1920 (36 page)

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.

I
F THE BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION
had had time and manpower enough, it would surely have investigated American authors in 1920, although it would have reached its conclusions before a formal inquiry even began. The BOI would have realized that there had been a change, a significant change, just as there had been a change in the relationship between labor and management, just as there had been a change between radicals and law-enforcement officials. The BOI would have noted that, all of a sudden, traitorous or lurid sentiments were bursting from the page for all to see; it would have condemned the fact that filth was replacing literature, perversion replacing tales of proper societal behavior. It would have condemned the writing as un-American and determined that if people were capable of such rebellion in novels, poetry, and drama for the stage, perhaps they were equally capable in real life.

As a result of the Great War, men and women of letters had become preoccupied with politics and social criticism; in the former they leaned more leftward than ever before, and in the latter they were scathing.
There were no terrorists among them, no anarchists or Bolshies, at least not as far as anyone knows, but neither were there Eagle Scouts, Rotarians, Chamber of Commerce boosters, flag-wavers, members of the newly formed American Legion, or any other celebrants of the grand ol' status quo. In many cases, the sympathies of the artists seemed to lie with the groups that threatened the United States more than with those that praised it uncompromisingly. But artistic violence, or at least opposition, whether it be verbal or visual, was not the concern of law-enforcement officials. It was, rather, the product of men and women of thought and careful expression, not propaganda of the deed.