“The holidays rather slipped by on me unawares this year because it was just at that time that we were busiest on our preparations for the big ‘Red” raids which came off the day after New Years. Since then until today we have been busy day and night examining the prisoners and getting the evidence in shape. When you heard from me last I was in the Pittsburgh district in the field myself collecting evidence. About the first of December my friend Creighton, one of the assistant attorney generals, came back to Washington from Indianapolis, where he had been helping settled the coal strike, and one of the first things he did was to have me called to Washington. He was given charge of the situation in the middle west and brought me out here with him. We were here for about two weeks before Christmas and then went back to Washington for several days. We came back to Chicago the day before New Years and will probably be here another week. After that I expect I will finally get on to New York although you can never count on much of anything in this game. It is certainly very interesting so far….

The ”Red Raids” of November 1919 and January 1920 - the postwar period of the First Red Scare after the Russian Revolution - were conducted by the US Department of Justice (and its Bureau of Investigation, with a General Intelligence Division headed by 25 year-old J. Edgar Hoover), under the direction of U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, to capture and arrest Socialists, Anarchists and Communists (especially Jewish and Italian immigrants who were suspected of terrorist activity), and deport them from the United States. 6,000 people were arrested in 36 cities, though only some 550 “aliens” were deported.

Vincent P. Creighton was a Special Agent of the Bureau of Investigation, as well as an Assistant Attorney General, who played an important role in the interrogation and deportation of Emma Goldman, the best-known woman Anarchist revolutionary of her day.