American Experience (1988) s30e04 Episode Script

1
(bells tolling)
(explosion)
(sirens blaring)
(distant shouting)
NARRATOR:
It was, as one newspaper noted,
a diabolical act "unparalleled
in the annals of terrorism."
On September 16, 1920, as the
bells of Trinity Church tolled
and hundreds of Wall Street
workers headed out
for their noontime break,
an explosion struck
outside the headquarters
of J.P. Morgan and Company
The world's most powerful
banking institution.
(distant shouting)
The bomb broke windows.
It knocked trolley cars off
their tracks two blocks away.
It ignited curtains
12 stories in the air.
It was just a savage,
horrifying thing.
People fled their places of work
and they saw basically
a war zone.
JAMES GREEN:
This was an attack
on civilians
just for the sole purpose
of creating terror.
NARRATOR:
The blast left 38 dead
and hundreds more injured.
Striking at the heart of
the nation's financial center,
many wondered if this was
the spectacular blow
against capitalism
that radical agitators
had so long discussed.
BEVERLY GAGE:
The corner of Wall
and Broad Streets
represented the fusion
of American capitalism
with American government.
You could target
them both at once.
STEVE FRASER:
To target it is to say,
"We are taking on the citadel
of American capitalism.
"We loathe it.
We want to overthrow it."
NARRATOR:
Financial centers around the
country went on high alert.
The head of the
Morgan bank sent guards
to his family's
Madison Avenue residence.
As federal troops arrived
to protect the nearby
U.S. Sub-Treasury building,
investigators sifted
through the rubble for clues.
GREEN:
It's not at all clear
who might be responsible.
So many people out there had
a grudge against Wall Street
that people wondered,
"Well, it could be any one
of these forces."
Which of course increases
the anxiety even more.
NARRATOR:
Attorney General A. Mitchell
Palmer arrived on the scene
and told reporters
the explosion on Wall Street
was the terrorist attack
he had warned Americans about.
For more than a year,
in the tumultuous aftermath
of World War I,
he had been at the center
of a bitter national debate
about how far
the government should go
to protect the nation
from acts of political violence.
Palmer pointed to the carnage
on Wall Street
as proof of the need
to renew aggressive action.
GAGE:
It's easy to think
about terrorism
as this frightening plague
of the early 21st century.
The Wall Street bombing suggests
it actually has a much longer
and deeper history.
How widespread government
surveillance ought to be,
what kinds of policies
are justified
in containing a threat
Those questions were being
openly asked in 1920.
(commotion)
(ship horn blares)
NARRATOR:
In January 1919, ships carrying
thousands of soldiers home
from World War I sailed
into New York Harbor.
Filled with hopes
for a better future,
the troops were greeted
by cheering crowds,
eager to leave behind
the horrors of a brutal war
that had left 16 million dead.
Returning soldiers had reason
to feel optimistic
about the economic
opportunities ahead.
Corporate profits had tripled
and stock prices had boomed
during the war,
helping to create 42,000
new millionaires.
GAGE:
World War I really was
a watershed moment
in terms of
the American economy.
The United States, for the first
time, is a creditor nation,
so Europe owes
the United States more money
than the United States
owes to Europe.
This is a big
coming-of-age moment.
NARRATOR:
Profitable though it
proved to be,
the war also created economic
and political divisions
that threatened to derail dreams
of postwar peace and prosperity.
While the American economy in
general benefited from the war,
the chief beneficiary was
the financial establishment
centered in New York.
There was some pent up
frustration about the fortunes
that had been accumulated
during the war.
There was this sense that it was
a rich man's war
and a poor man's fight.
There was also the bitter legacy
of the repression that occurred
under the Sedition Act
and the Espionage Act.
NARRATOR:
Shortly after American entry
into World War I,
President Wilson had signed
espionage and sedition laws
which made it a federal crime
to speak out
against the government
or the war.
The legislation was
an unprecedented regulation
of free speech that sent
thousands to jail
and fostered an atmosphere
of suspicion.
