Dark Tide (32 page)

Damon Hall and Charles Choate had drawn the battle lines with passion and precision in Hugh Ogden’s courtroom. The civil suit would determine who, if anyone, was responsible for the terrible disaster on Commercial Street in January 1919, and what should be done about it. Most of those who had been killed were the breadwinners for their wives and children, families who were now struggling to survive. Many of the injured had been out of work for months and now had little or no means of support. Some would never return to work.

A victory for Hall and the plaintiffs, if they could prove that the tank collapsed due to USIA’s negligence, would provide some financial relief for these people, even if lives could not be restored or injured bodies made whole. But if Charles Choate and his team could convince Ogden that the climate of unrest and violence in Boston and America in 1919 had incited anarchists to destroy the tank with dynamite, the victims of the molasses flood would likely wind up with nothing.

Charles Francis Choate was a brilliant and respected member of the Massachusetts legal community, a professional and a gentleman, a man about whom a colleague would one day say, “there was, there is, no better, braver, stronger man.” Such a man, a lover of the law, would be angered by the use of violence as a means to achieve results, would be appalled if innocent people were injured or killed because of that violence.

But in the places none of us like to visit—the darkest corners of the mind, the coldest reaches of the heart—Charles F. Choate must have felt a sense of perverse satisfaction when he received word on the afternoon of September 16 that someone, most likely an anarchist, had detonated a deadly bomb on Wall Street in New York City. As awful as the noontime explosion had been, killing nearly forty innocent people, the tragic event instantly enhanced the credibility of the opening argument Choate had delivered just days earlier,
affirmed
his circumstantial thesis, offered a timely and deadly reminder that violence was still a way of life for anarchists.

The Wall Street bombing was the most deadly anarchist action in America. In addition to the dead, more than two hundred people were injured, and property damage exceeded $2 million. The blast originated on the north side of Wall Street in front of the Subtreasury building and the U.S. Assay Office, directly across the street from the banking house of J.P. Morgan and an excavation where the New York Stock Exchange was building an annex. It was lunch hour, and an endless stream of office workers had just started pouring into the streets from buildings in the neighborhood.

“Suddenly, a cloud of yellowish, black smoke and a piercing jet of flame leaped from the street outside the Morgan offices,” reported the Associated Press. “Then came a deafening blast. A moment later, scores of men, women, and children were lying prostrate on the ground and the streets were covered with debris from thousands of broken windows and torn facades of adjacent buildings. Ten minutes later, the stock and curb exchanges, the financial pulse of the world, had closed. Panic and confusion reigned in the heart of New York’s financial district.”

Thousands of office workers fled in terror from adjoining buildings; scores fell and were trampled in the rush. The noise of the explosion had been heard throughout lower Manhattan and across the river in Brooklyn, “and brought thousands of the curious to the scene.” Downtown hospitals went on full alert, and makeshift medical stations were set up in the lobbies of nearby buildings, where nurses and doctors treated the less seriously injured. The few police on duty in the district were unable to cope with the crowds and downtown police stations were notified to send additional men. Subtreasury officials, fearing looters might try to rob the building—which the blast had seriously damaged—requested the assistance of military authorities at Governor’s Island, and officials dispatched a company of troops to guard the building.

Overnight, authorities launched a widespread investigation extending into every section of the country. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer called the blast “part of a gigantic plot” to overthrow the capitalist system. Extra guards were placed at all government buildings in Washington, D.C. William J. Flynn, chief of the Bureau of Investigation, went to New York the next day to oversee the investigation. He told the press that his agents had collected convincing evidence that the bombing was planned by a group of anarchists who perpetrated the “bomb outrages” of June 1919. The motive, Flynn believed, was revenge for the prosecution of Sacco and Vanzetti, and for Salsedo’s death earlier in the year, which anarchists still insisted was not a suicide.

Among the evidence Flynn cited were several circulars found by a letter carrier in a mailbox on the corner of Cedar Street and Broadway, a few blocks from the scene, with the following message printed in red ink:

The signature, combining those of
Go-head!
(“The American Anarchists”) and
Plain Words
(“The Anarchist Fighters”), convinced Flynn—most likely correctly—that Galleanists had been behind the Wall Street bombing. Later, Flynn announced that the anarchists had left the bomb in a horse-drawn wagon that they had hitched to a pole on Wall Street, “with the timing device set a few minutes ahead.” Three minutes later the bomb exploded. The horse and wagon were blown to bits.

