A MONTH AFTER THE ELECTION OF 1920, Christmas decorations began to appear in homes and on the streets of business districts. Santa was scheduled to make appearances in a number of civic venues; manger scenes had been erected in front of churches without controversy. Jingling bells could sometimes be heard from a distance. Bundled up against the weather with heavy coats, scarves, and mittens, mothers and fathers took it all in, holding children’s hands, the children changing their minds about their favorite toys with each store they passed.
But the holiday was the furthest thing from the minds of the federal investigators and members of their staffs who were looking into the explosion that had killed more than forty people and injured more than 140 others in front of the Morgan Bank more than three months before. They had made no progress. The tips they received had all been dead ends. Barring something miraculous, it seemed certain that all of their stockings would be filled with coal this year.
Their difficulties were numerous. The first was caused, inadvertently, by the board of governors of the New York Stock Exchange, and the damage was not only serious, but irreparable. Wanting to demonstrate their courage, their resilience, their unwillingness to be intimidated by whoever was responsible for the bomb, they met within hours of the blast and decided they would open for business the following morning. They would defy the Bolshies, the anarchists, the cowards of whatever name who had murdered so many Americans and then vanished somewhere into a late summer day. They would not be daunted. Whether the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation had approved the board’s decision or, with too many other things on its mind, simply did not realize what the money men were planning, is not known. But they could not have sabotaged the investigation more effectively if they had been paid accomplices.
So that the immediate neighborhood of the Stock Exchange would look welcoming, open for business on the day after, the board hired cleanup crews. They began working late on the afternoon of the blast. They kept at their labors all the way to dawn, sweeping and washing the streets, sidewalks, and benches and trimming patches of greenery. They picked up scraps of paper and other debris. There was nothing they could do about the thousands of panes of glass that had imploded; but outside the buildings, they worked with more than usual efficiency, picking up stray shards, rubbing away patches of dirt on exterior walls. It was not easy, especially when the sun went down and they had to rely on candles and gaslight to see what they were doing. But they did their job as well as it could be done, and by the time the Stock Exchange sounded its opening bell on September seventeenth, it appeared almost as if nothing extraordinary had happened the day before.
Which was precisely the problem. Members of the Bureau of Investigation looked around that morning at what no one would have believed had been, less than twenty-four hours earlier, the site of the first terrorist attack ever on American soil, and suddenly understood the problem. What the BOI had allowed might have been the end of the investigation before it even began. Who could say what clues might have been mixed in with the trash and thrown away, unable now to be retrieved? What personal possessions might have been discarded? Documents of identification, items of clothing? Even body parts? Who could say what other clues had been washed down city drains? None of the BOI agents, nor any of the New York City policemen who had been the first to descend on Wall Street the day before, had begun a careful examination of the scene before the janitorial services arrived and virtually remade the area. As the first full day of inquiries and planning got under way, the answer to the questions of guilt and motive might already have been lost, hauled to the dock and buried irretrievably somewhere in the midst of a barge full of trash, soon to be towed out to sea.
As for the biggest clue, at least in terms of size, it had also been eliminated. The horse, according to the New York Call, had been “sent off to Barren Island and ground into paste.” The Call then went on to ask the unfortunately reasonable question, “Are the authorities investigating the Wall Street explosion deliberately destroying evidence, or are they just stupid?”
It was the latter. The BOI could not have been more inept in its initial reaction to the bomb. It did not even consider the possibility that it had been the work of terrorists. It believed that too many innocent men and women had been killed in the blast for it to be the expression of a specific, politically oriented grievance; this was not, after all, like the small explosives that had been sent several months previously to the various big-city mayors and judges, or to the home of A. Mitchell Palmer. In fact, as far as anyone knew, virtually all the victims of the explosion were free from governmental affiliation.
More likely, the BOI decided, the bomb had been set off accidentally. There were several possibilities. The horse might have dragged the cart over a bump in the street in just such a way that it jangled the dynamite to life. Someone might have walked behind the cart and, after lighting a cigar, flipped the match in precisely the wrong place. The cart might have been too hot inside, somehow bringing its deadly contents to life. Or the horse and cart might not have had anything to do with the blast; the explosion might have been the result of dynamite stored elsewhere to clear space for new construction somewhere on Wall Street.