(crowd cheering)
CHARLES McCORMICK:
Americans were schooled
throughout the entire war
in being afraid of things,
in being afraid of foreigners,
in being afraid of German spies,
in being afraid of anyone
who wasn't sort of
like the majority,
which was essentially white
Anglo-Saxon and Protestant.
BRUCE WATSON:
The president spoke against
hyphenated Americans.
You shouldn't call yourself
German-Americans,
or any other type
of hyphenated Americans.
The war really ratcheted up
that sense
of American patriotism
Jingoism, if you want
to call it that.
NARRATOR:
By early 1919, Americans
conditioned to fear Germans
were focusing their anxieties
on a new global threat:
Vladimir Lenin and the
Bolshevik revolutionaries,
who had seized power in Russia
to form a communist state.
(speaking Russian)
GAGE:
The Bolshevik Revolution
was the world's first successful
anti-capitalist revolution
in which it appeared that the
working class had risen up
and overthrown its masters,
and put something very,
very different in its place.
KENNETH ACKERMAN:
It was much bigger
than something that happened
in Russia.
It was followed by a series
of left-wing uprisings
right after World War I
in Germany, in Hungary,
in Italy, in Argentina, in other
countries around the world.
For that moment in 1919,
the world was really in play.
These countries were in play.
GAGE:
Lenin comes out and says,
"We want the workers
to take over the world."
And you begin to see glimmers
of this happening
in the United States.
(riveting)
NARRATOR:
On February 5, 1919,
Seattle mayor Ole Hanson
sent an urgent message
to the U.S. Secretary of War:
the entire city of Seattle was
about to be shut down
in the first general
labor strike in U.S. history.
The strike began
two weeks earlier.
35,000 shipyard workers
had walked off the job
demanding higher wages to cope
with rising living costs.
GREEN:
From the point of view
of workers, this was their time.
They had sacrificed so much
for the war,
including their wages,
and they had seen
their employers gain
when they fell behind.
NARRATOR:
In an unprecedented show
of solidarity,
25,000 workers from other unions
joined the walkout.
WATSON:
The entire city was shut down
for a few days.
The trolleys did not run.
Other industries did not
show up to work, et cetera,
and of course this really
alarmed the powers that be.
GREEN:
It raised a specter
of what organized labor
could accomplish,
and it was scary
to a lot of people.
NARRATOR:
In the weeks leading up
to the strike,
pamphlets about
the Russian revolution
circulated widely among
Seattle's workers.
"The Russians have shown you
the way out," they read.
"What are you going to do
about it?"
The strike was peaceful
and orderly,
but Mayor Hanson viewed it
as the opening shot
in an attempted
communist revolution.
Seattle's residents braced
for civil war,
while a local newspaper
blamed the "riff raff of Europe"
among the workers
for starting it.
Hanson threatened martial law,
then summoned federal troops
to end the strike
less than a week after it began.
(horse whinnies)
"The time has come," he said,
"for the people in Seattle
to show their Americanism."
Hanson became a minor celebrity
for his strong stand.
He soon embarked on a lucrative
national speaking tour
to warn of the foreign agitators
threatening the nation.
His speeches stoked fear
among those already unsettled
by the strikes rippling
across the country.
Almost four million
men and women
would join the picket line
in the coming year
An average of
over 200 strikes a month
Threatening to shut down
the nation’s vital industries.
GAGE:
You see a really
wide range of demands,
and you also see a new kind
of revolutionary language
taking hold.
GREEN:
Workers were questioning
the validity
of private ownership
of industry.
"Let's let the government
keep running the railroads.
"Let's nationalize the mines."
And it really frightens people
in the context of believing
that somebody might
be manipulating them.
NARRATOR:
In the wake
of the Seattle strike,
Congress opened hearings
on the communist threat.
They debated laws
banning immigration
and revolutionary speech
and then waited to see
if the Justice Department
would act.
The new attorney general,
A. Mitchell Palmer,
didn't want mounting hysteria
about the Red threat
to set his course
at the Justice Department.
The former Pennsylvania
congressman
was more interested in promoting
the progressive ideals
on which he'd built
his political career.
ACKERMAN:
He was a Democrat on the liberal
fringe of the party.
