Before assuming office, he had opposed the APL activities. One of Palmer's first acts was to release 10,000 aliens of German ancestry who had been taken into government custody during the war. He stopped accepting intelligence gathered by the APL. He ordered some APL agents arrested. He also refused to share information in his APL-provided files when Ohio Governor James M. Cox requested it. He called the APL materials "gossip, hearsay information, conclusions, and inferences" and added that "information of this character could not be used without danger of doing serious wrong to individuals who were probably innocent." In March 1919, when some in Congress and the press were urging him to reinstate the Justice Department's wartime relationship with the APL, he told reporters that "its operation in any community constitutes a grave menace." A few months after the Armistice, the League officially disbanded, even as its members insisted they could serve as they had earlier in wartime against America's post-war enemies, "these bomb fiends, Bolsheviki, IWW's and other fiends." The publication of the organization's story as The Web: A Revelation of Patriotism was an attempt to revive its fortunes as well. That volume by Emerson Hough, an author of Western novels, called for a program of "selective immigration, deportation of un-Americans, and denaturalization of 'disloyal' citizens and anarchists." It said: "We must purify the source of America's population and keep it pure." On June 3, 1919, the Washington Post called for the revival of the APL to fight anarchists. The APL survived as a series of local organizations under other names, such as the Patriotic American League (Chicago) and the Loyalty League (Cleveland). New Jersey members served as investigators for New York's Lusk Committee investigation of radicals and political dissenters. APL members continued to provide information and manpower to the Department of Justice, notably during the Palmer raids of January 1920. In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan recruited members from the Southern branches of the APL. For years following the war, J. Edgar Hoover's General Intelligence Unit in the Justice Department drew on the APL for information about radicals. See also Alexander Mitchell Palmer National Security League American Defense Society Ralph Van Deman Notes Further reading Ackerman, Kenneth D. Young J. Edgar: Hoover, the Red Scare, and the Assault on Civil Liberties. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2007. Coben, Stanley. A. Mitchell Palmer: Politician. New York: Columbia University