May Day, the first since the Armistice and the second since the Bolshevik _coup d’état_ in Russia, was anticipated by the police in all major American cities. Attorney General Palmer had announced that there was a plot afoot to kill high officials and force American recognition of Soviet Russia. But the bomb packages were followed by nothing so drastic. In New York a Tom Mooney protest meeting that overflowed Carnegie Hall was charged by ex-servicemen in uniform. The New York offices of the socialist _Call_ were sacked by a mob of soldiers and sailors. There were demonstrations and counter-demonstrations in Chicago, and in Cleveland a man was killed when paraders carrying a red flag were attacked. The worst street fighting took place in Boston when the Communist-dominated Lettish Workmen’s Society attempted to hold a parade after a mass meeting in the Dudley Street Opera House. In mid-May Luigi Galleani, the leading anarchist figure in the United States, was taken to the East Boston Immigration Station for deportation. A man of leonine bearing and much charm, Galleani had edited the brilliantly inflammatory _Cronaca Sovversiva_ in Paterson, New Jersey, in Barre, Vermont, and finally in Lynn, Massachusetts. “Our master,” Vanzetti called him. Following his deportation, on the evening of June 2, bombs exploded in eight cities. The chief target was Attorney General Palmer, whose house at 2132 R Street, Washington, had its front blown in just as he was going to bed. Windows of neighboring houses were shattered, including those of Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt directly across the street. Apparently the bomb had gone off prematurely, killing its carrier, for parts of a body were found up and down the street, one fragment lying on the Roosevelt doorstep. The police also found a cheap suitcase large enough to hold about twenty-five pounds of dynamite, two pistols, a derby, a sandal, and shreds of a pin-stripe suit and a polka-dot bow tie. About fifty printed pink flyers entitled PLAIN WORDS were scattered over the neighborhood. Several of these were picked up by Secretary Roosevelt. They read: _The powers that be make no secret of their will to stop, here in America, the world-wide spread of revolution. The powers that be must reckon that they will have to accept the fight they have provoked._ _A time has come when the social question’s solution can be delayed no longer; the class war is on and cannot cease but with a complete victory for the international proletariat...._ _Do not say we are acting cowardly because we keep in hiding, do not say it is abominable; it is war, class war, and you were the first to wage it under cover of the powerful institutions you call order, in the darkness of your laws, behind the guns of your boneheaded slaves...._ _There will have to be bloodshed ... we will destroy to rid the world of your tyrannical institutions...._ _Long live social revolution! Down with tyranny!_