyal speech and activity and remove the need for citizens groups to take actions the government could not. During World War I the federal government used the Sedition Act of 1918 to prosecute people for statements in opposition to the war or that even suggested a lack of enthusiasm for the war effort. At the end of the conflict, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and others advocated for a peacetime equivalent and used the Bisbee events as a justification. They claimed that the only reason people had taken the law into their own hands was that the government lacked the power to suppress radical sentiment directly. If the government were armed with appropriate legislation and the threat of long prison terms, private citizens would not feel the need to take the law into their own hands. Writing in 1920, Harvard Professor Zechariah Chafee mocked that view: "Doubtless some governmental action was required to protect pacifists and extreme radicals from mob violence, but incarceration for a period of twenty years seems a very queer kind of protection."

The later history of American deportations did not follow the precedent of Bisbee and Jerome, which were vigilante actions by private citizens. Instead, later deportations were authorized by law and executed by government agents, though their advisability as public policy and constitutionality were questioned by contemporaries and later analysts. The most notable include the deportation of supposed anarchists during the Red Scare of 1919-20; mass deportations of up to 2 million Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the 1930s; the relocation of 120,000 Japanese Americans to internment camps during World War II; the 1954 removal of approximately a million Mexican-Americans by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, in what is known as Operation Wetback.