The Web : $b The Authorized History of the American Protective LeagueHough, Emerson
History
The Web : $b The Authorized History of the American Protective League
Hough, Emerson
American Protective League; Propaganda, German; World War, 1914-1918 -- Secret service -- United States
The seventh raid was August 6, 1918—the great slacker raid on Shibe
Park, at the time when there was a crowd of 8,000 men gathered to
witness the Jack Thompson-Sam Langford prize fight. There were
twenty agents of D. J., two hundred A. P. L. members and one hundred
Philadelphia police. They examined over 2,000 men between the ages
of twenty-one and thirty-two, and held one hundred and forty-one as
deserters or evaders.
The eighth raid, August 15, 1918, was set at Atlantic City, N. J.,
and is considered the daddy of them all. At that time four pleasure
piers were raided, and more than 60,000 men, women and children were
handled without commotion. Preparations for this raid were left to Mr.
Gaskill, since he had done so well with other raids. In the call for
the assembly the members did not know where they were going—they got
sealed directions. At 10:00 P. M. sharp, the entrance and exit guards
took up positions and refused to allow any males to leave the pier
without showing classification cards, if within draft age. The other
squads of from fifty to seventy-five men were instructed to proceed to
the ocean end of the pier, form a solid line and sweep all men within
the above mentioned ages, found without papers, to a point at the board
walk end of the pier where they were detained until the work had been
completed, after which they were transferred to the armory for further
examination. There were about seven hundred men apprehended in that
raid and sixty real slackers. It was an all-night job, the members from
Philadelphia arriving home about seven o’clock as quietly as they had
slipped out of town.
On November 6, 1918, the Olympia Athletic Club was raided, and out of
the 8,000 men who had gathered to witnessed the Dempsey-Levinsky prize
fight, more than 1,000 were detained, thirty-six of which proved real
draft evaders. This bunch of fight fans was handled by one hundred and
twenty-five A. P. L. members, forty police, and twelve agents of the
Department of Justice.
The signing of the armistice on the eleventh of November ended the
slacker raids, but having its hand well skilled by this time, the A. P.
L. went on with vice raids and picked up a great many people who had
not complied with the draft laws. On November 20, 1918, Chester, Pa.,
was again raided and an additional forty-two prisoners apprehended. The
next three days were put in with Tenderloin raids for bootleggers, of
whom sixty were sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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