Posted on Jun 16, 2017
The Deadliest Terror Attack On Wall Street
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The 1920 Wall Street Bombing
by Amy Zalman, Ph.D.
Updated April 21, 2017
Shortly after 12pm on September 16, a dynamite loaded horse drawn cart exploded on the corner of Wall and Broad Street in downtown Manhattan, just outside the banking firm. J.P. Morgan & Co. The blast would ultimately kill 39 people—most of them the clerks and messengers and secretaries who served the financial institutions--and cause damage in the millions of dollars.
To witnesses, the scale of the damage was unimaginable. Glass flew everywhere, including into the Morgan building, where several of the bank's partners were injured (Morgan himself was traveling in Europe that day.) The attack was made more lethal by the cast iron slugs packed in with the dynamite.
Investigations began immediately, with several theories about who might have committed the attack discarded along the way.
Thomas Lamont, a Morgan bank principal, first accused Bolsheviks of the attack. Bolsheviks was for many a catch-all term that meant "radicals," whether anarchists, communists or socialists.
The day after the attack, a message was found in a mailbox a block from the attack, which said:
Remember." We will not tolerate any longer. Free the political prisoners or it will be death for all of you. American Anarchist Fighters!"
Some have theorized that this note indicated that the attack was revenge for the murder indictment, several days earlier, of anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.
Finally, it was concluded that either Anarchists or communists were responsible. However, those responsible for the attack were never located, and suspicions about the object of the attack were inconclusive.
FROM WALL STREET TO THE WORLD TRADE CENTER:
The first act of terrorism aimed at the heart of the nation's financial institutions inevitably draws comparison to the second, on September 11, 2001. Beverly Gage, author of the forthcoming book, The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in its First Age of Terror, has made one such comparison:
To New Yorkers and to Americans in 1920, the death toll from the blast seemed incomprehensible. "The horrible slaughter and maiming of men and women," wrote the New York Call, "was a calamity that almost stills the beating of the heart of the people." That those numbers now seem paltry -- statistics from a past when we counted civilian deaths in dozens instead of thousands -- underscores just how violently our own world changed last Tuesday.
The destruction of the World Trade Center now stands alone in the annals of horror. But despite the difference in scale, the Wall Street explosion forced upon New York and the nation many of the same questions that we are confronting today: How should we respond to violence on this new scale? What is the proper balance between freedom and security? Who, exactly, is responsible for the destruction?"
There is another striking similarity. We may think that the defensive security crackdowns and resource mobilization following 9/11 are unprecedented, but a similiar mobilization occurred in 1920: Within days of the attack, there were calls on Congress and the Department of Justice to dramatically increase funding and legal mechanisms to counter the threat of Communists and Anarchists.
According to the New York Times on September 19: "It was said today at the Department of Justice that Attorney General Palmer would recommend in his annual report to Congress that drastic laws for dealing with anarchists and other disturbing elements be enacted. At the same time he will ask for larger appropriations, which were denied in the past. https://www.thoughtco.com/1920-wall-street-bombing-terrorism-in-america-3209275
@ col mikel COL Mikel J. Burroughs @ ltc stephen LTC Stephen C. @ ltc stephen LTC Stephen F. @ ltc frank LTC (Join to see) @ ltc john LTC John Mohor @ maj william Maj William W. "Bill" Price @ maj stephen LTC (Join to see) Capt Tom Brown @ capt marty Maj Marty Hogan @ smsgt doc SMSgt Minister Gerald A. "Doc" Thomas @ tsgt joe TSgt Joe C. @ sra christopher SrA Christopher Wright @ msg andrew MSG Andrew White @ sgt david SGT (Join to see) @ sgt david SGT David A. 'Cowboy' Groth @ sp5 mark SP5 Mark Kuzinski SCPO Morris Ramsey @ po1 chip PO1 William "Chip" Nagel Alan K. @ po3 tom PO3 Tom Howard
by Amy Zalman, Ph.D.
