January 15, 2006
Photo credit: New York World-Telegram and Sun archives, Library of Congress.
9/16: Terrorists Bomb Wall Street
by
Lona Manning
Prologue
Out of a clear blue sky, a deadly terrorist attack in New
York City brought grief and outrage. Initially, the country rallied in a wave of
patriotism and vowed revenge on the perpetrators. But critics said that the
government was using the terrorist threat as an excuse to curtail civil
liberties. They warned that aggressive action against the terrorists would only
provoke more violence and was harming America's reputation in Europe. And some
charged that the president was just a puppet and the decisions were really being
made by a handful of government officials who lied and twisted intelligence
reports to carry out their repressive agenda. Supporters of the government
policy countered that these critics were aiding and abetting the enemy while
posing as champions of free speech. Strong measures were needed to crush a
dangerous enemy, not naïve and craven appeasement.
The year was 1920.
Thursday, September 16, 1920
The church bells at Trinity Church overlooking Wall Street
were striking noon. 24-year-old William Joyce, head clerk at the J.P. Morgan
bank, glanced out the window at the scene outside. The busy intersection was
filling with office workers heading out for their lunch break. Twin sisters
Minnie and Esther Huger met up in front of the Assay office. Another pair of young sisters, Margaret and Charity
Bishop, also met for lunch. Just 18, they had recently joined the work force to
help support their widowed mother. Catherine Dickson stood on the sidewalk,
waiting for her girlfriend, who wanted to apply for a job on Wall Street.
Catherine had agreed to take an early lunch hour to help her. Lawrence
Roberts, a salesman for a printing company, made a bank deposit and decided to
walk to his next appointment with a client. Bernard Kennedy and Thomas Osprey walked down Wall Street,
headed for the Stock Exchange building, carrying pouches of valuable securities.
Like William Joyce, both young men were veterans of the First World War.
The solid granite facades of the Stock Exchange, the
Sub-Treasury building, the Assay office and J.P. Morgan's bank spoke of a
permanence and stability that belied the insecurity faced by many American
workers in the fall of 1920. The American economy was wracked by both high
unemployment and sharp inflation.
Lawrence Servin made a
living as a peddler and today he was selling chocolates to the noon-time crowd
while keeping one eye out for the cops. In 1920, it was still not uncommon to
see horses and carts on the streets of New York, though few were as dilapidated
and ancient as the old wooden wagon pulled by a tired old horse, that Servin saw
pull up in front of the Assay office. The driver quietly slipped down and
briskly walked away.
The driver of the horse and wagon knew he didn't have much
time to get away. And if these were his last moments on earth – well, better
comrades than he had gone in the same way. The rest of his comrades were in
prison, in hiding or in exile. What he was about to do was for all of them.
Tutti i nodi vengono al pettine – the chickens come home to roost.
At 12:01, as the last notes of the church bell died away,
there came a tremendous ear-shattering explosion. A newspaper reporter walking
down Wall Street from Broadway felt the concussion of the explosion before he
heard it. The sound of the blast, which seemed to shake the mighty buildings all
around him to their foundations, was followed by flames and smoke 100 feet high.
The explosion was contained within the narrow canyon of tall buildings and
whoever was unlucky enough to be in the area was trapped in the carnage.
Building awnings burnt to ash in seconds. Hundreds of people were knocked off
their feet. Automobiles were lifted into the air and overturned. Minnie and
Esther's hair and clothes exploded into flame. Blood spattered on the walls and
sidewalk. Windows shattered from ground level to nine stories in the air. Flying
glass injured Ulysses S. Grant, grandson of the civil war general and president,
who worked in the Treasury building. A secretary who had just stood up from her chair to answer
the telephone turned and saw glass shards all over her desk and chair.
The shattering glass, which one witness said covered the
inside of the J.P. Morgan office ''like snow,'' was not as
deadly as the chunks of hot metal which sprayed in all directions. Projectiles
slammed into the side of the J. P. Morgan building, biting holes into the smooth
façade. Other chunks crashed through plate glass windows,
even those that were covered with security screens.
One of the hot slugs killed William Joyce at his desk. Joyce was supposed to have been on his
honeymoon but had postponed his wedding until October to cover for a colleague
who was on vacation.
James Saul, an office boy, was knocked flat by the blast.
He stood up, his ears ringing, smeared and spattered with blood, some of it his
own. He commandeered an empty automobile and loaded it full of injured people
and made four trips to Broad Street hospital. Lawrence Roberts, the salesman,
was comparatively lucky, escaping with a broken leg. Many of the injured lay
unconscious on the pavement and others twitched in their death throes. Hundreds
of panicked office workers ran away from the devastation pursued by billowing
clouds of dust. Hundreds more people were drawn to the scene by the noise of the
explosion, which was heard all over Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Policemen, firemen and ambulances raced to the scene over
streets covered with broken glass and debris of all kinds, including maimed
bodies. Soon the rescue workers lined up a row of corpses covered with car
blankets from automobiles, torn awning and whatever else they could find.
