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Unleashing the Sleuths. Palmer, who had ambitions to succeed Wilson as President, finally did something. He ordered a roundup of suspicious aliens, a project partly supervised by the young J. Edgar Hoover. Justice Department agents zealously invaded homes and made many arrests without warrants. They pulled people out of pool halls and other public places and jammed them into overcrowded detention centers. When they raided meeting halls, they sometimes did not bother to find out who was meeting; in one instance, they jailed 39 people who were meeting to form a bakery cooperative. Since the Sedition Act of 1918 allowed alien "anarchists" to be deported, a "Soviet Ark" sailed for Russia in December 1919 with 249 Russian aliens aboard, only a handful of them dangerous criminals. Most of the nation's press ecstatically hailed its departure and called for many more deportations by Palmer.
By this time, no one was more enthusiastic about deporting people than Palmer, who was at last enjoying favorable publicity. But as quickly as it flared, the Red Scare subsided. Though Palmer's sleuths kept predicting more terrorism, it never came. When the Justice Department issued somber warnings that May Day 1920 would be marked by unprecedented violence and not a firecracker went off, Palmer was ridiculed in the press. Businessmen began to worry that immigrant labor might dry up, and the press, which only a few months before had been fanning the hysteria, ran sober stories about the importance of immigrants to the nation.
A bit ashamed of themselves, the U.S. people looked for a scapegoat, and Palmer was it.