“This amendment you teach — it protects us when authorities ask questions about missing men, ya?”
When, not if. The grammar of experience.
That question comes early in Book Three of The Promise Trilogy, asked by a Russian immigrant studying for his citizenship exam at the Henry Street Settlement in the fall of 1919. His teacher, Lucie Santoro, writes the Fourth Amendment on the blackboard while five chairs in her classroom sit empty — because the constitutional protections she’s teaching haven’t held for the men who used to sit in them.
It’s a fictional scene. The empty chairs are not.
In the fall of 1919, the United States government launched a coordinated campaign to identify, arrest, and deport immigrants suspected of radical political beliefs. The Palmer Raids — named for Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer — would eventually sweep through more than thirty cities, targeting union organizers, socialists, anarchists, and anyone whose politics could be described as dangerously foreign. In practice, the definition of “dangerous” proved remarkably elastic. Speaking Russian was suspicious. Attending a meeting was evidence. Reading the wrong newspaper was enough.
But the raids didn’t arrive all at once. They were preceded by months of surveillance so quiet that most of the people being watched didn’t know it until the knock came.
What struck me most in my research wasn’t the midnight arrests or the deportation ships — I expected those. What I didn’t expect was how thoroughly the federal government used education as a surveillance tool. Citizenship classes, literacy programs, night schools — the very institutions designed to help immigrants become Americans were infiltrated by Bureau of Immigration agents looking for evidence of radical thinking. A man who learned enough English to organize his coworkers was, in the government’s eyes, a man who had learned too much.
Federal agents attended citizenship classes. They sat in the back rows and took notes — not on the teaching, but on the students. Who asked questions about labor law. Who could read well enough to understand a union contract. Who spoke to whom after class, and in what language. The information went into files, and the files went into folders, and the folders went into the machinery that would produce arrest warrants, deportation orders, and the particular terror of a knock on the door at four in the morning.
The settlement houses where these classes took place — Henry Street, Hull House, and hundreds of others — were built on the principle that education was a public good. Lillian Wald had founded Henry Street specifically to serve immigrant families, and her citizenship classes were among the most respected in the city. But the same classrooms that taught immigrants their rights also made those immigrants visible to a government that increasingly viewed those rights as threats.
The surveillance followed a pattern that Wald recognized from experience. In the novel, she describes it to Lucie in terms that carry the precision of someone who has watched the machinery operate before: incentives first — funding, credentials, access — the kind of offers that make cooperation look like opportunity. When incentives fail, isolation: discrediting the teacher, pressuring the institution, making the work itself look dangerous. And when isolation fails, removal. Students first. Then the teacher. Then the program.
That scene is fiction. The pattern is not.
On December 21, 1919, the transport ship Buford sailed from New York Harbor carrying 249 deportees to Russia. The press called it the “Soviet Ark.” Among those aboard were Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman — genuine political radicals who had spent decades advocating for anarchism and labor reform. But many others on the ship had committed no crime beyond holding political opinions the government found inconvenient, or attending meetings that federal agents had decided were subversive, or simply being foreign-born in a country that had decided foreignness itself was a threat.
The Buford was supposed to be a warning. Instead, it became a symbol of how easily the machinery of deportation could be turned against anyone — not just radicals, but workers, students, teachers, neighbors. The man studying English on Tuesday could be on a list by Wednesday and on a ship by December.
In the novel, one of Lucie’s students tells her he’s been placed on the Buford list. His crime: learning English well enough to organize his coworkers. He asks her what he should pack.
What gets lost in the history of the Palmer Raids — what I wanted the novel to recover — is the cost to the people who weren’t deported but who lived inside the surveillance anyway. The teacher who kept teaching constitutional rights while federal agents took notes in her classroom. The settlement house director who answered agents’ questions with careful precision, giving them nothing useful while knowing they’d be back. The student who walked past the man with the notebook on his way to class and came anyway, because the citizenship exam was in three weeks and he had a daughter who needed him to be an American.
The women of the auxiliary kept their records in separate notebooks in separate kitchens across five neighborhoods — looking like nothing more than household bookkeeping. Not because they were paranoid, but because they had watched what happened to centralized records when federal agents came through the door.
The courage in 1919 wasn’t always dramatic. Often it was the decision to show up — to the classroom, to the sewing circle, to the attic meeting — knowing that showing up was being recorded, and showing up anyway, because the alternative was to let the fear do what the government couldn’t quite manage on its own: make people disappear from each other’s lives without anyone having to sign a deportation order.
I didn’t set out to write a novel about government surveillance. I set out to write about a woman who teaches immigrants their constitutional rights and discovers that the act of teaching is itself considered subversive. But you can’t write about 1919 without writing about the apparatus that decided education was dangerous — and you can’t write about that apparatus without recognizing how familiar its logic remains.
The Palmer Raids ended. Palmer himself was discredited when his predictions of a massive May Day revolution in 1920 failed to materialize. The deportations slowed. The surveillance, however, didn’t disappear — it evolved, changed names, found new targets. The cost of becoming American has always included the risk that the country you’re trying to join might decide you’re joining it wrong.
In The Promise Trilogy, Lucie stands at a blackboard with chalk in her hand and teaches the Fourth Amendment to men who need it to be true. That’s the bravest thing she does in three books — not because the teaching is dangerous, but because she keeps doing it after she learns that it is.