The View From 1776

Responding to Global-Warming Judicial Activism a reader commented:

In this post, Mr. Brewton has scooped the FBI, the New York City Police and all historians.  Tom has finally determined that the 1920 Wall Street bombing should be pinned on....drum roll!!....

Yes!  you guessed it! 

“Liberal activists!”

For the reader’s additional disagreements and my answer in part, as well as a description of the bombing, which killed 38 people and wounded some 300 others, see the comments to the posting referenced above.

With regard to characterizing socialists, anarchists, and communists as liberal-progressives, I am only taking liberals’ self-definition as asserted by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which came into existence during and after World War I for the sole purpose of defending socialists, anarchists, and communists and furthering their causes.  The ACLU was and remains the marching standard for liberal-progressivism.

The implication of the reader’s comment that the 1920 Wall Street bombing was done by persons entirely unknown is incorrect, It is of a piece with the insistence of deniers that the 9/11 attacks were staged by the United States government itself or that they never really happened. 

Given the nature of the 1920 Wall Street attack and its similarity to the many other dynamite bombings in the immediately preceding years, the only logical conclusion is that it was the work of liberal-progressive activists: socialists, anarchists, and communists who claimed responsibility for the other attacks.  J. P. Morgan’s office in Wall Street was a perfect iconic target.  In any event, no other motivation has ever been supported by the the weight of evidence implicating the revolutionary aspirations of liberal-progressives.

Police and the FBI lacked sufficient evidence to convict specific suspects, a problem, by the way, that plagues efforts today to deal with jihadists when we insist upon dealing with them as if the were ordinary criminals.  The blast was so powerful that essentially nothing remained of the wagon in which the dynamite and lead shrapnel had been packed, making it impossible for police to trace the wagon or its contents to their source.

1920’s Wall Street bombing was far from an isolated occurrence.  We must assess it in the context of revolutionary actions that had beset the nation since the Haymarket Square bombing in 1886 that killed 7 policemen and wounded 60 others.  Terrorist bombings and other attacks around the nation had been so frequent and so alarming in the decade before the Wall Street bombing that the New York State Assembly’s Joint Legislative Committee, five months prior to the Wall Street bombing, issued a several-thousand page report delineating the pervasive activities of liberal-progressives (socialists, anarchists, and Communists) aimed at fomenting revolutionary overthrow of the Constitution. 

ACLU co-founder Roger Baldwin had been captivated early in his social-worker career by Russian-born Emma Goldman’s brand of anarchism, which among other elements included an emphasis on “Propaganda of the Deed,” i.e. assassinations and bombings.  Leon Czolgosz, who assassinated President McKinley in 1901, was one of her followers.  He told police that Miss Goldman’s oratory had inspired his action.

One of Goldman’s early confederates, Johann Most, published a pamphlet entitled Science of Revolutionary Warfare: A Manual of Instructions in the Use and Preparation of Nitroglycerine, Dynamite, Gun-Cotton, Fulminating Mercury, Bombs, Fuses, Poisons, Etc, Etc. Mr. Most was among the organizers of the International Working People’s Association that became known popularly as “The Black Flag of Assassination and Terror.”

After the end of World War I in November, 1918, socialists and anarchists unleashed an unprecedented wave of strikes, race riots, and terrorist bombings.  On June 2, 1918, bombs exploded in eight cities.  Seattle Mayor Ole Hanson received a bomb in the mail, as did Georgia Senator Thomas Hardwick.  The Postal Service intercepted thirty-four bombs addressed to prominent citizens, including John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, and Postmaster General Albert Burleson. Prosecutions in such cases, including the action against Emma Goldman, were vigorously opposed by ACLU attorneys. 

An article in the December 2001 edition of American Heritage (THE FIRE LAST TIME - The 1920 Wall Street Bombing) gives us a good summary.

...most Americans held a particular ethnic picture of a terrorist; at that time, it was based on the Italian and Russian radicals credited with bombings over the previous 10 years in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Boston, and Washington. A tremendously ambitious terror scheme—in which 36 bombs were mailed to well known Americans in Gimbel Brothers boxes to be opened on May Day 1919—had nearly succeeded. Half the packages reached their intended targets, while the rest were discovered in a New York City post office…

“Authorities were agreed that the devastating [1920 Wall Street] blast signaled the long-threatened Red outrages,” the [New York] Times reported on its front page the day after…

But the answer to this mystery, unlike later inscrutable tragedies such as the TWA disaster, may have been disappointingly plain. Postal workers found circulars mailed a block away between 11:30 and 11:58 on the fatal day: “Remember / We will not tolerate / any longer / Free the political / prisoners or it will be / sure death for all of you / American Anarchist Fighters.”

The Anarchist Fighters had been linked to, among other things, the May Day bombing scheme of the year before and to radical groups (including what newspapers called the notorious “Galliani gang") around Lynn, Massachusetts, a place federal authorities then considered “the most dangerous spot in America,” according to a later investigator. Still another theory had it that the Wall Street bombing was revenge for the September 11 murder indictment of two Italian-born anarchists in Dedham, Massachusetts, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.

While it is not true of all liberal-progressives, many have been, since the end of the 19th century, supporters of efforts by anarchists and socialists to overthrow our constitutional government and to impose their conception of social justice: equality of income and wealth.  Businessmen and bankers were in the 1920s, and are still under the socialist Obama administration, targeted by liberal-progressives as oppressors and enemies of the people.