Louis Freeland Post

Louis Freeland Post (November 15, 1849 - January 11, 1928) was a prominent Georgist and the Assistant United States Secretary of Labor during the closing year of the Wilson administration, the period of the Palmer Raids and the Red Scare, where he had responsibility for the Bureau of Immigration. Post considered the process to be a witch hunt and is credited with preventing many deportations and freeing many innocent people.

Career

Post opposed immigration restrictions and forcefully supported free speech and Henry George's single-tax movement. He once called George's political philosophy "my kind of radicalism...which regards the social values of natural resources as in their nature public property." He became an Assistant Secretary of Labor in 1913, a position he held until the end of the Wilson administration in March, 1921.

Early in March 1920, the temporary absence of Secretary of Labor William B. Wilson and the recent resignation of the Department's Solicitor General made Post the Department's Acting Secretary and the key person responsible for the Bureau of Immigration for two critical months. He directed the review of all deportation cases and often opposed the activities of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the Justice Department's "Radical Division," soon renamed the General Intelligence Division. In 1919, in response to anarchist terror bombings, Hoover's agents penetrated many violent revolutionary groups and identified their members. In January 1920, Palmer and Hoover oversaw the Palmer Raids designed to arrest those members who were not U.S. citizens and deport them.