“Almost in front of the steps leading up to the Morgan bank was the mutilated body of a man. Other bodies, most of them silent in death, lay nearby. As I gazed horror stricken at the site, one of these forms, half-naked and seared with burns, started to rise. It struggled, then toppled and fell lifeless into the gutter.”
Reporter George Weston
A photo of the aftermath of the 1920s Wall Street bombing in New York City.
September 16 2019 — The Wall Street bombing occurred at 12:01 pm on September 16, 1920, in the Financial District of Manhattan, New York City. The blast killed 30 people immediately, and another 8 died later of wounds sustained in the blast. There were 143 seriously injured, and the total number of injured was in the hundreds. The case was never solved. Follow us on Twitter: @INTEL_TODAY
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Many investigators and historians believe the Wall Street bombing was carried out by Galleanists (Italian anarchists), a group responsible for a series of bombings the previous year.
The attack was related to postwar social unrest, labor struggles, and anti-capitalist agitation in the United States.
The Wall Street bomb killed more people than the 1910 bombing of the Los Angeles Times, which was the deadliest act of terrorism on U.S. soil up to that point. [Wikipedia]
The last official inquiry into the Wall Street attack took place in 1944, when the FBI reopened the decades-old cold case and concluded the explosion was likely the work of “Italian anarchists or Italian terrorists.”
Other investigators have since pointed to a Galleanist named Mario Buda as the most likely culprit.
Buda was an associate of the famed anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, and he may have engineered the Wall Street attack as revenge for their September 11, 1920 indictment for murder in a robbery gone wrong.
Buda fled to Italy shortly after the bombing, however, and remained there until his death.
Neither he nor anyone else was ever charged with the September 16 attack. [History]
The Bombing of Wall Street
On September 16, 1920, a horse-drawn cart packed with dynamite exploded in front of Morgan Bank, leaving 38 dead and hundreds more seriously injured in the nation’s financial center.
REFERENCES
The Wall Street bombing (September 16 1920) — Wikipedia
The Mysterious Wall Street Bombing, 95 Years Ago — History
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On this Day — The Wall Street bombing (September 16 1920)
On this Day — The Wall Street Bombing (September 16 1920) [2019]
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