Updated April 21, 2017
Shortly after 12pm on September 16, a dynamite loaded horse drawn cart exploded on the corner of Wall and Broad Street in downtown Manhattan, just outside the banking firm. J.P. Morgan & Co. The blast would ultimately kill 39 people—most of them the clerks and messengers and secretaries who served the financial institutions--and cause damage in the millions of dollars.
To witnesses, the scale of the damage was unimaginable. Glass flew everywhere, including into the Morgan building, where several of the bank's partners were injured (Morgan himself was traveling in Europe that day.) The attack was made more lethal by the cast iron slugs packed in with the dynamite.
Investigations began immediately, with several theories about who might have committed the attack discarded along the way.
Thomas Lamont, a Morgan bank principal, first accused Bolsheviks of the attack. Bolsheviks was for many a catch-all term that meant "radicals," whether anarchists, communists or socialists.
The day after the attack, a message was found in a mailbox a block from the attack, which said:
Remember." We will not tolerate any longer. Free the political prisoners or it will be death for all of you. American Anarchist Fighters!"
Some have theorized that this note indicated that the attack was revenge for the murder indictment, several days earlier, of anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.
Finally, it was concluded that either Anarchists or communists were responsible. However, those responsible for the attack were never located, and suspicions about the object of the attack were inconclusive.
FROM WALL STREET TO THE WORLD TRADE CENTER:
The first act of terrorism aimed at the heart of the nation's financial institutions inevitably draws comparison to the second, on September 11, 2001. Beverly Gage, author of the forthcoming book, The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in its First Age of Terror, has made one such comparison:
To New Yorkers and to Americans in 1920, the death toll from the blast seemed incomprehensible. "The horrible slaughter and maiming of men and women," wrote the New York Call, "was a calamity that almost stills the beating of the heart of the people." That those numbers now seem paltry -- statistics from a past when we counted civilian deaths in dozens instead of thousands -- underscores just how violently our own world changed last Tuesday.
The destruction of the World Trade Center now stands alone in the annals of horror. But despite the difference in scale, the Wall Street explosion forced upon New York and the nation many of the same questions that we are confronting today: How should we respond to violence on this new scale? What is the proper balance between freedom and security? Who, exactly, is responsible for the destruction?"
There is another striking similarity. We may think that the defensive security crackdowns and resource mobilization following 9/11 are unprecedented, but a similiar mobilization occurred in 1920: Within days of the attack, there were calls on Congress and the Department of Justice to dramatically increase funding and legal mechanisms to counter the threat of Communists and Anarchists.
According to the New York Times on September 19: "It was said today at the Department of Justice that Attorney General Palmer would recommend in his annual report to Congress that drastic laws for dealing with anarchists and other disturbing elements be enacted. At the same time he will ask for larger appropriations, which were denied in the past. https://www.thoughtco.com/1920-wall-street-bombing-terrorism-in-america-3209275
@ col mikel COL Mikel J. Burroughs @ ltc stephen LTC Stephen C. @ ltc stephen LTC Stephen F. @ ltc frank LTC (Join to see) @ ltc john LTC John Mohor @ maj william Maj William W. "Bill" Price @ maj stephen LTC (Join to see) Capt Tom Brown @ capt marty Maj Marty Hogan @ smsgt doc SMSgt Minister Gerald A. "Doc" Thomas @ tsgt joe TSgt Joe C. @ sra christopher SrA Christopher Wright @ msg andrew MSG Andrew White @ sgt david SGT (Join to see) @ sgt david SGT David A. 'Cowboy' Groth @ sp5 mark SP5 Mark Kuzinski SCPO Morris Ramsey @ po1 chip PO1 William "Chip" Nagel Alan K. @ po3 tom PO3 Tom Howard
Terrorism
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Thanks SGT John " Mac " McConnell for reminding us that on September 16, 1920 a dynamite loaded horse drawn cart exploded on the corner of Wall and Broad Street in downtown Manhattan, just outside the banking firm. J.P. Morgan & Co.
