Conducted by Christopher Chen

Professor Beverly Gage teaches 20th century American History at Yale, with a focus on U.S. politics. An established journalist who has contributed to such publications as the New York Times, The Nation and the Chicago Tribune, Gage is author of the forthcoming book The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in its First Age of Terror.

Much of your teaching and research deals with the evolution of American political ideologies and institutions. What political ideologies and institutions distinguish domestic terrorism from international terrorism?

The first thing to say about terrorism is that it is a tactic. It’s a tactic that has been used by many groups over time, within the U.S., outside of the U.S., against the U.S., and against a very wide variety of targets. That said, in the domestic United States, you’ve seen terrorism emerge since the mid-nineteenth century as a form of political violence that’s used to, as the name suggests, create terror, through assassinations, bombings, and clandestine attacks. It’s emerged from a very, very wide range of groups. Some have come from the right: organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, or more recently, for instance, someone like Timothy McVeigh of the Oklahoma City Bombing. In other cases, you’ve seen various forms of terrorism from the left. In the late nineteenth century, terrorism was something much-discussed and occasionally used by anarchists and left-wing revolutionaries. Similarly, in the late sixties and early seventies, you had a very wide range of discussion on the left about the use of violence.

Your latest book The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in its First Age of Terror, focuses on the still-unexplained 1920 terrorist bombing that occurred in New York’s financial district. How do you define America’s first age of terror?

In the title there, I use “the Age of Terror” to describe a period in which violence in the form of bombings and assassinations, primarily at the hands of various left-wing revolutionaries—anarchists, and in some cases, labor unions—led to what was the first substantial discussion in the United States of terrorism as a problem and a form of political violence. So in my book I’m really talking about the period from the 1870s through the 1920s, although the book’s focus is on this particular event in 1920 in which still unknown culprits, who were probably anarchists, set off a bomb on Wall Street.

What do we know about the Wall Street explosion of 1920? What mysteries remain?

On Sept. 16, 1920, just about a minute after noon, a bomb went off on Wall Street, killing 39 people and injuring hundreds more. You can picture what Wall Street would have looked like at the noon hour; even then, the financial district was a center of commerce. You had hundreds, if not thousands, of people out there on the streets, and a bomb went off in the midst of this. There was a question in the beginning about whether or not this was an accident or a bomb. What investigators eventually concluded was that dynamite had been set on Wall Street in a horse-drawn cart loaded with metal slugs intended to injure people in the crowd. The question became: if it was a bomb, who might have wanted to set this off on Wall Street? In 1920, there were many radical dissenters who opposed certain policies on Wall Street as well as capitalism in general, or particularly opposed the role the Morgan Bank had played in bringing the United States into World War I. There were many, many suspects, but attention quickly focused on anarchists and more generally on labor and left-wing radicals, although the case was never solved.

The interesting thing about the case and the fact that it was never solved is that it provides a window into what Americans thought about terrorism in that moment—about who might have committed it, about what kinds of policies you wanted to have in effect to prevent it, about whether or not it might be justified in certain circumstances of tyranny or oppression. And so what you get, in part because it was an unsolved bombing, is a pretty wide-ranging discussion on everything from policy to suspicions about who might have carried out such an act. The last thing to say about the Wall Street bombing in its context is that it came in the midst of what is known as the “red scare” that followed the First World War. People tend to know a little more about McCarthyism, which was the second “red scare” of the twentieth century. But during and after World War I, there was an enormous wave of repression against left-wing radicals: members of the Industrial Workers of the World, anarchists, communists, all in the context of the First World War and the Bolshevik revolution. When this bomb went off in 1920, it also became a referendum on all of the policies that had been in place since the war to deal with revolutionary language and labor uprisings.

What lessons about terrorism in America today can we draw from such episodes in America’s first age of terror?

Well, it’s always a little tough to draw direct lessons from history. It’s important to talk first about some of the differences. A hundred years ago, we’re talking about a very different political context, a very different set of people and issues, a different government structure. We’re also talking about differences in technology. Terrorism in the late 19th century, even at its most extreme, was fairly small-scale in comparison to the sorts of things that we are unfortunately becoming used to today. That said, there are several commonalities that emerge. I think the most pronounced one is around the question of civil liberties and free speech. A lot of the debates that emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were over the question of how to deal with these acts of violence: do you treat them as purely criminal acts to the degree, go through a trial, prosecute them, and end the story? Or do you engage in a much more wide-ranging campaign against certain ideologies, certain groups, against people who might have spoken in favor of violence but had not actually committed it themselves? If you’re going to take on that sort of larger campaign, where exactly do you draw the line of responsibility? These were very hot questions in the late 19th and early 20th century, and in some cases they were settled in one way, in other cases, in another way. But that sort of discussion is one of those places that historical lessons are very useful to the present day. I think the other, probably more basic, way in which looking historically is useful and interesting to the present day is simply in learning that terrorism is something that has a history. The political language of the present day has been focused on the idea that nobody has ever experienced terrorism before or at least not in the way that we’re experiencing it today. Of course, to some degree this is true—the scale is different, the politics are different, etc. But, nonetheless, the fact remains that terrorism, like everything else, has a history, and that has to be part of our conversation too. In some ways, there is perhaps a comforting aspect to this, in the sense that societies have dealt with it in many other scenarios at many times in the past and have often seemed to come through okay. In other ways, I think you have a more troubling legacy in the sense that many of the responses, again, looking back at the late 19th and early 20th century to terrorism, went to pretty widespread campaigns against groups and individuals who were sometimes innocent of any sort of involvement in that kind of violence.