In addition to the frantic efforts to help the wounded,
officials worried that the explosion was but a precursor to an attack on the
sub-Treasury building, which stood vulnerable, its windows gone, its door
smashed in. The first policeman at the scene called for
all Army veterans to step forward and help push back the crowds and guard the
buildings. ''Within five minutes,'' The New York Times reported, ''upwards
of 500 young men had forced their way through the crowd and assembled on the
sidewalk for orders.'' Later, soldiers were called in from nearby
Governors Island to set up a security cordon around the financial district.
By nightfall, the death toll stood at 31, with hundreds
more injured. Dorothy Hutchinson learned that her husband William, an insurance
broker, would not be coming home. Samuel Soloway identified the body of his 16-year-old son
Benjamin at the morgue. Minnie and Esther Huger and Margaret and Charity Bishop
were treated for severe burns. Minnie hung on in terrible pain until Saturday,
then died. Charity survived, although scarred for life, her sister Margaret
died.
The driver of the wagon believed that there were but two
classes of people, the oppressors and the oppressed. But the majority of his
victims were chauffeurs, couriers, secretaries and bank tellers – ordinary
working-class people. Some were American-born; others were from England,
Ireland, Poland and Sweden.
At first, officials theorized that an automobile had
collided with a wagon carrying dynamite and that the explosion, the largest ever
in Manhattan, was an accident. But descriptions from survivors and an inspection
of the site by mine explosion experts soon convinced them otherwise. The
dynamite, at least 100 pounds of it, was indeed the kind used in demolition
work, but it had been wired to a timer and packed around with hundreds of small
chunks of iron. And where the horse and buggy had stood there was a tangle of
twisted metal and a large depression in the roadway. Police collected the
jawbone and legs of the horse, still wearing its horseshoes.
Lawrence Servin, the chocolate peddler, regained
consciousness in the hospital. He told police that he had seen the driver of the
wagon and described him as a ''dark-complexioned, unshaven, wiry man, probably 35
or 40 years old, and dressed in working clothes and a dark cap. He seemed to be
about five feet six inches tall. He had dark hair.''
His description was echoed by secretary Rebecca Eppstein,
who had seen the wagon pull up, and the driver walk away towards Broadway just
before the explosion knocked her ''senseless.''
The following day the Stock Exchange opened as usual at 10
a.m. The carnage had been swept and washed away and canvas was tacked up over
the shattered windows. In fact so quickly had the debris been removed from the
site that the police had to chase down garbage scows in search of remaining bomb
and wagon fragments or other possible clues. The financial leaders at Wall
Street were determined to put on a display of strength in the face of the attack
and to show that life would go on as usual. Coincidentally, arrangements had
already been made to hold a small parade and ceremony to mark the anniversary of
the adoption of the Constitution. ''A stone's throw from the spot which 24 hours
before had witnessed scenes of wildest confusion and terror, patriotic speeches
were delivered from a rostrum on the site where George Washington took the oath
as first president of the United States'' and a fife and drum band played. It was
happily noted that the bronze statue of Washington that presides over Wall
Street ''suffered not the slightest blemish.''
William J. Flynn, head of the Justice Department's Bureau
of Investigation, arrived from Washington with scores of federal detectives. At
police headquarters, Arthur Carey, chief of the homicide squad, asked for
harness makers, livery stable owners and wagon builders to help him reconstruct
the shattered wagon and identify the maker of the horse's shoes. Although
hundreds of City detectives and federal agents worked on the case, they turned
up no firm leads.
Wealthy New Yorkers hired security men to guard their
homes. J.P. Morgan, who was in Europe at the time of the blast, hired his own
private detectives to try to find the killer. Across the nation, policemen were
called out to guard banks and government buildings.
Detectives had to sort through hundreds of leads, rumors
and hoaxes. When it was reported that the Customs House would be blown up at 2
p.m. on Friday, thousands of New Yorkers gathered to watch the spectacle.
Nothing happened. Postcards and letters warned of further bomb attacks in cities
across America. Several letters appeared to have warned of the explosion before
it happened, but they were swiftly traced to a man living in Canada who was
known to be harmless and suffering from paranoia. It was only a bizarre
coincidence that he predicted an explosion on Wall Street.
But the day after the blast postal inspectors found a
message that appeared to come from the actual terrorists:
|
Remember
We Will Not Tolerate Any Longer
Free the political prisoners
Or it will be death
For all of you
American Anarchists Fighters!
|
The warning, stamped on ordinary paper with a rubber
printing kit, was found in a mailbox a block away from the explosion. The
mailbox was emptied around 11:30 each day, so detectives reasoned that the
terrorists had dropped their message into the mailbox on their way to detonating
their bomb.
