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8 | “Terrorist Plot Is Seen”
- Northeastern University Press
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[W]e are, above all, against government. . . . We intend to use force against government, because it is by force that we are kept in subjection by government. •Errico Malatesta 8|“Terrorist Plot Is Seen” Terror struck New York on a clear September day. Bloodied workers fled panic -stricken through the eye of the storm�the financial district, symbol of American capitalism. A reporter who was on the scene at the moment of the attack described “a crash out of blue sky�an unexpected, death-dealing bolt.” He felt a concussion of air, then “a sharp resounding crash which shook to their foundations themonsterbuildingsfacingeithersideofWallStreet.”Horriblenoisesblasted forth, the cacophony of shattered glass raining down from a thousand broken windows, the screams of the injured. Smoke rose up everywhere, clouds of dust, white vapor, and a “mushroom-shaped cloud of yellowish green.” Bodies , said the reporter, “most of them silent in death, lay nearby. As I gazed horror -stricken at the sight, one of these forms, half naked and seared with burns, started to rise. It struggled, then toppled and fell lifeless into the gutter.”1 The president of the New York Stock Exchange listened for “a second to cries and groans and excited shouting and running feet,” and immediately suspended all trading. Within five minutes, a mass of ten thousand people was swarming through the narrow streets. Moving away from a burning car, the mass turned into a “flying wedge and thousands . . . [were] lifted off their feet.”2 Incoming calls from alarmed citizens overwhelmed phone services. Telephones went dead. Doctors, nurses, fire trucks, and ambulances rushed to the scene. Rescuers commandeered vehicles to speed the wounded off to hospitals. Hundreds of anxious people streamed through the city morgue late into the night, searching for the bodies of relatives and friends. Fear gripped the nation. Police protection went up quickly around financial districts in other American cities. As long as they lived, Wall Street financiers and clerks would remember where they had been on the day that terrorism struck New York. That day was “Terrorist Plot Is Seen” | 97 September 16, 1920. The World Trade Center did not yet exist, but the affected buildings were equally symbolic: the Wall Street headquarters of J. P. Morgan & Co., the most influential private bank in the world, and the United States Subtreasury and United States Assay Office. Destruction was inflicted not by means of an airplane, but by its technological antithesis, a horse-drawn wagon laden with dynamite, the progenitor of all truck bombs. The terrorists were not a band of jihadists but, according to the most widely accepted theory, a single anarchist acting alone, a short Italian man who ran a laundry with his brother and whose best friends were fellow anarchists Nick Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.3 • The periods surrounding two of the most notorious days in New York� September 11, 2001, and September 16, 1920�share many similarities. Since 9/11, Americans have felt threatened by evil and mysterious forces. In the years preceding 9/16, Americans felt the same way. Homeland security in 1920 was tenuous. Assassinations, bombings, and paralyzing strikes had Americans on edge. The federal government enacted Terrorism strikes Wall Street on September 16, 1920, with a deadly wagonload of dynamite. Rising above the carnage is a statue of George Washington, upper right. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Div., NYWT&S Collection. [44.201.24.171] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 20:23 GMT) 98 | in search of sacco & vanzetti far-reaching new laws, conducted mass raids and secret trials, and suspended civil liberties. Most American citizens approved of these measures at first. They saw all radicals�socialists, communists, and anarchists�as malevolent perpetrators of a terror that seemed to lurk everywhere. Leading the alarmists in 1920 was the attorney general of the United States. A. Mitchell Palmer warned that 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 . . . burning up the foundations of society.” He was speaking of communism, but conflated it with anarchism, adding that the anarchist’s creed is a fanaticism “that admits no respect of any other creed.”4 Palmer’s words may sound hyperbolic today, but in 1920 anarchists provoked fear and fury as intense as any provoked by modern terrorists. • Anarchism as a political ideology took root in Europe in the late nineteeth century and the early twentieth. It had many philosophers and definitions, but...