Bolsheviks, socialists, and even a number of anarchist groups agreed with the diagnosis of holocaust without intent and began sending out letters to that effect as soon as they heard about the blast. They wrote to law-enforcement agencies, local and federal, and swore their disavowal of the deed. On the morning of the seventeenth, the Call, a socialist newspaper, and the communist journal World Tomorrow, opined in favor of the accident theory, as did the Yiddish Forverts and the Hungarian Lore. But these papers were read by few and influenced even fewer. The only endorsement of the horrible mishap theory from a reliable source came from the perpetual presidential candidate, socialist, and union leader Eugene V. Debs, who should have known better.
The BOI should have known better too; and on the day after the explosion, it came to its senses. What had blown apart the lower Manhattan neighborhood, investigators determined, was a well-constructed bomb that had ignited precisely where and when it was intended to. True, the Bureau had had no experience with terrorism, not on this scale at least; but, preliminarily, common sense was just as valuable a tool in discarding the “accident” theory. How many loads of dynamite were rattling along the streets of New York on any given day? What were the odds that one of them would erupt on Wall Street, in front of the country’s most glitteringly wealthy bank, where it had no business to transact? Further, what were the odds that the blast would occur just as the empty streets and sidewalks of late morning began to fill, the number of potential victims at its height? Taken all together, there were simply too many implausibilities.
Besides, as should have been obvious from the start, the murder of innocent people did not eliminate terrorists from consideration; rather, it fit the definition of the word perfectly. Terrorism: indiscriminate slaughter, the more victims the better. And the location of the bomb, in the midst of New York’s financial district, also pointed to terrorism, an act symbolic of capitalism’s destruction, the goal of all radical groups.
THE OFFICIAL END OF THE accidental-explosion theory came early on the afternoon of the seventeenth. A few hours earlier, the Sons of the American Revolution had gone ahead as planned with their celebration of Constitution Day. Like the governors of the New York Stock Exchange, they wanted to demonstrate their refusal to be intimidated by the catastrophe. They even kept their originally planned starting time, twelve noon—“the murder hour,” as the New York Times referred to it.
But it turned out to be even more of a celebration than the Sons had envisioned. As they sang their songs and made their speeches, five to ten thousand New Yorkers crowded onto Wall Street, many of them telling reporters that they, too, wanted to show that they would not be intimidated. And when the Sons began singing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” much of the crowd joined in, resulting in an enthusiastic version of the national anthem, with arms pumping in the air, legs marching in place, exuberant yet solemn. Others, less carried away, admitted they were merely curious and, feeling safe with so many policemen and BOI officers patrolling the area, wanted merely to mill around the scene where the destruction had occurred, just as people had taken in the sight yesterday: terrorism’s grim aftermath as a tourist attraction.
It was a few hours after the crowd had dispersed that the Bureau released a packet of flyers found in a Wall Street post office box. They had been written by hand, rather than being printed, which might have led authorities to the press that had turned out the messages. The paper was yellow; the ink, from a stamp, red. The message, obviously threatening, was nonetheless imprecise in its meaning.
Remember
We will not tolerate
any longer
Free the political
prisoners or it will be
sure death for all of you.
The flyers were signed “American Anarchist Fighters.” The name was supposed to mean anarchists who fight Americans, but reads as if it refers to the opposite, Americans who fight anarchists. It is hard to be confusing in just three words; the terrorists managed it.
Postal authorities told federal officials that the flyers had been placed in the box shortly before yesterday’s explosion, between the 11:30 collection and the next one only twenty-eight minutes later. Other than that, they knew nothing about the crudely written documents which, for some reason, they had held on to overnight and all morning without a public announcement. According to some reports, there were five pieces of paper, all communicating the same threat, and all had been placed in a single box near Wall Street, at the edge of the blast’s range, where they were unlikely to be damaged, sure to be found.
No one in the BOI had ever heard of a group called the American Anarchist Fighters. Still, the flyers provided the Bureau with its first clue, helping it to see a pattern. The barrage of bombs released in late 1919, those that precipitated the first series of Palmer raids, had been signed “The Anarchist Fighters.” The same group, then, seemed responsible for all the acts of violence, probably even those that had precipitated the second series of Palmer raids.
But who were these guys? For the first time, the Bureau realized it had truly formidable and persistent foes with which to deal. And, shrouded in mystery as they were, and having had ample time to escape after Wall Street erupted, they would be almost impossible to catch.
