The Day Wall Street Exploded presents a key part of US history. In it, Beverly Gage sets the stage for events now little remembered, but the effects of which still linger in a major way. It would seem much of American economics and politics has grown out of class conflict. Gage does not sugar coat the plight of the American worker in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There were no safety regulations, no safeguards against exploitation, no minimum wage or eight hour work day. The situation among many workers in those days was not just deplorable, but desperate.
And attempts at demanding workers’ rights, mainly in the form of union strikes, were met with violence. Police were called into bust up the strikes. Striking workers responded with violence of their own at times, often against strikebreakers.
It was against this background that terrorist actions by self-proclaimed anarchists were perpetrated. Peaceful strikes were not usually effective, and so to many the need for violence was apparent. The first attacks were directed against the corporate and political elites that suppressed the labor movement. But later attacks were seen as being aimed at innocent civilians who had nothing to do with labor disputes. In the battle for public sympathy, these terrorist actions were counter-productive.
Especially in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1917, Communism became something to fear. Communists were seen by many as advocating the violent overthrow of the American way of life. Class conflict had spilled beyond mere labor relations. The political ramifications, both domestic and global, tended to distract from the actual plight of the workers.
The Red Scare during the period following the Russian Revolution and World War I was short lived in the public imagination at the time, but seeds were planted to sprout again during the McCarthy era. One of those seeds was planted in J Edgar Hoover who had gained his hatred of Communism in the period Gage recounts. Hoover considered Communism a bigger threat domestically than organized crime, a consideration shared by much of law enforcement later on.
The Day Wall Street Exploded takes us back to a simpler time when the conflicts were more easily traced to the class warfare dating at least from the nineteenth century. Nowadays things have gotten far more complicated, but similar forces are still at work. Gage’s historical work is one piece that can help us sort out the forces and motivations at play by looking back to the origin of much of our domestic conflicts.
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