Most likely the Soviet Bolsheviks were responsible since we had US forces in Russia from 1918 to 1920. We had been fighting on their soil for a couple years and hardened revolutionaries were skilled at diverting suspicion from themselves. There were many communists sympathizers in the USA at that time who could shield the perpetrators.
Anarchists like Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were already charged for murder after al weeks earlier.
Skilled revolutionaries as the Red Russian were they wouldn't let a crisis go to waste and blaming the anarchists for a pro-Marxist activity like blowing up an explosive cart in front of a capitalist bourgeois bank of the stature of J.P. Morgan & Co. was probably too good an opportunity to pass up.
Expect Leon Trostky or Josef Stalin to be involved discretely.
"In January 1918, the Red Army was founded, building on the less organised Red Guard militias. It was tasked both with defending the Soviet state militarily against internal and external enemies, and, it was hoped, to support the revolutionaries of the rest of Europe.
In addition, the notorious Cheka was founded at the end of 1917 as a small security force tasked with combating counter-revolution and sabotage, and grew over the course of 1918 into a feared apparatus of repression. Certain nationalist anti-Bolshevik propaganda presented the Cheka as a tool of Jews utilising Chinese death squads against patriotic ethnic Russians, stoking racial violence, as shown in this famous anti-Semitic caricature of Trotsky.
Red and White Terror grew as deliberate policy from above interacted with collective action from below, while class conflict was exasperated by local factors such as food scarcity, rivalry between ethnicities, nations and regions, and opportunistic banditry.
There was also much violence perpetrated by other groups than the Reds or Whites amid this chaos. This included the loose and localised groups known as the Green armies chiefly associated with the peasantry, the different national armies of the former Tsarist Empire, the anarchist Black army led by Nestor Makhno in Ukraine, and international intervention forces.
How did the violence of the Russian civil war shape the Soviet state?
The Soviet state developed by the Bolsheviks and consolidated in the early 1920s was clearly shaped by the brutalising experiences of the First World War and the civil war.
Throughout the civil war, the Bolshevik state firmly asserted its right to the monopoly of violence in the territory it controlled, attempting to create order out of the economic dislocation, shortages and desperate anarchy of the situation. This propaganda poster from the early 1920s celebrates the firm actions of the Bolsheviks as ‘sweeping the criminals out of the Soviet land’.
During the consolidation of the Soviet state in the final period of the civil war, any resistance was harshly punished. This included the violent suppression of an anti-Bolshevik uprising in Kronstadt in 1921, led by revolutionaries who wanted ‘Soviets without Communists’.
Peasant revolts against the Bolsheviks were ruthlessly dealt with, such as in the Tambov rebellion of 1920–21, when the use of concentration camps and poison gas led to hundreds of thousands of peasants being killed.
Under the pressure of these uprisings and disasters, the Bolshevik leaders soon changed their approach, and criticised their own excesses during the period they now defined as ‘war communism’. As threats to Bolshevik control diminished, they shifted away from these emergency measures without relinquishing their party dictatorship or the system of repression they had developed.
The civil war period produced the state apparatus which Joseph Stalin would later use to accomplish his campaigns of brutality, which killed many millions in the effort to rapidly create a modern industrial nation out of a backward agricultural society."
https://www.bl.uk/russian-revolution/articles/violence-and-terror-in-the-russian-revolution
That is my story and I am sticking with it :-)
LTC Stephen C. LTC Greg Henning LTC Ivan Raiklin, Esq. Capt Seid Waddell Capt Tom Brown CW5 (Join to see) SGM David W. Carr LOM, DMSM MP SGT MSG Andrew White SFC Joe S. Davis Jr., MSM, DSL SFC William Farrell SSgt Robert Marx SSgt (Join to see) TSgt Joe C. SGT John " Mac " McConnell SP5 Mark Kuzinski SPC (Join to see) SrA Christopher Wright Cpl Joshua Caldwell
Most likely the Soviet Bolsheviks were responsible since we had US forces in Russia from 1918 to 1920. We had been fighting on their soil for a couple years and hardened revolutionaries were skilled at diverting suspicion from themselves. There were many communists sympathizers in the USA at that time who could shield the perpetrators.