When he was in Congress
he introduced legislation
to give women the right to vote,
to end child labor,
to support labor unions.
Wilson appointed him
attorney general
not to impose any kind
of crackdown against radicals
but because he would be helpful
in defusing the tensions
that existed during the war.
NARRATOR:
Some of the president's closest
advisors dismissed Palmer
as a political opportunist
with an eye on the Oval Office.
Wilson considered him
a loyal ally.
In his first term,
he offered Palmer
the job of Secretary of War.
Palmer turned him down,
claiming it would violate his
religious principles
as a Quaker.
He later served the war effort
by overseeing
the seizure and sale of
German-owned assets in America.
ACKERMAN:
He had a very good talent
for making headlines.
It threw him in the limelight
and by the end of the war
he was a real celebrity.
GAGE:
He acquired a nickname,
"The Fighting Quaker,"
because he was fighting
on behalf of America.
And that was sort of
how he was known
at the moment that
he became attorney general.
NARRATOR:
In his first weeks on the job,
Palmer signaled a shift
from the repressive wartime
policies of his predecessor.
ACKERMAN:
Some of the first things he did
were to free
about 50 people who had been
jailed under the Espionage Act.
He disbanded the American
Protective League,
which was a vigilante group
created during the war
to crack down
on slackers and spies.
So everything had him acting
as a moderating influence.
NARRATOR:
Investigators were impressed
by the bomb's cunning design
A wooden tube filled with an
acid detonator and dynamite.
Concealed in a gift box,
the bomb arrived at the office
of Seattle's Mayor Ole Hanson
in late April 1919.
An aide to Hanson
opened the package,
but it failed to detonate.
An identical box delivered
to the Georgia home
of a former U.S. senator blew
off the hands
of the maid who opened it.
In the coming days,
federal investigators would
discover 28 more bombs
making their way
through the U.S. mail,
all timed to arrive on May Day,
the international
day of solidarity
for radical political groups.
The intended recipients included
six congressman,
three cabinet members,
Supreme Court justice
Oliver Wendell Holmes,
and the nation's preeminent
banker, J.P. Morgan, Jr.
WATSON:
The targets were very, very
prominent capitalists,
and others who had specifically
targeted radicals.
It was a sinister
and very well-planned plot.
NARRATOR:
One of the packages
was addressed
to Attorney General
A. Mitchell Palmer.
GAGE:
This is an enormous scare
and people begin to think,
"Is there an organized
conspiracy for revolution
"in the United States and are
there more bombs on the way?"
ACKERMAN:
It gave the impression
to the country
that the radical fringe was
escalating the violence
to an unacceptable level.
(car engine revs)
NARRATOR:
Although most of the bombs never
reached their destination,
newspapers urged Americans
to call police
before opening
any suspicious packages.
Citizens already
on edge lashed out.
(shouting, whistling)
Riots erupted when mobs attacked
May Day rallies
in cities across the country.
Ole Hanson went on the
offensive, criticizing Palmer
for his "weak" response
to the threat at hand.
"I hope Washington will buck up
and hang or incarcerate for life
"all the anarchists in the
country," Hanson told crowds.
Palmer held firm.
He pledged he would
treat the mail bombs
as a criminal investigation
and no more.
He ordered the
Justice Department's
Bureau of Investigation
to draw up a list of suspects,
then left the case in the hands
of the post office inspectors.
Palmer wouldn't be able
to remain on the sidelines
for long.
GAGE:
We tend to think of the
late 19th and early 20th century
as being a kind of triumphal age
in which the United States
grows richer.
But what's emerging
during this period
are whole new sets of ideas
about what's wrong
with capitalism.
Some of that came out
of the organized labor movement.
Some of it came even further
to the left,
groups like anarchists
and socialists
who really did think
that capitalism
needed to be overthrown,
done away with altogether.
FRASER:
People were deeply
anti-capitalist,
because it had destroyed lives
of all kinds.
Capitalism is a kind of curse,
and the people therefore
who run it
are seen as bestial,
as depraved, as inhuman,
as consummately greedy.
NARRATOR:
Since the early 1900s,
labor and revolutionary groups
had argued
about how best to challenge
the economic inequities
of capitalism
Whether change would come
through votes or violence.