Before the last of the victims were buried, the newspapers
declared that the investigators had run out of leads in their search for the
perpetrator. In fact, Flynn and the NYPD had a very good idea of who was behind
the explosion – what they lacked was the proof.
The story behind the Wall Street bombings encompasses the
period known as the
''Red Scare''
and led to one of the most famous trials in American history.
The Red Scare
President Woodrow Wilson faced trying times. The nation
had come through the slaughter of World War I, followed by the even more deadly
Spanish Flu pandemic. Returning soldiers clashed with immigrants for jobs, the
newspapers were full of stories of labor unrest and general strikes, wages
didn't keep up with inflation, deadly race riots broke out in Chicago and St.
Louis, wartime shortages for essentials like sugar persisted and crime was
rapidly on the increase. As if that wasn't enough, small but vocal groups of
socialists, communists and anarchists fervently preached the downfall of the
corrupt capitalist system and the coming revolution of the proletariat.
Wilson, kept a clamp on vocal opposition
to the war by passing the Espionage Act, which prescribed prison terms
and fines for anyone who spoke out against conscription, criticized the armed
forces, or otherwise gave aid and comfort to the enemy Hun. The 1917
Espionage Act was followed by the Sedition Act of 1918 which forbid
''disloyal, profane, scurrilous or abusive language,'' against the U.S.
government. These laws were still in force in the summer of 1919 when Wilson
appointed fellow Democrat A.
Mitchell Palmer as his attorney general. Several months later, Wilson was felled by a stroke
and was incapacitated for the remainder of his presidency. Many of the nation's
problems fell to Palmer, including the problem of what to do about the radicals,
many of whom were immigrants to the country.
Palmer's Justice Department included the Bureau of
Investigation, now known as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or FBI.
Director William J. Flynn,
a former New York City detective, was put in charge
of surveilling and catching radicals.
One of Flynn's assistants, a fast-rising young civil
servant named John Hoover, was in charge of assembling all information possible
about radical groups throughout the United States. Hoover filed his information
on thousands of cross-referenced index cards. ''Every anarchist or red in the
country is ticketed and labeled like so much dry goods. He can be reached at any
time,'' Palmer boasted.
The public seldom distinguished between anarchists,
socialists and communists, dubbing them all ''reds'' or ''Bolshies,'' although
fierce debate about how best to achieve the worker's paradise raged between the
radical groups. Anarchists like
Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were the first
to denounce Lenin's Bolshevik revolution because they opposed his totalitarian
methods. Anarchists eschewed formal organizational structures, and were divided
between those who believed in ''propaganda of the word'' and ''propaganda of the
deed,'' or direct action. The
Haymarket bombing in which
eight policemen died was the work of anarchists. An anarchist assassinated
President William McKinley
in 1901.
A few of the Italian immigrants who migrated to
communities up and down the East Coast were devoted anarchists. The foremost
Italian anarchist in America at that time was
Luigi Galleani,
a charismatic orator who believed that violence was necessary to overthrow the
capitalists who oppressed the workingman. Galleani emigrated from Italy in 1901
and lived in New Jersey, Canada and Vermont, occasionally running into trouble
with the authorities but always defiant and uncompromising in his beliefs. Flynn
called him the cleverest of the anarchists. The members of Galleani's inner
circle who figure most prominently in this account are Carlo Valdinoci, a tall,
handsome bachelor; Mario Buda, a short, wiry man whose eyes glowed with the
intensity of a true believer; Nicola Sacco, a hard-working skilled tradesman,
and Bartolemeo Vanzetti, an intelligent man who preferred the freedom of casual
labor, because it gave him time and energy to spend on his true passion:
anarchism.
The work of Galleani and his disciples had a public side
and a hidden side. They spread the gospel of anarchy through newsletters,
speeches, social events and plays. But an inner cadre occasionally used bombs to
get the message across. Four Galleanists died while planting a bomb in a
Massachusetts textile mill. A female member of the group was arrested on a
Chicago-bound train with a satchel full of dynamite. Galleani himself was
arrested several times for inciting labor unrest and advocating anarchy, but was
always acquitted. This may have been in part because any judge trying anarchists
in his courtroom could count on a retaliatory strike in the form of a bomb in
his courthouse or his home. Over the years, there were scattered incidents of
bombing in New York City, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Boston, and
Milwaukee.
Criminal investigations and trials were hampered by the
need to collect sufficient evidence. Conspiracies are by their nature difficult
to prosecute – it is difficult to establish who did what. Justice officials were
certain that Galleani was behind many bombing incidents. Lacking direct
evidence, they could not prosecute him, but they could deport him because he was
a resident alien who preached criminal anarchy and had authored a ''how-to''
bomb-making manual, cheekily titled La Salute é in
Voi (The Health is Within You).
In October 1918, Congress passed a new law aimed at
resident aliens, the Anarchist Act. Historian and anarchist expert Paul
Avrich notes the new law meant ''for the first time mere membership in an
anarchist organization or possession of anarchist literature for the purpose of
propaganda became grounds for eviction from the country,'' no matter how long an
immigrant had lived in America. If he was not a citizen, he could be deported.