Anarchists like Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were already charged for murder after al weeks earlier.
Skilled revolutionaries as the Red Russian were they wouldn't let a crisis go to waste and blaming the anarchists for a pro-Marxist activity like blowing up an explosive cart in front of a capitalist bourgeois bank of the stature of J.P. Morgan & Co. was probably too good an opportunity to pass up.
Expect Leon Trostky or Josef Stalin to be involved discretely.
"In January 1918, the Red Army was founded, building on the less organised Red Guard militias. It was tasked both with defending the Soviet state militarily against internal and external enemies, and, it was hoped, to support the revolutionaries of the rest of Europe.
In addition, the notorious Cheka was founded at the end of 1917 as a small security force tasked with combating counter-revolution and sabotage, and grew over the course of 1918 into a feared apparatus of repression. Certain nationalist anti-Bolshevik propaganda presented the Cheka as a tool of Jews utilising Chinese death squads against patriotic ethnic Russians, stoking racial violence, as shown in this famous anti-Semitic caricature of Trotsky.
Red and White Terror grew as deliberate policy from above interacted with collective action from below, while class conflict was exasperated by local factors such as food scarcity, rivalry between ethnicities, nations and regions, and opportunistic banditry.
There was also much violence perpetrated by other groups than the Reds or Whites amid this chaos. This included the loose and localised groups known as the Green armies chiefly associated with the peasantry, the different national armies of the former Tsarist Empire, the anarchist Black army led by Nestor Makhno in Ukraine, and international intervention forces.
How did the violence of the Russian civil war shape the Soviet state?
The Soviet state developed by the Bolsheviks and consolidated in the early 1920s was clearly shaped by the brutalising experiences of the First World War and the civil war.
Throughout the civil war, the Bolshevik state firmly asserted its right to the monopoly of violence in the territory it controlled, attempting to create order out of the economic dislocation, shortages and desperate anarchy of the situation. This propaganda poster from the early 1920s celebrates the firm actions of the Bolsheviks as ‘sweeping the criminals out of the Soviet land’.
During the consolidation of the Soviet state in the final period of the civil war, any resistance was harshly punished. This included the violent suppression of an anti-Bolshevik uprising in Kronstadt in 1921, led by revolutionaries who wanted ‘Soviets without Communists’.
Peasant revolts against the Bolsheviks were ruthlessly dealt with, such as in the Tambov rebellion of 1920–21, when the use of concentration camps and poison gas led to hundreds of thousands of peasants being killed.
Under the pressure of these uprisings and disasters, the Bolshevik leaders soon changed their approach, and criticised their own excesses during the period they now defined as ‘war communism’. As threats to Bolshevik control diminished, they shifted away from these emergency measures without relinquishing their party dictatorship or the system of repression they had developed.
The civil war period produced the state apparatus which Joseph Stalin would later use to accomplish his campaigns of brutality, which killed many millions in the effort to rapidly create a modern industrial nation out of a backward agricultural society."
https://www.bl.uk/russian-revolution/articles/violence-and-terror-in-the-russian-revolution
That is my story and I am sticking with it :-)
LTC Stephen C. LTC Greg Henning LTC Ivan Raiklin, Esq. Capt Seid Waddell Capt Tom Brown CW5 (Join to see) SGM David W. Carr LOM, DMSM MP SGT MSG Andrew White SFC Joe S. Davis Jr., MSM, DSL SFC William Farrell SSgt Robert Marx SSgt (Join to see) TSgt Joe C. SGT John " Mac " McConnell SP5 Mark Kuzinski SPC (Join to see) SrA Christopher Wright Cpl Joshua Caldwell
Violence and terror in the Russian Revolution – The British Library
Collaborative Doctoral student Mike Carey looks at the ideologies of violence and violent practices driving the Russian Revolution and the civil war.
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