AMONG THE FIRST PEOPLE INTERVIEWED by the BOI were men named “Carusso, Abato, Ferro, Luigio, and DeFillipos,” whose nationality alone was enough to make them suspects. Unfortunately for the Bureau, all these Italians had alibis.
The first person who legitimately stirred the Bureau’s interest, at least for a few days, was an anomaly, a fascinating character, a man who “fit nobody’s picture of a bomb-throwing anarchist.” Still, he was the most promising of the lot for a time, and some agents, try though they might, could never quite get him out of their minds, no matter how long the investigation dragged on. True, he was “neither a Sicilian, a Jew, a Scot, an East Side peddler, nor a greasy fellow, but a middle-class professional man of Anglo-Saxon lineage with friends high in Wall Street”—but his story was unlike any other that law-enforcement officials had ever heard.
The man in question was the red-white-and-blue-named Edwin P. Fisher (whose name is spelled “Fischer” in at least one prominent source, but “Fisher” more often), formerly employed at a respected Manhattan brokerage house. He was also an athlete of sufficient skill to have been ranked ninth in the country by the United States Lawn Tennis Association in 1901.
However, despite his background, he had long pronounced himself an enemy of all those who lived on unearned wealth, and moved even further to the left by becoming exposed to the anarchist Emma Goldman and finding many of her ideas worthy of support. But even more than his admiration for Goldman, it was a proclaimed ability by Fisher to see into the future that brought him to the attention of authorities. He might have been a patient in New York mental hospitals on two occasions, but there was something close to clairvoyance in utterances he made in September 1920. As Susan Gage writes:
In the week before the explosion, Fisher had sent at least three notes to friends in the financial district alerting them, in a variety of phrasings, that a “Bolshevist professor” had instructed him to “[s]tay away from Wall Street this Wednesday afternoon.” His warnings were off by a day, and his correspondents assured the Bureau that “no conspirators, after talking with Fischer [sic] for ten minutes, would consider letting him into a plot with them.”
Prior to that, “a passenger in a Hudson Tube train had encountered a stranger who was carrying a tennis racquet and whose description tallied with Fischer’s, and who abruptly leaned forward and said, ‘Keep away from Wall Street until after the sixteenth. They have sixty thousand pounds of explosives and are going to blow it up.’”
No one has ever offered a satisfactory explanation for these statements by Fisher. Had he dropped into a meeting of subversives one night and overheard them? Had he actually been one of those who planned the blast, or a friend of a planner who confided the imminent terror to him? Was he, then, a material witness? Or, as he insisted, was he possessed of psychic powers? “I know when anything bad is going to happen,” he said, and the BOI could not help but wonder. However, there was no evidence that linked him to violent anti-Americans, other than a few utterances that might have revealed “mental derangement” more than prescience.
Despite his background of dubious psychological health, Fisher was one of the first men arrested by the Bureau. He was north of the border when the Bureau cabled Canadian officials to return him to the United States. They agreed, and found the total assets on his person at the time of his apprehension to be seven cents. What he was doing in Canada, no one knew, and Fisher could not satisfactorily explain. When his brother-in-law was alerted to Fisher’s extradition, he reacted as if he were hearing the same old song one time too many, urging the Bureau to turn him over to the “Lunacy Commission” as soon as he arrived back in New York. No such organization existed, but the name gives the right idea of the brother-in-law’s attitude.
Fisher was apprehended in Niagara Falls. Before that, in the Toronto hotel from which he had sent the postcards warning his three friends about the danger ahead on Wall Street (the “notes” Gage refers to), he is said to have been heard muttering about “millionaires who ought to be killed.”
When federal agents got their first look at Fisher in New York’s Grand Central Terminal, they glanced at one another in disbelief. Their suspect departed from his train clad in “a lopsided gray cap, a wrinkled gray suit, and a silk scarf around his waist. Later, he explained that the suit was the outermost of three full sets of clothes. Wearing multiple layers helped to keep him cool, he said, and meant he didn’t have to carry baggage.” Among his first statements in the presence of the men from BOI were that he had received information about the Wall Street explosion from God via air waves, which had also informed him that it was time for farmers to tend to their harvest, and that money would cease to have any value soon; labor would be the new American unit of commercial exchange.
It took a while for the investigators to regain their composure after Fisher’s bizarrely attired monologue; when they did, they handcuffed him, and he offered no resistance as he was escorted to police headquarters.