GAGE:
There's a huge range of opinion
about whether revolution
is going to be something
that comes
in people's hearts and minds,
or whether you're literally
talking about an armed uprising.
You see lots of people saying,
"What democracy means is that
"you can run candidates
for office.
"That is how you make change."
And then you have a small number
of people who say,
"Terrorism is a useful tool
in this whole story."
NARRATOR:
Anarchists had been
among the first to advocate
dramatic acts of violence
as a political weapon.
Anarchism has many
different branches.
Again, there were the pacifists.
There were the syndicalists,
there were others.
And among them were
a group of people
who believed in what was called
the "propaganda of the deed,"
and the deed was violence.
NARRATOR:
One of the most prominent
proponents of propaganda by deed
was a charismatic Italian
anarchist named Luigi Galleani.
His followers numbered
in the thousands,
the vast majority of them
immigrant manual laborers.
WATSON:
He was amazingly eloquent,
and he spoke to groups of people
in gatherings in labor groups,
and Italian enclaves all
throughout the East Coast.
And he wrote books as well.
One of his books was called
La Salute e in Voi,
which in Italian means,
"The Health Is Within You,"
which sounds like
a nice peaceful thing.
It's actually a
dynamiting manual
and how to use dynamite
effectively.
NARRATOR:
For more than a decade,
Galleani had published
an Italian-language weekly
called Cronaca Sovversiva
Subversive Chronicle
Which attacked the state and
private property owners.
Galleani's feelings
about the government were clear.
"Overthrow it," he wrote.
"Make the country free forever
with the triumph
"of true democracy made by
Americans, not by Wall Street."
WATSON:
It was a truly incendiary rag.
The Bureau of Investigation
discovered this publication
during World War I
and quickly put it on
the banned list of periodicals.
The Bureau confiscated lists
of subscribers
and immediately targeted
all of them
as radicals to be watched.
NARRATOR:
Bureau agents also raided
Galleani's home,
gathering evidence
that immigration authorities
would use to deport him
in June 1919.
As he prepared
to leave the country,
Galleani urged his followers
to seek revenge
against the tyrannical
federal government.
(siren blaring)
Shortly after 11:00 p.m.
on June 2,
just a month after
the May Day plot,
police arriving at the
Washington, D.C., home
of A. Mitchell Palmer
encountered a disturbing scene:
a bomb had exploded on the
attorney general's doorstep,
detonating prematurely
as the bomber
was delivering the device.
WATSON:
It was really just a huge,
mind-ripping explosion.
They saw the remains of this man
blown all over the neighborhood.
There were pieces of limbs,
and blood on the trees.
And it was just
a shocking violation.
ACKERMAN:
A few minutes earlier
he and his wife
had been sitting
in the library downstairs.
If they had waited a few minutes
longer before going upstairs
they would've been dead.
NARRATOR:
Palmer soon learned of midnight
bombings in six other cities,
most at homes of anti-radical
judges and legislators.
GAGE:
Unlike the May Day bombs,
which conceivably could have
all been put together
and mailed by a single person,
it's quite clear that
there's no single person
who could have set off bombs
in Washington, and Boston,
and New York,
and several other cities
at the same time.
So it's clear that there is some
sort of organized conspiracy.
NARRATOR:
Found among the wreckage
of Palmer's home
was a flyer promising
more violence.
WATSON:
The flyer was a masterpiece of
rage and eloquent militance.
It brooked no uncertainty at all
about what was coming.
"There will have to be murder.
We will kill."
It said the powers that be
had provoked this.
It ended with,
"Long live the revolution,"
and it was signed,
"Anarchist Fighters."
GAGE:
You can imagine
it terrified Palmer
and in some sense
it actually radicalized him
on the question of,
"What are we going to do
"about people
who are advocating revolution
in the United States?"
NARRATOR:
The evidence scattered
across Palmer's lawn
pointed to Galleani's followers.
But Palmer didn't limit
his next move
to hunting down the bombers.
He used the June attack to
launch a broader campaign
against all
revolutionary organizations.
