The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in Its First Age of Terror

Hardcover
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Author: Beverly Gage

ISBN-10: 019514824X

ISBN-13: 9780195148244

Category: Terrorism - General & Miscellaneous

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Just after noon on September 16, 1920, as hundreds of workers poured onto Wall Street for their lunchtime break, a horse-drawn cart packed with dynamite exploded in a spray of metal and fire, turning the busiest corner of the financial center into a war zone. Thirty-nine people died and hundreds more lay wounded, making the Wall Street explosion the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history until the Oklahoma City bombing.In The Day Wall Street Exploded, Beverly Gage tells the story of that once infamous but now largely forgotten event, tracing the four-year hunt for the perpetrators and giving readers the decades-long but little-known history of homegrown terrorism that helped to shape American society a century ago. She grapples as well with some of the most controversial events of its day, including the rise of the Bureau of Investigation, the federal campaign against immigrant "terrorists," the grassroots effort to define and protect civil liberties, and the establishment of anti-communism as the sine qua non of American politics.Many Americans saw the destruction of the World Trade Center as the first major terrorist attack on American soil, an act of evil without precedent. The Day Wall Street Exploded reminds us that terror, too, has a history. The New York Times - Kevin Baker Beverly Gage…has brought the bombing to life again in her outstanding first book. The Day Wall Street Exploded describes in detail both the bombing itself and the hunt for the perpetrators, but Gage also does us the great good service of placing it in the wider history of industrial warfare that once proliferated in America.

Introduction 11 The Middle of Things 112 The End of the World 313 The First Terrorist Act in America 414 American Roughneck 695 The War at Home 966 The Great Detectives 1257 Business as Usual 1508 Usual Suspects 1699 A Perfect Alibi 18710 The Anarchist Fighters 20711 Illegal Practices 22912 The Martyr Who Wasn't 24213 The "Great Detective" Returns 26114 Triple-Cross 27715 The Wall Street Curse 29116 The Roar of the Twenties 309App In Memoriam 329Acknowledgments 331Note on Sources 333Abbreviations Used in Notes 335Notes 339Index 387