In response, Galleani and his followers declared war on
the U.S. government and announced their intentions through a published flyer:
''Deportation will not stop the storm from reaching these shores. The storm is
within and very soon will leap and crash and annihilate you in blood and fire…We
will dynamite you!''
In late April, three dozen small bombs destined for a
cross-section of prominent politicians, justice officials, and financiers such
as John D. Rockefeller were sent through the mail. Only a few of the packages
were delivered. Although the design of the bombs was ingenious and the ''infernal
machines,'' (as the newspapers called them) were carefully packaged to look like
store samples, the plotters had neglected to add sufficient postage. Once the
authorities realized that the packages marked ''Gimbel Brother's – Novelty
Samples'' contained bombs, postal officials managed to intercept them. No one was
killed by the few that were delivered, but when Sen. Hardwick's maid opened the
package sent to his home in Georgia, her hands were blown off. Hardwick was on
the anarchist's hit list because he co-sponsored the deportation bill. Like
virtually all prominent men, Hardwick did not open his own mail and the
punishment fell on a black servant.
The anarchists intended their bombs to be delivered on May
Day, the international day of revolutionary solidarity. A month later, the
anarchists managed to blow up eight large bombs, nearly simultaneously, outside
the homes of judges, politicians and a factory owner who had drawn their ire.
Judge Albert F. Hayden of Boston, Judge W.H.S. Thompson and Judge Charles Nott
of New York sent anarchists to jail for protest and conspiracy. W.W. Sibray of
the Bureau of Immigration presided over deportation hearings. In Paterson, N.J.,
a bomb exploded at the home of Harry Klotz, a powerful mill owner. The
politicians on their hit list had endorsed anti-sedition laws and deportation –
Mayor Harry L. Davis of Cleveland, Massachusetts State Reps. Leland Powers and
A. Mitchell Palmer. This was their second attempt on Attorney General Palmer's
life. But once again, none of the anarchists' intended targets, or their wives
and children, perished in the attacks and the only fatalities were a night
watchman, a female passer-by, and one of the anarchists.
That anarchist was Carlo Valdinoci, Galleani's dashing
young lieutenant. He was blown to bits in front of Palmer's house. He either
tripped over his bomb as he was about to place it on Palmer's porch or the bomb
went off prematurely. The police collected Valdinoci's remains over a two block
area. His luxuriant dark curly hair, which the anarchist women used to sigh
over, landed with his scalp on the roof across the street. But to the great
frustration of the police, the only pieces of Valdinoci that they really needed,
his finger-tips, were atomized in the blast. For some time they did not know the
identity of the dead bomber, but strongly suspected he was an anarchist. All of
the bombs were delivered with a flyer that promised, ''war, class war, and you
were the first to wage it under the cover of the powerful institutions you call
order, in the darkness of your laws…There will have to be bloodshed; we will not
dodge; there will have to be murder: we will kill, because it is necessary;
there will have to be destruction; we will destroy to rid the world of your
tyrannical institutions.''
The Washington Post averred, ''the series of bomb
outrages occurring simultaneously in eight American cities may now serve as a
warning as to what wavering, indecision and weakness inevitably lead to in
dealing with the new brand of Bolshevik-anarchy which is fastening itself like a
foul growth on the life of the country.'' Prominent labor leaders countered that
while they did not condone the violence, it showed that people were being driven
to desperate measures by unjust working conditions and heartless capitalists.
No arrests followed. Periodically Palmer or Flynn would
announce that federal agents, working undercover, had discovered the existence
of vast conspiracies aimed at overthrowing the United States government.
Headlines would scream: ''Huge Red Plot of Destruction is Uncovered'' or ''Reds
Planned Overthrow.'' Palmer enjoyed nation-wide support in his hunt for the
radicals, as the headlines attested: ''No Mercy for Reds Behind Gigantic Bomb
Plot to Main and Kill,'' ''Congress to Fight Reds Who Seek U.S. Downfall.''
While historians of the ''Red Scare'' describe American
reaction to radical movements as ''hysterical'' and ''draconian,'' it might be added
in fairness that those who most fervently believed that radicals could overthrow
the government were the radicals themselves. Galleani's eloquent, almost
mystical rhetoric urged them on:
|
Thou hast seen
the Passion, the Sorrow, and the
horrid slaughter
of undefended right.
Thou hast curst, thou hast wept
Harvesting prison, misery, and
affliction.
Cursing is sterile; weeping
cowardly,
Listen!
History directs you; Science arms
you.
From unavenged tombs,
killed by disease and gunshot
your fathers entrust you with
their vengeance
Be Bold! Redemption springs from
audacious revolt!
|
Nothing else could explain the suicidal course they
embarked on with their 1919 bombing campaign.