Warning the next attack
could come within weeks,
Palmer told Congress what
he needed to prevent it:
emergency funding to investigate
and deport what he described as
the "alien troublemakers
threatening
"to overthrow the government.
ACKERMAN:
What they decided to do
was not to wait
for another violent outbreak
but to launch something
of a preemptive strike
to try to get as many radicals
as they could off the streets
and, to the extent they could,
out of the country.
NARRATOR:
Palmer created a new
domestic intelligence unit
to keep tabs
on potential threats.
It was called
the Radical Division.
GAGE:
This was
a transformative moment.
You had never had
the federal government
coming forth in quite
such a concerted way to say,
"We're going to keep track
of political movements,
"political groups,
radical organizations
"within the United States
during time of peace,
because they actually pose a
threat to the national order."
NARRATOR:
Palmer's choice to run
the new unit
was an ambitious 24-year-old
Justice Department lawyer
named J. Edgar Hoover.
MCCORMICK:
He was a bright young man
who stuck to the rules, much
committed to Protestantism,
and he was very good
at organizing.
Hoover read everything
he could get his hands on
on the communists
and became firmly convinced
that they were the greatest
threat that existed.
NARRATOR:
Hoover had put himself
through law school
by working as a clerk
at the Library of Congress,
mastering its complex
classification system.
He began his legal career
identifying politically suspect
foreigners during World War I.
GAGE:
He takes what he's learned
at the Library of Congress,
he takes what he learned
processing Germans
during the war,
and he sets up
what is effectively
the first really mass peacetime
political surveillance
filing system
in the United States.
NARRATOR:
Hoover built his database
from a vast array of sources,
including military intelligence,
postmasters,
and private detectives.
He hired translators to monitor
radical publications
and planted undercover
informants inside labor unions.
ACKERMAN:
He was setting up a system
to keep track
literally of every identified
radical in the country
Who they talked to,
where they lived,
what organizations
they belonged to.
GAGE:
You didn't need very much
to become a target
of the Bureau of Investigation.
All you had to do was show up
in the orbit of some kind of
radical or labor demonstration
or criticize
the Justice Department.
NARRATOR:
In its first year of operation,
the division would amass
more than 200,000 files
on radical activities.
The Justice Department's efforts
did little to ease the fears
of Americans
who saw revolution in the labor
unrest sweeping the country.
In September, just weeks
after the formation
of the first American
communist parties,
steelworkers nationwide walked
off the job.
Coal and railway workers
also threatened a shutdown.
The walkout of three-fourths
of the police department
in Boston
threw the city into chaos.
GREEN:
They were branded as Bolsheviks,
because it was inconceivable
that they could have done this
on their own.
FRASER:
Everything feeds this kind
of atmosphere of hysteria
that agitators, Red agitators
are stirring up people
to engage in this kind
of social disorder,
this kind of violent behavior.
So people feel
they're living on the edge.
NARRATOR:
As letters calling
for government action
flooded Congress, senators
demanded Palmer explain
why he had not yet taken action
against those attempting
to "bring about the forcible
overthrow
of the government."
On November 7, 1919,
Palmer silenced his critics.
He launched a raid
on the second anniversary
of the Bolshevik Revolution
to send a message that
America was fighting back
against communist influence.
(people shouting)
With Hoover serving
as the point man in Washington,
agents arrested
several hundred members
of a group
he had been monitoring
The Union of Russian Workers.
ACKERMAN:
It was a quite violent affair
designed as much for political
effect and for theater
as well as actual breaking up
of these radical organizations.
The government was now actively
cracking down on radicals
and they wanted that message
out there.
NARRATOR:
Hoover commandeered
an army transport ship
to carry 249 detainees
back to Russia.
In a headline-grabbing move,
he included two of the nation's
most notorious anarchists,
Emma Goldman
and Alexander Berkman.
Their celebrity
overshadowed the fact
that most of the detainees
had never been part
of a criminal or terrorist plot.
ACKERMAN:
You could call it
a publicity stunt,
but it was a very major action.
They sent the Russians
back where they belong.
That's how it was portrayed.
