1920 (35 page)

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.”