Under the law, Palmer's Justice Department did not have
the authority to deport resident aliens, only the Immigration Department could.
The Commissioner of Immigration,
Anthony Caminetti,
was also in favor of deporting anarchists and argued that deportation was not a
punitive act – the anarchist ''is merely removed from one field of activity to
another where he may continue his work.'' Caminetti added that the anarchists
were hypocrites to delay their deportations with legal appeals: ''those who most
noisily denounce every form of government in existence are the most persistent
in claiming every technical and other right under the laws of the country they
are in.''
Palmer, with one eye on the pending Democratic
presidential nominations, warned, ''Like a prairie-fire, the blaze of revolution
was sweeping over every American institution of law and order…eating its way
into the homes of the American workmen, its sharp tongues of revolutionary heat
were licking the altars of the churches, leaping into the belfry of the school
bell, crawling into the sacred corners of American homes, seeking to replace
marriage vows with libertine laws, burning up the foundations of society.''
So with the public and the press clamoring for action,
Palmer, Flynn, Hoover and Caminetti turned their attention to rounding up and
deporting as many radicals as they could – a wave of arrests and deportations
known as the Palmer Raids.
Luigi Galleani and eight of his adherents were deported in
June of 1919, three weeks after the June 2nd wave of bombings. The newspapers
reported that ''the government has reason to believe they were concerned in a
conspiracy to assassinate the President of the United States, but the evidence
to that effect was not sufficient to hold up in court. For that reason there
were no indictments on that charge…'' Several dozen members of Galleani's inner
circle successfully eluded the federal dragnet, including Buda, Sacco, and
Vanzetti, who moved around and used alibis.
As many as 10,000 immigrants were swept up in the raids in
late 1919 and early 1920 though fewer than 500 people were eventually deported.
Justice officials also claimed to find counterfeiting equipment (many of the
radical groups had their own small printing presses) and materials for making
bombs. Once, they mistook a set of bocce balls for a new type of bomb. Mostly,
they confiscated ''tons'' of radical literature from social clubs and private
homes. A typical raid took place on Aug. 14, 1919 at the premises of the Union
of Russian Workers in Manhattan, ''an old private house in process of rather
rapid decay.''
Policemen from the New York City bomb squad swarmed the
building and arrested everyone inside with much swinging of their night-sticks.
Most of the men herded into holding pens turned out to be poor Russian
immigrants who were taking English classes. The authorities believed that the
free classes were ''but a blind, the real purpose being to gain recruits to the
cause of revolution and anarchy… Large quantities of anarchist literature were
found secreted in various portions of the premises….''
Most of the bruised and bewildered Russians were released
but the directors of the Union of Russian Workers found themselves on a ship
bound for Russia. ''To deny them the privilege of remaining in a country which
they have openly deplored as an unenlightened community, unfit for those who
prefer the privileges of Bolshevism, should be no hardship,'' Palmer remarked.
Two thousand more aliens were being held and awaiting
deportation when 70-year-old Assistant Secretary of Labor
Louis Freedland Post
intervened.
Post was appalled by the Palmer Raids, which marked
immigrants for deportation without legal counsel or in some cases evidence of
any wrong-doing. He reviewed the pending deportation orders and cancelled most
of them. In his memoir of the Red Scare,
Deportations Delirium, he wrote
that Palmer's justice officials trampled on the Constitution:
So detectives of the Department of Justice ruthlessly
invaded peaceable homes, in the small hours of the morning, without warrants
but upon a pretense of imminent danger to the community, and arresting
inmates in their beds, searched their rooms, seized lawful private property,
and hurried their prisoners to police stations where, before the sun had
risen, they subjected them to ''third degree'' examinations in efforts to
discover evidence of a guilt that apparently did not exist. So, also, those
detectives made sweeping arrests of whole audiences at public meetings,
rounding up citizens and aliens without discrimination, and standing them
against meeting-room walls, searched them threateningly after the manner of
highwaymen robbing groups of travelers. After the search they usually turned
citizens loose, but the aliens they marched off to prison, and at least once
conspicuously in manacles and chains. They jailed crowds of these prisoners
in quarters so close, and held them there so long, that Nature protested
with sickening odors. They kept prisoners incommunicado, old Spanish
fashion, for days at a stretch, lawlessly intercepting their letters in the
mail, depriving them of the help of friends and the services of lawyers,
placing them beyond the reach of writs of habeas corpus, and hiding
them so that their families were in distress from ignorance and fear….And
the victims, those ''moral rats'', what were their offenses? Were they
criminals? In almost every instance, No.''
Palmer countered that Post was defying the law because of
''his own personal view that the deportation law is wrong.'' The assistant
secretary was a ''moonstruck parlor radical'' who had even invited Emma Goldman
into his home. Palmer lacerated Post for ''his self-willed and autocratic
substitution of his own personal viewpoint for the law… [h]is habitually tender
solicitude for social revolutionists and perverted sympathy for the criminal
anarchists of the country…his release of even self-confessed anarchists of the
worst type.''