WATSON:
The Palmer raids, for all their
terror, were really cathartic
in the sense that it sort of
made most Americans think,
"Well, we've handled
those people
and we're not going to hear
much from them anymore."
NARRATOR:
As the deportees left New York
Harbor on December 21,
reporters claimed their shouts
of "long live the revolution
in America"
could be heard on shore.
(ship horn blares)
Newspapers celebrated Palmer
for taking action.
ACKERMAN:
Palmer was viewed
as a strong leader
who, in the midst of chaos,
was drawing a firm line.
He recognized this as a boon
and he very shortly
would start organizing
a campaign for president
of the United States.
NARRATOR:
Promising no let up,
the attorney general authorized
Hoover to move forward
with plans for a massive raid
just after the New Year.
(horses whinnying)
On the night of January 2, 1920,
Palmer's agents struck
simultaneously
in 33 cities across the country.
Raiding parties swept through
meeting halls and private homes,
arresting everyone in sight.
They seized nearly 5,000 people
for deportation
Many were American citizens
and didn't belong to any
of the targeted radical groups.
Hoover was receiving telegrams,
and phone calls,
and messages by the hundreds.
Every time there was a legal
question, a logistical problem,
it would first go to Hoover.
Hoover pretty much ran what are
now called the Palmer Raids,
but might easily be called
the Hoover Raids.
(din of crowd)
NARRATOR:
With support from local police,
federal agents herded suspected
radicals into detention centers,
searched their homes, and
confiscated their possessions.
WATSON:
Thousands of people were
detained without any warrant,
without any specific cause.
They were kept
for weeks at a time.
Some were beaten.
ACKERMAN:
They had no prisons big enough
to hold all of these people.
In Detroit, they put about 700
or 800 people
in a corridor
of a government office building
with just one bathroom,
a water fountain,
and held them there
for seven or eight days
because they had no place else
to put them.
In Boston a person
committed suicide
because the conditions
were so bad.
It sent a real
terrifying message
through the immigrant community.
And I think for the anarchists
in particular
this was the final evidence
that the American government
had declared war
on their people.
NARRATOR:
So on, it wasn't just radicals
who thought Palmer
had gone too far.
ACKERMAN:
The evidence started coming out
about just how thin
these cases were,
the fact that very few of these
people had any connection
with violence
or real radicalism,
a real threat to the country.
NARRATOR:
Church, labor,
and business groups
began questioning Palmer's
tactics,
which had failed to produce
the May and June bombers
or evidence of a future plot.
Even within Palmer's own Justice
Department, there was criticism.
On January 12, U.S. Attorney
Francis Fisher Kane
resigned from office in protest.
"We appear to be attempting
to repress a political party,"
he wrote to Palmer.
"By such methods we shall
drive underground
"and make dangerous
what was not dangerous before."
GAGE:
You've taken people whose
opinions you don't like,
who have joined organizations
that you don't like,
and you've arrested them
en masse,
without ever having
a court proceeding.
Are these people really
a threat,
or are they not a threat,
and how are we going
to assess that?
You get a really big set
of questions
about what kind of country
do we actually want to be.
NARRATOR:
In the coming months, Palmer's
critics gained momentum.
The acting Secretary of Labor
nullified more than 2,000
deportation warrants,
calling the evidence
against the deportees "flimsy."
Palmer tried
to focus public attention
back on the Red threat,
claiming that he had received
intelligence
warning of a revolutionary
upheaval on May 1.
When the day passed peacefully,
Palmer was ridiculed
for being an alarmist.
A month later, a damning report
by 12 prominent lawyers
accused the attorney general
of "utterly illegal acts which
have struck at the foundation
of American free institutions."
Congress summoned him
to Capitol Hill
to defend his deportation raids.
ACKERMAN:
At the end of it
Palmer is very frustrated.
He saw the country call on him,
demand him to take
this hard line,
and he did what he thought
was his responsibility
with the information
he had before him.
The hard part though
is figuring out
how you come up with something
that addresses the threat,
that doesn't at the same time
do the collateral damage
of sweeping up innocent people
who've done nothing
to deserve it.
