On the morning of July 22, 1916, Mrs. Cecil Wymore, a young mother in Oakland, California, made her way to downtown San Francisco. She took the journey with her husband Lloyd and two young children, Virginia, age four, and Billy, age two. They left their 53rd Avenue home in Oakland across the Bay for a trip that was really for the young children, so that they could marvel in the spectacle of the city’s much anticipated Preparedness Day Parade. By this point, war in Europe had raged for two years and in the United States, with involvement a real possibility, parades like this hoped to generate patriotism and enthusiasm for the cause. Newspaper reports estimated that 50,000 parade-goers would be in attendance, and on the surface, the parade seemed to symbolize a patriotic and harmonious American moment. One Oregon paper called the San Francisco Preparedness Day Parade, “the greatest demonstration in support of a national movement that the west has ever seen.” Once in the city, the Wymores found a spot to view the parade along Market Street, by that point jammed shoulder to shoulder with onlookers.
What happened next the press would describe as one of the “pathetic” results of the explosion: As she held up Billy in her arms for a better look, a bomb exploded, leaving the 26-year-old mother without legs. Surgeons scrambled to help Mrs. Wymore, but the wounds would prove fatal. “Dazed from the shock,” her husband Lloyd stumbled away with their two children, who miraculously survived unscathed. An overwhelmingly sunny and festive day had turned inexplicably dark.1
The blast ultimately killed 10 parade-goers, and shrapnel wounded another 40 bystanders, including a young girl who had her legs blown completely off. The authorities immediately searched for the culprit of this heinous crime, assuming it was one of the city’s known anarchists or radicals. Once police identified their suspects, the sensational trial captivated Americans paying any attention. The legal battle promised to continue for decades.
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The tragedy that struck the Wymore family, and many others, at 2:06 pm on July 22, 1916, stands as an underappreciated and yet critical point in American history. Taken on the whole, the 1916 Preparedness Day Bombing in San Francisco marked a bookend of 30 years of conflict between capital and labor.
The day’s events in 1916 certainly exposed the strained relationship between capital and labor during the early twentieth century and how it could become violent. Called “a dastardly act,” the explosion cost lives. Since Chicago’s Haymarket bombing in 1886 (and certainly before), industrialists and workers had stood at odds and, at times, openly fought in the nation’s mines, newspapers, ballot boxes, and streets. This event typified the wider march of labor versus capital and emerging radicalism and a series of unsettling events on the road to 1916. On the surface, the explosion offered a window into the real America, where income inequality had left a country much more divided than it first seemed.
This moment also revealed a great deal about how the nation might respond to an unsettling event such as this one. Indeed, the reaction(s) to the bombing revealed something different altogether. They first seemed to show a nation struggling with not just discontented labor, but also a country possessing shaky attitudes toward immigrants. It also signaled the high point of wartime dissent and division and revealed the difficulties surrounding United States international involvement, patriotism at home, and the “risks” of an increasingly diverse immigrant population. This decisive event showed that for one summer, and perhaps longer, the nation’s attention turned to San Francisco, as the nation teetered on the edge of war. During a war, what was known at the time as the “labor question” also became the loyalty and Americanness questions. The responses to the attack raised the larger questions as to how to proceed as participants in a war and how to handle political dissenters. It uncovered a legal system that did not function impartially. Divisions continued, as some came out in emphatic support for the suspects, and yet, conversely, many more vilified them.
We know a lot about labor violence and moments of conflict during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. For example, skilled books like James Green’s on the Haymarket and the late J. Anthony Lukas’ vast retelling of the Frank Steunenberg murder offered windows into these times and conditions. Like these crucial moments in the American experience, we should look for similarly significant ones and reflect on how they also demonstrate these important and larger themes. Accordingly, offered here is an account of that fateful July day, the subsequent manhunt and trial, and the continually unfolding legal drama. On center stage, sparked by the attack, and in the subsequent days, months, and years of fallout, were questions of immigration, nativism, antiradicalism, dissent, and wartime patriotism.
Chapter 1 examines the conditions and realities of not only Gilded Age economic growth but also, and especially, the realities for a United States working class that found themselves overworked and underpaid. Coupling this percolating tension was the topic of Chapter 2, the rise of an American brand of anarchism, one that, like its counterparts in Europe, became increasingly receptive to sabotage and violence as a path to change. Chapter 3 traces the widening gulf between capital and labor, increasing radicalism, and a few notable examples of these developments during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By World War I, the subject of Chapter 4, the nation stood divided on the cause and preparedness parades like the one in San Francisco hoped to create a sense of duty. The bombing that took place, however, shook San Francisco and the country. The manhunt after the blast is the topic of Chapter 5, and as the search made clear, the authorities followed a typical pattern of anti-immigrant and antiradical prejudices. When the trials of 1917 and 1918 took place, traced in Chapter 6, they came amid the war effort and the antiradical climate of the Red Scare, with disastrous results for some of the accused. The much longer legal fight unfolded for the next two decades and those battles are outlined in Chapter 7.
The stories of San Francisco in and around 1916 reveal a city, and nation, grappling with the tensions of war, patriotism, free speech, and loyalty. That summer, the nation stood in a delicate balance, as Americans were left struggling with not only discontented labor and apprehensive immigrant attitudes but also how to balance patriotism and justice. As the hundred-year anniversary of the attack has come and gone, it reminds us of the long and often unfortunate pattern of violence or domestic terrorism in the United States, from moments like the Preparedness Day Bombing to the more modern, and perhaps unnerving, examples.
1 An earlier version of this story appeared in the Winter 2014 issue of The Journal of the West. Mail Tribune (Medford, OR), July 24, 1916; New York Times, July 24, 1916; Daily Capital Journal (Salem, OR) July 22, 1916; Ontario Argus (Ontario, OR), July 27, 1916.