APEnglish–Los Al

Just in case you thought that terrorism was something new or that homegrown terrorists have never before been seen on our shores, well, I thought you might be interested in this. It’s a part of American history we don’t talk about much, but it was still something to consider being a resident of New York in 1920–the most vibrant and dynamic city in the world (as London and Paris were in decline after WWI).

This is an excerpt which appeared in Harper’s (Oct, 2006)

From, “The Poor Man’s Air Force”By Mike Davis, from an article published last April in TomDispatch. The work will be issued in expanded form next year by Verso as Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb. Davis is the author of Planet of Slums and Ecology of Fear.

On a warm September day in 1920, a few months after the arrest of his comrades Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a vengeful Italian anarchist named Mario Buda parked his horse-drawn wagon near the comer of Wall and Broad streets, across from J. P. Morgan & Company. He climbed down and disappeared unnoticed into the lunchtime crowd. A few blocks away, a startled postal worker found leaflets warning, FREE THE POLITICAL PRISONERS OR IT WILL BE SURE DEATH FOR ALL OF YOU! They were signed, AMERICAN ANARCHIST FIGHTERS. The bells of nearby Trinity Church began to toll at noon. They were still ringing when the wagon, packed with dynamite and iron slugs, exploded in a fireball of shrapnel. Buda was no doubt disappointed to learn that J. P. Morgan himself away in Scotland at his hunting lodge-was not among the thirty-three dead and more than 200 wounded. Nonetheless, a poor immigrant with some stolen dynamite, a pile of scrap metal, and an old horse had delivered unprecedented terror to the core of American capitalism.

His Wall Street bomb was the culmination of a half-century of anarchist fantasies about avenging angels of dynamite, but it was also an invention far ahead of its time. Buda’s “infernal machine” was the first use of an inconspicuous vehicle to transport large quantities of high explosives within precise range of a high-value urban target. Besides some (mostly failed) improvisations, the car bomb was not fully conceptualized as a weapon of urban warfare until 1947, when the Stem Gang, a splinter group of the right-wing Zionist paramilitary lrgun, launched a swiftly reciprocated campaign of car and truck bombings in Palestine. Vehicle bombs were used sporadically in the ensuing decades-with notable massacres in Saigon (1952), Algiers (1962), and Palermo (1963). The gates of hell opened in 1970, when four undergraduate protesters at the University of Wisconsin improvised the first ammonium nitrate-fuel oil (ANFO) car bomb. The Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) adopted the weapon two years later. These cheap and astonishingly powerful new bombs elevated urban terrorism from an artisanal to an industrial scale, allowing for sustained blitzes against entire city centers as well as the total demolition of skyscrapers and residential blocks…

To give you an idea of how a cartload of explosives could wreak so much havoc, here is a picture of the stock exhange at Wall and Broad.  Down on the left you should be able to make out the ending of “J. P. Morgan & Co.”  Wall St. was one of the original Dutch streets (that paralleled a wall that kept the Native Americans at bay), so it was and is extremely narrow.  Today the skyscrapers on each side blot out the sun for most of the day.

Here is a small photo of the destruction wrought by Buda’s improvised bomb. The steps to the Stock Exchange are on the right.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Filed under: Summer Reading, The Great Gatsby and