But Post wasn't the only voice to speak up against the
Palmer Raids. A committee of 12 prominent lawyers, including
Felix Frankfurter,
issued a ''Report upon the Illegal Practices of the United States Department of
Justice,'' charging that Palmer's ''ruthless suppression'' had inflamed
''revolutionary sentiment'' and created more radicals than he caught.
Palmer had enjoyed widespread support for his crusade
against the ''reds,'' but would suffer a dramatic reversal of his fortunes in the
spring of 1920. Only the year before, Palmer and his federal agents were the
heroes who thwarted the May Day mail bombings and he was touted as a leading
candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. But now he was seen as a
political opportunist. Too many public alarms were false alarms, which
undermined his credibility. Palmer had predicted more mayhem for May Day 1920,
(''Discover May Day Plot of Reds: Many Federal and State Officials Marked for
Death'') but the day passed peacefully. Jackson Ralston, a Washington lawyer,
complained that the Justice Department ''advertised uprisings on specific dates,
which failed time after time to materialize, until the whole matter became a
national joke.'' Further, Ralston charged that some of the detainees had been
arrested on bogus charges with faked evidence and added ''some of the bombs
alleged to have been sent [to] prominent persons have never been produced.''
Although the Palmer Raids ceased, undercover surveillance
and deportation of radicals continued. Eugenio Ravarino, an undercover agent
working for Flynn's Bureau of Investigation, managed to penetrate what was left
of the Italian anarchist movement. Acting on Ravarino's information, federal
agents began to roll up the remaining Galleanist radicals, making arrests in
Paterson, N.J., and Brooklyn. Two of those arrested, Roberto Elia and Andrea
Salsedo, were of particular interest because they were printers who may have
been responsible for publishing the anarchists' manifestos that accompanied
their bombs. The two were held incommunicado, illegally, at Justice Department
headquarters in New York and the evidence is that they were beaten. After
several days of intensive interrogation, Salsedo confessed to their connections
with the Galleanists and named other members of the group.
Word reached Buda, Sacco, and Vanzetti that their comrades
were being held and interrogated. The remaining Galleanists concluded that their
days were numbered and most, including Sacco, made preparations to leave the
country. Some have argued that one of his preparations was to acquire some cash
for himself and his fellow anarchists by robbing the payroll of a shoe factory
in South Braintree, Mass., where he once briefly worked.
Meanwhile, Salsedo flung himself out of a 14th story
window at the Justice Department. Although some, including Asst. Labor Secretary
Post, believed Salsedo was murdered, this seems unlikely since he shared a room
with Elias who would have been a witness to any struggle. Further, Flynn
lamented that Salsedo's death hampered the investigation of the bombing
campaign. It is more likely that Salsedo killed himself because he knew that he
was a marked man, having betrayed his comrades.
The next day, Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested and
eventually charged with armed robbery and murder, resulting in the most hotly
debated
trial of the 20th century.
Bartolomeo Vanzetti (l) and Nicola Sacco (r)
Sacco and Vanzetti
Sacco and Vanzetti were indicted on Sept. 11, and five
days later Wall Street exploded. The Washington Post editorialized that
the ''wholesale murder'' was ''the fruit of so-called radicalism. With the
enactment of every law designed to protect the American government from
radicalism, and at every suggestion for the suppression of propaganda inimical
to constitutional government, there are thousands of well-meaning people in the
United States who throw up their hands in holy horror lest the guarantee of free
speech may be infringed.''
Sacco and Vanzetti were not on trial for radicalism, but
for killing a payroll guard and a clerk and making off with $16,000 in payroll
cash. Nevertheless, it is an interesting historical question: Were they part of
the bombing conspiracies of the Galleanists?
Historian Paul Avrich concludes ''[t]hough the evidence is
far from satisfactory, the answer almost certainly is yes…Both were
ultra-militants, believers in armed retaliation. They carried guns…they were
associated with known participants in the plot. [Mario] Buda reckoned them the
''best friends'' he had in America and they were equally close to Valdinoci [the
man who died while planting a bomb]…After [Valdinoci's] death his sister Assunta
went to live with the Saccos and remained with them for many years.''
The night Sacco and Vanzetti were detained, they were
questioned about their radical activities and associates – not the South
Braintree payroll robbery. They understandably assumed that they had been caught
in the dragnet for anarchists, and understandably, they lied. (They also told
their lawyer that they were hiding a cache of dynamite that night and were lying
to cover their tracks.)
So even though they were not on trial for their anarchist
beliefs or any terrorist activities, the defense strategy was hopelessly
compromised. From the point of view of saving Sacco and Vanzetti's lives, the
defense attorneys should have focused on the crimes themselves and shown that
the prosecution's evidence did not rise to the standard of proof beyond
reasonable doubt. But Sacco and Vanzetti had to explain why they had lied to the
authorities. They were not covering up the participation in the robbery, they
explained, they were hiding the fact that they were anarchists. But this
explanation brought their anarchist beliefs into the courtroom, and Prosecutor
Frederick G. Katzman took full advantage of their quandary, painting them as
ingrates to the Red, White and Blue, or worse.