(shouting)
NARRATOR:
Palmer still hoped
he had enough support
to win his party's
presidential nomination,
but when he arrived
in San Francisco
to appear before the delegates
in July 1920,
even his close friends
regarded him
as poor presidential material.
The press wrote off
the nation's "Fighting Quaker"
as the "Quaking Fighter."
By the time Palmer left
the convention in defeat,
hysteria-weary Americans
were embracing
the Republican nominee
Warren Harding.
His campaign dismissed
the radical threat
and promised to return America
to "normalcy."
(cars driving in the street)
On September 16, 1920, the stock
market was having a bullish day,
reason for optimism
after a bumpy summer.
Inside the M organ bank,
a partner was wrapping
up a meeting with the owner
of one of the country's
largest mining operations
about the latest round
of strikes
in the Pennsylvania coalfields.
Across the street,
government workers
were busy transferring
a billion dollars in gold
to the U.S. Sub-Treasury.
A few minutes before noon,
as lunchtime crowds began
to fill Wall Street,
a postal worker discovered five
flyers stuffed inside a mailbox
just a short walk from the bank.
(bells tolling)
As the bells of Trinity Church
began to toll,
he read the alarming words.
(tolling continues)
Moment slater, a violent blast
rocked the financial district.
(explosion)
It began with a flash,
then a roar,
followed by a force so powerful,
that skyscrapers three blocks
north trembled from the impact.
Fire-packed air smashed
against buildings
and burned through
the lunch crowd,
leaving devastation in its wake.
(distant shouting)
FRASER:
There's pandemonium everywhere.
The brokers
on the Stock Exchange
think the glass dome atop the
Exchange is going to collapse.
Trinity Church is shaken
to its foundations.
It's a terrifying scene.
WATSON:
When people came out
from the trading floor
they could still see a mushroom
cloud rising above Wall Street.
It was hundreds
of pounds of dynamite
packed into a horse cart.
When it went off
it just tore people in half.
NARRATOR:
Bodies mangled
beyond description
sprawled amidst
the shattered glass.
The remains of one man lay
in front of the Morgan bank
The building's
pale granite walls
stained with splotches of red.
GAGE:
All through the district
were these little pieces of
metal that were window weights,
and they had been packed
around the explosives.
Many people died from lung
injuries, from internal bleeding
as these weights penetrated
their internal organs.
NARRATOR:
Most of the dead
were under the age of 30
and made a modest living
serving the trading houses
of Wall Street.
GAGE:
If you set a bomb at the corner
of Wall and Broad Streets,
the assumption was
you were aiming
for the biggest men
of American capitalism.
But that's not who
this bombing hit at all.
It really impacted
ordinary people.
NARRATOR:
As news of the tragedy spread,
stock exchanges across the
country suspended business.
Eager to minimize further damage
to the nation's
financial markets,
Wall Street leaders
moved quickly
to reopen the New York exchange
for business the next day.
Crews worked feverishly
throughout the night
to clean up the shattered glass
and hose down
the bloodstained streets.
GAGE:
Wall Street's answer
to the bombing
is to get back to what they
described as "business as usual"
and to put on a real show
of defiance and strength.
NARRATOR:
Trading resumed at the New York
Stock Exchange the next morning,
as 100,000 people descended
on the financial district
to view the effects
of the explosion.
(crowd murmuring)
The mixed emotions of the day
were on full display at noon,
when a previously scheduled
celebration
of the signing
of the Constitution
began its patriotic exercises.
The gathered at the spot
where George Washington first
took the oath of office,
his unscathed statue just steps
from the epicenter of the blast.
The solemn crowd listened to
a prayer for national safety
and a speech calling
for the capture
and killing of the bombers,
then joined together to sing
a rousing rendition
of the national anthem.
Attorney General Palmer
was quick to point out
that he might have been able
to prevent the attack
if Congress hadn't
slashed his budget
in the backlash
against his raids.
He called for a new
deportation campaign
and vowed to ram a peacetime
sedition bill through Congress.
GAGE:
On the day after the bombing,
Palmer stood there,
he said, "I warned you that
something like this
"was going to happen,
and here it is.
"We need more raids.