After a few days of interrogation that was sometimes comprehensible, sometimes not, he was released, and he disappears from the historical record immediately afterward. No one seems to know where he went, what he did, or whether, other than his apparently unsympathetic brother-in-law, he had a family to look after him. The BOI was certain it had done the right thing in setting Fisher free; but some of the comments he made, the few that were close to the truth of September 16, were hard to dismiss. How did he know? The man was obviously unbalanced, but so was the act committed in front of the Morgan Bank. Could there possibly be a connection? Should the BOI have had Fisher examined by a psychiatrist? Might such an examination have revealed that Fisher possessed the kind of extrasensory perception that none of the lawmen believed in? Fisher had been officially discounted as a suspect, but he lingered in the minds of investigators for years to come.
AS THE YEAR WOUND DOWN, the BOI was making more accusations than progress. It was inevitable. “With just a handful of agents assigned to radical affairs,” writes Gage, “the Bureau’s New York office could not handle the Wall Street case alone.” So it reassigned some of its men from other locations and matters of lesser import—such as enforcement of Prohibition, which had never been a priority among those in law enforcement and was already regarded by many as the biggest mistake the Constitution had ever made. Almost all of America, in fact, gaped in unison when the commissioner of Internal Revenue, David H. Blair, in a public address, “recommended that all American bootleggers be lined up in front of a firing squad and shot to death. The site of the speech was a Presbyterian church in Philadelphia.” That proposal not gaining any traction, “Blair had the government print leaflets urging drys to spy on their wet neighbors and report their intelligence anonymously, using telephones outside their neighborhoods so they would not be seen or overheard.”
The Anti-Saloon League supported both proposals, and was virtually alone in doing so.
It might have been a coincidence, but a week or so after the increase of manpower on the bombing investigation, Gage tells us, some provocative, if muddled, clues began to appear. “A chauffeur named Hiram David had told detectives that he was driving east on Wall Street behind a ‘red explosives wagon’ when he saw a flash and a concussion of air rip the roof from his car. He distinctly recalled that the wagon bore the name of the DuPont Powder Works. It also flew a red flag, he said, the required legal warning for dynamite.”
A bond salesman in approximately the same place at the same time also remembered the wagon, as well as the DuPont sign.
Joseph Kindman, an electrical engineer, said he saw a red wagon in the area of the blast and that he clearly read “DuPont Powder Company” on the side. He also saw the word “Danger” in large white letters, and a red flag jutting out from the end of the wagon.
Rebecca Epstein, a stenographer at a nearby brokerage house, was even more specific than Kindman in her timing. “She told police that she had seen a ‘reddish’ wagon pull up alongside the Morgan bank just before the explosion. The wagon … flew a telltale red flag. The front of the wagon bore faded impressions of the three letters D, N, and T. The letters were separated by odd spaces, she said, as if they had once formed a word like ‘DuPont’ or ‘Dynamite.’”
And at least two other people remembered a vehicle of some sort with the word “DuPont” or something like it written on the side. But these people did not agree with the others that the cart was red. They did not remember the color, but were certain it was something other than red.
Was all of this as suspicious as it sounds, all these fingers pointing to DuPont? Almost certainly not. Earlier in the day, according to the New York Times, “It was revealed that a permit had been issued to the du Pont de Nemours Powder Company … to unload explosives from their pier at West Forty-Eighth Street and the North [i.e., Hudson] River.”
Whether or not this particular vehicle was in the vicinity of Wall Street at noon on the sixteenth is not clear, although it does not seem to fit the vehicle’s schedule. Another vehicle with the name DuPont on it had parked on Wall Street at the approximate time of the bombing, but was several blocks away from the Morgan Bank. In addition, it was a truck, not a van, and its cargo was paint pigments, not dynamite.
Besides, as everyone, at the Bureau and elsewhere, knew, DuPont was far too respectable a company, too fervently capitalistic, to be involved in the Wall Street bombing. Could someone have stolen one of its carts? The company reported none missing. Why, then, did the firm’s name keep popping up in the investigation? There had to be some reason. Was it just that so many Americans associated the name DuPont with explosives that a few of them saw a picture in their minds that did not, in truth, exist? Perhaps someone had painted the name DuPont on the side of a cart that had nothing to do with the company, a ploy to throw investigators off the scent. So many possibilities, nothing that constituted proof.
