Another time terrorism came to Wall Street.
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.
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.
Some unionists, seeing the state aligned with the employers, struck back with dynamite, invented in 1866 and readily available at American construction sites. In Idaho in 1905, a bomb ripped the legs off Gov. Frank Steunenberg in his own front yard, after he stuck a thousand miners from the Coeur d’Alene strike in makeshift jails for months without trial. Twenty-one men died when labor radicals blew up the rabidly anti-union Los Angeles Times building in 1910. Relatively few workers were involved in such outrages, but millions did turn to the Socialist Party and the far-left Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblies), organizations that promised to sweep away the entire capitalist system. “Far from being an era of placid reform,” Gage writes, “the turn of the century was a moment in which the entire structure of American institutions — from the government to the economy — seemed to be up for grabs, poised to be reshaped by new movements and ideas.”
A murky underworld developed, one in which some radicals — particularly the small but implacable cells of anarchists — really did plot assassinations and bombings, while companies tried to frame strikers and their leaders with phony bomb plots and other accusations.
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