In your opinion, how has the Patriot Act compared to the federal government’s response to previous terrorist attacks?

In many ways, it’s pretty consistent with what you might’ve seen a hundred years ago. One of the stories that I tell in my book is about the development of a new law enforcement apparatus in an attempt to deal with this question of violence, of revolutionary sentiment, and of terrorism in particular. A hundred years ago, it really began with the buildup of police bomb squads, sometimes called labor or anarchist squads, in American cities. There was a real specialization of the police around attempts to conduct surveillance, to infiltrate, to disrupt these sorts of organizations—even very mainstream organizations like laborunions and the American Civil Liberties Union in its very early years. So you saw a real professionalization of police on that level, and by the First World War, you saw the growth of agencies like the Bureau of Investigation, today known as the FBI, which was founded in 1908 but really came into its own during the First World War as the political surveillance unit of the federal government. Their move was very controversial at that time; there were all sorts of questions about warrants and wiretapping and civil liberties issues, and there was a big backlash against these new intrusions into American civil liberties by the federal government at the time. Of course, the larger story is that the Bureau continued to exist.

How significant of a threat is domestic terrorism today?

Well, that’s a very hard question and one that I do not know the answer to. I will say that I think the assumption is that it is not as much of a threat. Timothy McVeigh is sort of an interesting figure in this respect. From what we can tell, he was acting more or less on his own initiative. Nonetheless, that was a really dramatic act, it was fairly recent in our history, and it has been surpassed obviously by 9/11 and international concerns. But the question remains whether or not this is something that’s going to re-emerge. I wish I knew the answer. I wish I could say more about the future, but I’m a historian and I look at the past.

How great of a social and economic effect do domestic terrorist attacks have on society today as opposed to the effects they have had in the past? What incidents, historical or contemporary, have been most influential on everyday life?

One thing that I can say—and this is perhaps not the definitive answer—is that the idea of violence and terrorism on a smaller scale was much more widespread a hundred years ago. The frequency with which people dealt with it was actually much greater, at least in the United States. But I think the key to terrorism is that it’s a form of violence designed to have a psychological effect—quite literally, to terrorize. So when you think about its impact, it really has much more to do with how people think about it and how they respond to it than necessarily the definitive, objective calculations on the ground. By its nature, terrorism has always been something that’s committed by very, very small numbers of people—sometimes working together in organizations, other times taking individual initiatives—but at any rate, it’s always marginal. It’s always unusual. I think the question is what the psychological impact is. Historically, there are some important moments to consider. The Haymarket affair of 1886, which certainly had a profound effect on American society, remains an unsolved bombing. The bombing of the Los Angeles Times in 1910 was again, kind of a watershed moment in its day. To jump to the present day, certainly Oklahoma City and 9/11, without question, have had really dramatic impacts. One thing that’s interesting in the history of terrorism in America is that there’s something of a lull in the middle of the 20th century, at least in the U.S. great question for historians and political scientists is exactly why that might be the case.

What measures has the government taken to prevent large-scale domestic terrorist attacks since the Oklahoma City bombing?

One of the interesting things about the Oklahoma City bombing was that it came two years after the first World Trade Center bombing. You had, in response, a real intertwining of domestic and international terrorism concerns. There was already legislation in the works in response to the first World Trade Center bombing.
It was given great momentum by Oklahoma City but ended up focusing a lot more on international terrorism. One of the things just to note, a historical parallel, is that it’s often much easier to pass legislation that addresses what’s going to be done about people who are not American citizens who are involved in terrorism or terrorist organizations than it is to pass laws domestically because of the Constitution and because of questions about civil liberties, etcetera. That was the case a hundred years ago, and that’s the case today.

In comparison to domestic terrorism in other countries, what stands out about domestic terrorism in America?

The first thing that I think stands out is that Americans tend to not remember the history of terrorism in this country. The historian Richard Hofstadter in the early 1970s wrote an essay on violence in the United States, asking why it was that Americans were so disinclined to remember violence as a part of their domestic political history. I don’t have the definitive answer to that question, but I certainly think that this question of memory is one that stands out as a unique aspect of American history.

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