NYT: Blood on the Street

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/books/review/Baker-t.html?_r=1&em

By KEVIN BAKER
Published: February 19, 2009

At the stroke of noon on Sept. 16, 1920, a bomb exploded along Wall Street, killing 38 people and maiming hundreds more. It was the worst terrorist bombing in the United States until the Oklahoma City attack in 1995, the worst in New York until the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center.


Brown Brothers

The aftermath of the bombing on Wall Street on Sept. 16, 1920.


The bomb was an immeasurably cruel device, most likely dynamite tied to iron sash weights that acted as shrapnel. It blew people apart where they walked out on a cool, late-summer day, tore arms and legs, hands and feet and scalps off living human beings. Others were beheaded or eviscerated, or found themselves suddenly engulfed in flames. Still more injuries were caused by a cascade of broken glass and the terrified stampede that followed.

The bomb’s target was presumed to be the House of Morgan, which sat like a blockhouse just across the street from where the explosive had been left in a horse-drawn wagon. The Morgan bank had emerged from World War I as the single most powerful financial institution in the world, and both the firm and its principals had been under increasing attack, rhetorical and otherwise, ever since it had arranged a huge loan a few years before to help the Allies and keep the Great War going. But the only fatality inside the firm was a 24-year-old clerk. Nearly all the bank’s employees were back at their desks the next morning, some of them still bandaged and bruised. The explosion merely pocked the firm’s impenetrable, marble walls, the marks defiantly left where they can be seen to this day: “the stigmata of capitalism.”

As with all terrorist attacks, most of the victims were innocent bystanders, “messengers, stenographers, clerks, salesmen, drivers,” men and women for whom “Wall Street was not a grand symbol of American capitalism” but “a place to make a modest living by selling milk, driving a car, typing reports, recording sales.” Only seven of the dead were over the age of 40. Five of them were women, four of them teenagers.

Who would do such a thing? A bevy of the nation’s most prominent lawmen and private detectives immediately descended on Wall Street, blaming first anarchists, then paid agents from Lenin’s new government in Moscow. But years of investigation yielded nothing — no indictments, no trials, no culprits. No one ever came forward to take responsibility for the crime, or to state what it was supposed to accomplish, and before long it had dropped from public view, lost among the sensations of the racing, giddy ’20s.

Beverly Gage, a writer and history teacher at Yale, has brought the bombing to life again in her outstanding first book. “The Day Wall Street Exploded” describes in detail both the bombing itself and the hunt for the perpetrators, but Gage also does us the great good service of placing it in the wider history of industrial warfare that once proliferated in America. Like much of American history, these battles have dropped out of mind because no one wanted to look at them too closely. As Gage points out, the right was loath to discuss the decades of brutal labor and political repression that preceded the Wall Street bombing; the left, to admit that extremists really were willing to resort to violence to overthrow the capitalist order.

FULL story at link.