Ed Helms

It's like if you were trying to quit cigarettes, but you had to quit.

You had to, like, use a pack of cigarettes to do your online banking.

We just got through the first wave of the Palmer raids.

We're about to jump into the second.

With the encouragement of Palmer in January of 1920 came the mother of all raids.

Federal, state and local agents swept through more than 30 cities, arresting between three and ten thousand people.

Again, mostly without warrants.

And again, jail cells overflowed.

The mistreatment continued and due process eroded even further.

Palmer claimed that these arrests were obviously critical and just the tip of the iceberg, that there were 300,000 communists still out there they needed to chase down.

But by now...

Fortunately, even his own government was starting to recoil from this stuff.

Acting Labor Secretary Louis Post reviewed the deportation files and found most of them completely baseless, overturning more than 70 percent of the 1600 cases.

By spring of 1920, the horror stories of beatings and illegal detentions were headline news and the tide was turning against the raids.

And then came the nail in Palmer's professional coffin.

He had been warning and using this as justification the whole time that on May 1st, 1920, the communists across the country would rise up, torch cities and topple the government.

So on that day –

The country braced itself like for a revolution.

Police nationwide were on high alert.

Troops were on standby.