"We need more aggressive action
against the people
who clearly did this."
NARRATOR:
Palmer found wide support
for his ideas
in national
business publications.
But other voices
were more cautious.
"By what means are we
to face attempts
to overthrow the established
order by deeds of violence?"
one newspaper asked.
"There must be no yielding
to fear."
GAGE:
A lot of people stepped up
in that moment
and said, "We'll get the person
"who set off the bomb
on Wall Street.
"We will try them in court
and we will send them to prison.
"But we don't need to go after
entire groups of innocent people
just because they share certain
political opinions."
NARRATOR:
Finding the person who set off
the bomb proved difficult.
After sifting through tons
of debris,
investigators confirmed the bomb
had been planted
on a horse-drawn cart.
But they were unable
to identify the driver.
With the followers
of Luigi Galleani
considered prime suspects,
agents scoured Italian
neighborhoods for leads.
They traveled to Italy
to track down
the deported Galleani himself.
Like many other
suspected conspirators,
he was nowhere to be found.
Never entirely convinced the
Bureau was on the right track,
Hoover secretly sent agents
to Russia to find proof
that Lenin's communists
had directed the attack.
After three years, officials had
little to show for their efforts
but an embarrassing string
of false arrests.
The trail had gone cold.
GAGE:
Probably the best theory
that we have
suggests that the bomb
was actually set
by a man named Mario Buda,
who was, in fact,
an Italian anarchist who moved
in the circle
around Luigi Galleani.
And Buda's act was a protest
against the arrests
and deportations
of Italian radicals as a whole.
WATSON:
Buda disappeared.
He later turned up in Italy.
People went and talked
to him, et cetera.
He never admitted
anything like this
but again you never know
who to believe
when you're talking
to anarchists.
NARRATOR:
As anniversaries of the Wall
Street bombing came and went,
fewer Americans seemed to notice
the case had not been solved.
GAGE:
It is the Roaring Twenties.
It is a time of triumphal
celebration of Wall Street
as an icon of American success
and prosperity,
and somehow this bombing
just seems very quickly
like the last gasp of an older,
much more conflict-ridden age.
FRASER:
The Wall Street bombing
is the culminating point
of a long period
of anti-capitalism that engaged
American culture, and politics,
and economic life for well more
than half a century.
But the bombing
put an end to that.
This act of terrorism was
rather than a kind
of reveille for radicals,
it was kind of
their final last gasp.
NARRATOR:
By 1924, A. Mitchell Palmer,
the man who had led the war
against radicals in America,
was no longer a political force,
but his sweeping
deportation campaigns
had achieved many of their aims.
The heavy-handed tactics
of the officials
had really just scared the hell
out of anyone
who thought of joining
the movement.
GAGE:
The Communist Party
goes underground.
The anarchist community
never again
has the kind of presence in
American politics and culture
that it did in the teens.
NARRATOR:
J. Edgar Hoover did his best
to distance himself
from the deportation raids.
He claimed Palmer alone
had been calling the shots.
Hoover relied on his reputation
as an invaluable manager
to win a series of promotions,
becoming the director
of the Justice Department's
Bureau of Investigation in 1924.
He never lost his conviction
that a violent, left-wing
conspiracy threatened the
stability of the United States.
GAGE:
The Red Scare years remain
really important to Hoover
for the rest of his career.
A lot of what he learns
in those years
he holds on to ideologically
but also strategically as well.
If you're going
to keep your files,
if you're going
to go after people,
you want to kind of keep that
quite close to the vest.
NARRATOR:
All the while he was
promoting the Bureau
as a modern
crime-fighting organization,
Hoover never stopped
investigating people
for their political ideas.
He continued to add information
to the secret files he created
at the Radical Division,
laying the groundwork for
the agency's espionage efforts
in the decades to come.
No case ever ends for the
Federal Bureau of Investigation
until it is solved and closed
with the conviction
of the guilty or the acquittal
of the innocent.
NARRATOR:
Hoover never was able
to convict anyone
for the Wall Street bombing.
The Bureau's last active
investigation into the case
was in 1944.
The Wall Street bombing
remains unsolved.