Most of the preceding reports, interestingly, came from legwork done not by the BOI or any other law-enforcement agency, but by the New York Call. Desperate to protect the reputation of socialists and other foes of what they perceived to be American greed, they assigned a higher percentage of their employees to the Wall Street investigation than did the BOI. They were to be commended. And nothing that the Call printed, despite its being such a tiny paper, was ever contradicted by the people whose names appeared in the articles.
YET ANOTHER THEORY CAME FROM Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, an avowed Democrat. His notion did not concern responsibility for the bomb, for he was as usual certain that foreign radicals of one stripe or another were responsible; rather, his theory concerned the timing of the event.
In the spring of 1920, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives had sliced the Justice Department’s budget for Red-hunting from $2.5 million to a mere $2 million. The $500,000 that the Department had gained before the Palmer raids was gone—a punishment directed personally at himself, Palmer thought, although without good reason—and he was furious. He and J. Edgar Hoover had implored lawmakers to change their minds, to restore the money and even add to the sum, but without success. The result was that numerous agents had been laid off, and even with the added personnel from the Prohibition forces, the BOI was operating under what Palmer believed to be a severe handicap. The cops from the booze beat were hardly in the same class of crime-solvers as longstanding BOI agents. Thus, Palmer believed, the best law-enforcement agency in the United States was vulnerable—perhaps, all things considered, more vulnerable to radical deeds than ever before.
[Palmer] suggested … that the proximity of these two events—the budget cuts and the bombing—was no mere coincidence, speculating that the bombers might have known about the cuts and therefore felt emboldened to attempt what before they would not have dared. “Acquiescing in the direction of the Republican-controlled Congress,” Robert T. Scott, his private secretary, explained to the New York Times, “this department reduced its operating forces to meet the amount of money provided. Inevitably this cut became public. Three weeks after it became actually effective this outrage was perpetrated in New York City.”
The day of the explosion was also election day in New York, and all five Socialist assemblymen won their races by substantial margins and would remain in the state assembly. To Palmer, it was all of a piece, proof that subversives were gaining ground in mainstream America, and that efforts to vanquish them must be increased, with more substantial budgets to support the efforts.
TAKEN INDIVIDUALLY, SOME OF THE preceding information was, to one degree or another, promising. Looked at all together, it was a hash of hastily formed impressions—some items seeming to verify others, others to contradict, the mass of them leading officials nowhere except to further confusion. The clues they needed, if in fact they had ever existed, were by this time either water-logged in Davy Jones’s locker or made into an equine-based paste long since put to use.
It was at this point, suddenly, that a new investigative avenue opened. As John Brooks says, it was the horse, despite its dismal fate, who now stepped to the fore of the BOI’s efforts—and stayed there longer than did any other subject of inquiry.
For a decade and more, the local and federal police went on conducting one of the most extensive and prolonged investigations on record. They visited over four thousand stables up and down the Atlantic seaboard in an effort to establish ownership of the horse; every blacksmith east of Chicago, and even the editors of every blacksmith trade journal, in an effort to identify the horseshoes conclusively; and every sash-weight manufacturer and dealer in the country in an effort to trace the source of the iron slugs. These procedures, which were uniformly fruitless, were mocked from time to time by confessions to the crime, each of which caused a momentary stir until it was shown to be implausible.
On one occasion, William J. Flynn, heading the BOI, led a contingent of men to a stable situated in a neighborhood of New York “notorious for its Italian criminals and for murders.” A blacksmith named Gaetano De Grazio, himself of dubious national origin, told agents about a man who had brought in a horse to be shod a few days before September sixteenth. The man was small in stature, about five-foot-five, De Grazia said, maybe weighing 165 pounds. And he spoke with an unmistakable Sicilian accent; having been born in Italy, De Grazia knew what the dialect sounded like. But he had no idea what the man’s name was or where he lived; he had just stood by without saying a word as the blacksmith did his work, less than half an hour’s worth, and then paid the bill in full and was gone.
Knowledge of the incident led nowhere. De Grazio’s customer might well have been the bomber, but there was no way to know, certainly no way to track him down at this point. Some of the investigators realized that the description of the horseman fit that of Mario Buda, but only in general terms, too general to be of any value.
After having visited the four thousand stables, the BOI could come up with no more specific information than this.
The investigation continued. Or, more accurately, it dragged on. And on and on.