Sacco and Vanzetti were convicted on July 14, 1921. They
were executed seven years later, after numerous failed appeals. The executions
sparked anti-American demonstrations around the world. Rioters in Paris swarmed
the streets, smashing American cars. They entered movie theaters and pulled
American films out of the projectors. In Geneva, a mob swarmed American
consulate, shouting ''Murderers! Murderers!''
It is often asserted that Sacco and Vanzetti were
deliberately framed. They were initially arrested because of suspicious
circumstances that pointed to their participation in the South Braintree
hold-up. One of their associates, Feruccio Coacci, had missed his April 15th
deportation sailing but voluntarily left the country immediately thereafter.
Coacci lived near South Braintree and Chief Michael Stewart, who was
investigating the April 15th murder/robbery, wondered if there was a
connection. The stolen car used in the robbery was found abandoned near Coacci's
home. The police went to Coacci's home to investigate and found Mario Buda
living there. Buda gave them a false name and disappeared after being
questioned. The police learned that Buda had left his own car in a local garage
and they asked the garage owner to let them know when he came to pick up his
car.
On May 5, Buda and three other men showed up at the
garage. The garage owner told them they couldn't drive the car because it didn't
have current license plates. While his wife slipped to a neighbor's house to
phone the police, the men reluctantly left. The police sent an officer to check
the Bridgewater streetcar and detain any ''foreigners.'' Although Sacco and
Vanzetti had lived in the United States for 12 years, their appearance and
demeanor made them instantly visible as the ''foreigners'' on the streetcar. When
arrested, they were both carrying guns. Vanzetti's gun was said to match the gun
stolen from the slain payroll guard. Three different brands of bullets were used
in the robbery. The same three brands were found in Sacco's pocket.
Although the police had probable cause to make an arrest,
the trial that followed was anything but fair. Judge Webster Thayer made no
secret of his contempt for the defendants, telling a friend: ''Did you see what I
did to those anarchist bastards the other day? That ought to hold them for
awhile,'' and a friend of Harry Ripley, the foreman of the jury, told the court
Ripley said that even if Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent of the robbery/murder
''They ought to hang them anyway!'' The evidence against them was shaky,
particularly the eyewitness evidence. New evidence that turned up after their
conviction, including a confession from a career criminal that his gang had
robbed the payroll, did not win them a new trial. Most legal analysts agree that
the prosecution did not prove the case against them, particularly Vanzetti, and
it was prejudice against foreigners and resentment of anarchists that sent them
to their doom.
But miscarriages of justice occur every day. Not every
injustice brings millions of protestors out into the street. The difference was
that Sacco and Vanzetti's case was seized upon as a cause célèbre, the judicial
murder of ''a good shoemaker and a poor fish peddler,'' attracting, in the words
of writer Francis Russell, ''literary left, radicals, liberals, [c]ommunists,
woolly well-meaning progressives…plus a large scattering of people who could not
be labeled politically but whose sense of justice had been outraged. Some of
these latter were starched conservatives. The crystallized view of the
opposition was that Sacco and Vanzetti were the victims of a malignant
conspiracy…The trial was a put-up job to get rid of two troublesome agitators.''
According to historian William Koch, the Comintern, or
Communist International – an organization controlled by Moscow whose purpose was
to encourage the spread of communism world-wide – saw the useful
propaganda
value of the Sacco and Vanzetti case.
The Comintern set up a front organization called the
International Labor Defense,
and collected vast sums for Sacco and Vanzetti's defense –
although they kept most of the money and gave only a pittance to the two
condemned men. Essentially, communists masquerading as progressives lionized
militant anarchists posing as pacifists to further denigrate the United States
and fatten the Comintern's pockets.
The charade was sometimes difficult for the condemned men
to bear. They told their friends they would have proudly died for anarchism, but
to be executed for a sordid murder and a grubby robbery was a different matter.
When Sacco and Vanzetti's letters from prison were published, the editors cut
out references to their atheism to make the duo more palatable to a U.S.
audience. According to historian Robert D'Attilio, Vanzetti wrote an article for
their Defense Committee bulletin, ''signed by both, [which] ends with the words,
‘Remember La Salute é in Voi [The Health is Within You].' It is without
question a call for help to their comrades, a call for direct action now that
their legal means apparently had been exhausted, a cry of defiance hurled at the
authorities, who would have understood its meaning.''
