“Property is theft,” Proudhon had said, and some anarchists accepted this literally, asserting, in Galleani’s words, “the right to expropriate the bourgeoisie—which lives by theft—whenever the need presses or the struggle against the evil social order demands it.” During the 1880s in Paris, one such anarchist expropriator, Clement Duval, was convicted of robbery and sent to Devil’s Island. His successor, François Ravachol, became one of the saints of anarchism through his bombings of the houses of judges. In the course of various robberies Ravachol committed several brutal murders.[3] Galleani spoke well of both Duval and Ravachol, and when Duval escaped from Devil’s Island and reached the United States, published his prison memoirs and a biographical sketch in _Cronaca Sovversiva_. In 1917 this material appeared in book form, edited by Andrea Salsedo, a forty-year-old Sicilian who had helped Galleani with his newspaper. * * * * * The bombing of his house may well have caused Attorney General Palmer to believe that “resident aliens in large numbers and of a desperate type” were conspiring to overthrow the government by means of a “physical force revolution.” Certainly from then on Red plots became his phobia. Appointing William J. Flynn, former head of the Secret Service, Director of the Bureau of Investigation, Palmer ordered him to conduct “a dragnet for Reds all over the country.” The first raids took place on November 7, the second anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Suddenly, an army of government agents, local police, and special deputies, augmented by a haphazard swarm of private detectives, many of dubious background, swooped down on the various headquarters of the Communist Party, the Communist Labor Party, the Union of Russian Workers, and the Russian anarchists. During that wild and vengeful night the raiders smashed their way into buildings in all the large cities, wrecked property, broke open safes, and indifferent to warrants and the niceties of habeas corpus hustled thousands of citizens as well as noncitizens to the lockup. But the November raids were only a prelude to the sweeping raids of January 2, 1920. These were timed to take place simultaneously in thirty-three cities. Six thousand warrants were issued, and thousands of aliens were picked up with or without warrants. Subsequently, about three thousand were held for deportation—although in the end only 446 of these were deported. In Massachusetts there were fourteen such raids, and in Boston five hundred aliens were marched through the streets in chains and taken to the Deer Island House of Correction, where they were isolated in brutally chaotic conditions.