A massive manhunt ensued. Detectives and federal agents visited nearly five thousand stables along the Eastern seaboard in a vain effort to trace the horse, according to historian Paul Avrich. Police did find the maker of the horseshoes, a blacksmith in Manhattan’s Little Italy section, “who recalled that the day before the explosion a (Sicilian) man had driven such a horse and wagon into his shop and had a new pair of shoes nailed to the hooves.”

Though the bomber was never found, Avrich has surmised that the Wall Street explosion was the work of Galleanist anarchist Mario Buda, a close comrade of Sacco and Vanzetti—“the best friends I had in America”—who believed he was retaliating against America’s financial power structure in retaliation for the September 11 murder indictments of his friends for the South Braintree killings. “The victims of the blast,” Avrich noted, “far from being the financial powers of the country, were mostly runners, stenographers, and clerks. Buda was surely aware that innocent blood might be spilled. He was a man, however, who stopped at nothing.”

Avrich traced Buda’s movements from New York to Providence, where the anarchist secured a passport from the Italian vice-consul, and a few weeks later sailed back to Italy. By the end of November, he was back in his native Romagna, “never again to return to the United States.”

Several days after the Wall Street bombing, Boston mayor Andrew Peters received a threatening letter, mailed from New York, accusing him of having the “blackest and yellowest” government in the country and warning him that he was being watched, and that a “better job” would be done in Boston than was done in New York. The letter was signed “The Reds.” Peters turned the letter over to police, but said he intended to take no special precautions to protect himself.

However, in Boston’s financial district, Secret Service agents guarded federal buildings, including the subtreasury, the post office, the Federal Reserve bank, and the Internal Revenue offices. “The financial section of Boston is plentifully supplied with plainclothesmen and a large number of uniformed men are patrolling the streets of that district as a precautionary measure against attempted repetition of the New York bomb outrage here,” the
Boston Herald
reported. Police officials gave orders for officers to act against “loiterers or suspicious looking persons or vehicles,” and to examine any vehicle, “motor drawn or horse drawn that may have a suspicious aspect.” Guards were also placed around the perimeter of the Massachusetts State House on Beacon Hill.

Once again, Boston was a city on alert, this time against an enemy that was difficult to identify and one that could strike from almost anywhere, at anytime.

There is no mention in the historical record of whether extra guards were placed around Boston’s courthouses. But in Hugh Ogden’s courtroom, the Wall Street bombing, just five weeks into the molasses hearings, could not have failed to create an impression among all parties.

Neither Hall, Choate, nor Ogden referred to the New York City tragedy specifically in open court, but each must have pondered one question in connection with the molasses case, from vastly different perspectives—Hall with distress, Choate with the moral outrage of one who is pained to be right about man’s capacity for evil, and Ogden with the quizzical conjecture of all good arbiters:

If anarchists could explode a bomb at high noon in the heart of New York City’s financial district in September 1920
,
couldn’t they have done the same thing at the same time of day in the heart of Boston’s commercial waterfront district in January 1919?

More than anything else, the outcome of the molasses case depended on the answer to this single question.

ELEVEN

As New York recovered from the Wall Street tragedy, and law enforcement authorities offered their theories on the explosion, Charles Choate was taking his expert witnesses through their own bomb story in Hugh Ogden’s Boston courtroom.

Choate’s strategy was to impress Ogden with the brainpower and credentials of the distinguished men he would call to the stand, one after another, a parade of academicians and professionals who would validate USIA’s thesis that an “evilly disposed person” had dropped an “infernal device” into the molasses tank, causing it to explode. Choate called engineering professors George E. Russell of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and George F. Swain of Harvard, as well as Lewis E. Moore, engineer of the Massachusetts Public Utility Commission, all of whom testified as hydraulic and structural experts. Each proffered the same conclusion: that the tank was structurally safe, although admittedly, the “factor of safety” of the tank’s walls was materially less than they would have provided. (The factor of safety is a number that describes the maximum amount of pressure the walls could withstand without buckling; a factor of safety of 3 would mean that the tank could withstand a force equivalent to three times the total pressure exerted on its walls by the contents inside.) Choate also questioned nationally renowned metallurgist Albert Colby, who spent
three weeks
on the stand testifying about the tensile strength of steel, its properties at different temperatures, and its ability to withstand the changing stress levels created by fermenting molasses.

In addition, Russell, along with Choate’s other expert witnesses—professor A. H. Gill of MIT’s chemical department and state police chemist Walter Wedger—testified that they had conducted tests, both at MIT and at USIA facilities in Baltimore, using a smaller replica of the Commercial Street tank. At MIT, they had filled the thirty-foot model tank with water; in Baltimore, they had used molasses. The blast ripped a hole in the side of the tank and damaged the steel walls in a fashion similar to the way the actual steel plates had been damaged after the real tank collapsed.