Beverly Gage has written an engaging story about the September 16, 1920 bombing on Wall Street. At times the work melds the historical with the current, demonstrating that a war on terror had been fought long before the Twin Towers attacks of September 11, 2001. Most of book's content is historical, moving adroitly from Alfred Nobel's invention of dynamite in 1866 to the Coolidge Administration. At the outset, Gage explores nineteenth century anarchic plots in Russia and the United States that relied on bombings to make political statements, with the final goal, being the overthrow of exploitative capitalism. The book is not written chronologically, but one of Gage's skills as an author is the ability to transition between eras without losing momentum.
The beauty of Gage's book is that it tells a story, filled with people and the world they populated. This is not merely an intellectual history, but a narrative with vignettes of anarchists such as Emma Goldman; financiers like J. P. Morgan; and investigators, most prominently J. Edgar Hoover. Underpinning the whole work is the class struggle, something that Gage richly details in describing both the investigation of the 1920 bombing and the conflict between groups seeking to reform governmental and financial institutions. The book expostulates on a world of workers' strikes that were violently squelched by police and armed guards. Many social activists chose to retaliate violently, especially when they found the courts to be ineffective.
The shock, terror, and carnage of the Wall Street bombing and its aftermath are brought out in great detail. After engagingly retelling the central event, Gage doubles back to the labor and anarchist unrest of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She sets the context with events such as the Haymarket Affair and the “Dynamite Express,” along with workers' rights activists such as Johann Most, Eugene Debs, and Clarence Darrow. But minutiae from investigative files periodically obfuscate Gage's central story.
The terror attack of 1920 came shortly after the Russian Revolution. In the years that followed Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin agitated for world revolutions. Unsurprisingly, their ideology caused a stir among the United States intelligence community, especially with the discovery that the Soviet government had been funneling money to some supporters in America.
Gage is at her best when she scrutinizes the interaction of executive, legislative, and judicial efforts against subversive speech in the United States. She does an impressive job touching upon the domestic and international situation around the time of the Russian Revolution, when she intermingles materials on Goldman's and Alexander Berkman's deportation to the Soviet Union.
The book also deserves praise for interlacing the Wilson Administration's search for the bombers with the restraints it placed on wartime communist dissent. Under the leadership of Atttorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, the Justice Department used arrests and deportations to splinter and punish radical workers' organizations. It was a sign of national consensus that Palmer's willful disregard for procedural rules earned him widespread condemnation. In this context, Gage also writes about Felix Frankfurter's and Zechariah Chafee's outspoken opposition to government infringements against civil liberties, especially speech and dissent, which the United States Department of Justice was wont to violate under the auspices of investigations into wrongdoings.
My disappointment with the book is that Gage did not offer sufficient normative analysis of terror organizations like the Social Revolutionary Club of New York and Russia's Narodnaya Volya. Although historians are usually best advised to maintain a neutral tone, some reflection on violent tactics against innocent people would have been in order given the extreme suffering terrorists caused innocents in the United States as well as in the Soviet Union. Gage doesn't broach this subject in a sophisticated manner until the final chapter. Further, she discusses Lenin and Trotsky several times in the book but fails to link them to the cruelty of the Red Terror they initiated. She is not remiss in identifiying Bolshevism's disregard of human rights, but does not identify its intellectual progenitors.
A final point is that the primary purpose of Gage's book is to reopen an unsolved investigation about a bombing that was either terror attack or dynamite company accident. She strongly sides with the accident theory throughout the book. That's certainly legitimate because there is a reasonable amount of evidence for it, but until the end she gives no hint that there is also good cause, other than the excesses of the Red Scare, to think the 1920 bombing was in fact an act of terrorism. As Ruth Reynolds' 1960 study pointed out, the bombing may have been linked to the indictment of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, which occurred on September 11, 1920, five days before the explosion. Reynolds' theory receives mention in Gage's conclusion, but the reader deserves to know about it from the beginning.
To sum up, this is a well-written and engaging book that is certain to educate and entertain a wide-ranging readership. It raises a controversy that is pertinent at a time when the United States continues to participate in the war on terror.