If Sacco and Vanzetti were framed because they were
anarchists, we are no closer to understanding why they were framed
because they were anarchists. The authorities deported the most dangerous
anarchist of all, Luigi Galleani, and many of his comrades. There is no apparent
reason why Sacco and Vanzetti, who had no prior criminal records, should have
been singled out for judicial murder as opposed to deportation. Any satisfaction
to be gained by killing these two particular anarchists would be more than
outweighed by the expense of the trial, the many appeals, and the condemnation
directed against the State of Massachusetts and the United States by those who
protested the executions.
And if the authorities were in the business of framing
anarchists for crimes they didn't commit, they never got around to framing
anyone for the Wall Street bombing, even though federal agents picked up several
likely candidates, all radicals, who would have made excellent patsies. Tito
Ligi and Giuseppe de Fillipis matched the survivors' description of the driver,
while Florian Zelenko was arrested with dynamite in his possession. They were
all released ''for lack of adequate evidence.'' Flynn and the NYPD conducted a
diligent and thorough investigation, including placing an informer next to
Sacco's cell, which suggests at least a good faith effort to find the true
perpetrator of the massacre.
On the first anniversary of the Wall Street bombing, Flynn
publicly discussed the Justice Department's theory that the bombing was the work
of ''the so-called Galliani band that was centered in Paterson, N.J., but whose
members became widely scattered.'' He suspected that Galleani himself, by then
deported to Italy, ordered the strike. Decades later, an old associate of the
Galleanists told historian Paul Avrich that Mario Buda was the driver of the
wagon that blew up Wall Street. This fits what is known about Buda's movements
at the time. But Buda was beyond the reach of Bureau of Investigation – he left
the country after the bombing and returned to Italy. In 1927, the Mussolini
government arrested him as a ''dangerous anarchist'' and sentenced him to five
years in prison.
The Italian anarchist movement in America was shattered by
the Palmer Raids. There were a few final salvos from the anarchists – in the
years following Sacco and Vanzetti's trial, bombs went off at the homes of a
witness, a juror, and Judge Thayer. No one was killed. But there were no further
fatal domestic terror attacks on
U.S. soil until the 1970's and the emergence of a
Puerto Rican independence
group and the radical Weathermen.
The legacy of the ''Red Scare'' era includes the
American
Civil Liberties Union which was founded
to assist conscientious objectors in World War I and to protest anti-sedition
laws that curbed free speech; and
immigration quotas that favored immigrants from North European countries.
A. Mitchell Palmer failed in his effort to win the 1920
Democratic presidential nomination. He resigned as U.S. attorney general in
April 1921. William J. Flynn resigned as head of the Bureau of Investigation in
September 1921. His assistant John Hoover, better known to history as J. Edgar
Hoover, became chief of the FBI in 1924 and remained in that post until his
death in 1972.
Palmer, Flynn and Hoover may have won the war against
radicals but they lost the verdict of history. The ''infamous'' Palmer Raids are
generally condemned as an ''hysterical'' overreaction that trampled on basic legal
freedoms ''illegally, brutally and viciously.'' Palmer is dismissed as a political
opportunist who used the ''Red Scare'' to advance his bid for the presidency.
While Flynn is largely forgotten, Hoover remains a highly controversial figure.
In 1961, the Massachusetts State Police ran modern
ballistics tests on Sacco's pistol and concluded that his gun was indeed used in
the South Braintree robbery. However, it has been suggested that the
prosecution
tampered with the gun.
The marks of the 1920 Wall Street bomb explosion are still
visible on the façade of the J.P. Morgan building.
Two Historical Footnotes
In 1942 a right-wing extremist named
William Dudley Pelley
was sentenced to 15 years in prison for saying that President Franklin Roosevelt
lied about the extent of the damage at Pearl Harbor. Unlike Sacco and Vanzetti,
his case was not taken up by the Comintern and he did not become a free-speech
martyr. During Roosevelt's presidency
prosecutions suppressing free speech were
brought against both Communists and Fascists.
In 1916, Labor leader
Tom Mooney was convicted for
throwing a bomb during a parade
in San Francisco, in which 10 people were killed. It is generally accepted today
that he was wrongfully convicted. He was pardoned in 1939.
Further Reading
The author is indebted to the scholarship of historian
Paul Avrich. His book,
Sacco & Vanzetti: the Anarchist Background, is an
invaluable window into the world of the Galleanists.
There is an enormous amount of literature about Sacco and
Vanzetti. Historian Francis Russell argues for Sacco's guilt in Sacco and
Vanzetti in
Sacco & Vanzetti: The Case Resolved. Upton Sinclair
re-created their story in his novel
Boston. In
The Untried Case,
Herbert B. Ehrmann argues that the Morelli Gang, professional criminals, actually
committed the South Braintree robbery.
Protest: Sacco-Vanzetti and the
Intellectuals by David Felix tells how Sacco & Vanzetti became martyrs.
Aliens and Dissenters: Federal Suppression of Radicals,
1903-1933, by Preston William Jr., covers the Red Scare.
A new book about the Wall Street bombing,
The Day Wall
Street Exploded, by Beverly Gage, is forthcoming.
