At 12:01 p.m. on Sept. 16, 1920, a horse-drawn wagon exploded at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City.
Thirty-eight people died, hundreds more were wounded, and windows shattered across the financial district, where bodies covered the pavement and chunks of iron tore through offices high above the street. It was one of the deadliest acts of terrorism America had ever experienced up to that point.
Most Americans today have never heard of it.
Historian Beverly Gage, whose work on the bombing became the basis for a PBS documentary, has pointed out that Americans often treat terrorism as though it arrived in the 21st century.
It didn't. The country had already lived through periods when ideological violence, bombings, and assassination attempts were part of American life.
The wagon had stopped outside the U.S. Assay Office, directly across from J.P. Morgan & Co. Inside were about 100 pounds of dynamite and hundreds of pounds of iron sash weights. The metal was there for one purpose: to rip through human beings when the dynamite exploded.
The driver walked away before the blast.
This wasn't a random New York street corner; J.P. Morgan & Co. represented enormous private financial power, while the federal government operated directly across the street. For a radical who saw capitalism and government as partners in oppression, there were few more symbolic targets in America.
The explosion turned the sash weights into flying blades of iron. Shrapnel tore into nearby buildings and reportedly reached astonishing distances. One fragment traveled nearly three-quarters of a mile before striking a ferry in New York Harbor.
The people killed weren't the financial titans whose names defined Wall Street. Many were clerks, messengers, stenographers, and other workers caught outside during the lunch rush. The bomb may have been aimed at American capitalism, but ordinary people absorbed its fury.
J.P. Morgan wasn't there; he was overseas. His son Junius was injured, while Morgan's chief clerk, Thomas Joyce, was killed.
Among the people knocked from their feet was a young stockbroker named Joseph P. Kennedy. He survived and eventually became the patriarch of one of America's most famous political families. Most of the dead had no famous surname waiting for history books. Many were young workers earning ordinary wages in an extraordinary place.
The Wall Street bombing also didn't come out of nowhere.
America had already spent more than a year dealing with political bombs. In the spring of 1919, explosive packages were mailed to government officials, judges, businessmen, and other prominent Americans. Some were intercepted, while others exploded.
Then, on June 2, bombs detonated almost simultaneously outside homes in several American cities. One ripped apart the front of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer's Washington home. Palmer survived, but the bomber didn't. Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, who lived across the street, felt the explosion.
So when Wall Street exploded the following year, investigators weren't simply searching for radicals because the country was frightened. They had already seen a coordinated anarchist bombing campaign.
At first, authorities weren't even certain they were looking at terrorism . The scene was chaos, forensic science was primitive, and New York had another priority.
Clean up Wall Street.
Crews worked through the night sweeping away glass, debris, pieces of the wagon, and other material that modern investigators would've sealed behind police tape. In restoring the financial district, they destroyed evidence that might have identified the killer.
Investigators were trying to solve what we'd now call a major terrorist attack without DNA, surveillance cameras, computerized databases, or a mature federal counterterrorism apparatus. The Bureau of Investigation, predecessor to the FBI, was barely a dozen years old.
Police managed to reconstruct portions of the bomb and its fuse, but the components were commonly available. Witness descriptions of the wagon driver were vague. Federal agents interviewed hundreds of people. Leads that seemed promising eventually collapsed.
Then morning came, and Wall Street reopened.
Broken windows were covered with canvas, injured workers returned wearing bandages, offices operated, and trading resumed. Less than 24 hours after someone tried to turn the financial capital of the United States into a graveyard, people went back to work.
Investigators did have one frightening clue. A letter carrier found flyers nearby from a group calling itself the "American Anarchist Fighters." They demanded the release of political prisoners and resembled material connected to earlier anarchist bombings.
The resemblance mattered: investigators had already spent the previous year chasing bombers associated with the violent anarchist movement surrounding Italian radical Luigi Galleani. His followers believed political violence could help bring down existing institutions, and people connected to the movement had been implicated in previous attacks.
Nobody was charged or convicted, and the case remains unsolved.
The FBI's own historical assessment still says the best available evidence points toward a small group of Italian anarchists. More than a century later, however, suspicion is all investigators have. Nobody ever stood in an American courtroom and answered for the dead.
Today, scars from the explosion can still be seen on the stone exterior of 23 Wall Street. The building remembers, even if much of the country doesn't.
The scars are small enough that a visitor who isn't looking for them could walk past without noticing. Maybe that's fitting. The physical evidence has lasted longer than the national memory of the attack.
But I keep coming back to the morning after.
Reopening for business wasn't the only answer New York gave the bomber.
Thousands of people returned to the area the following day. A patriotic gathering took place within sight of the damaged buildings, and music filled a street that had been a killing ground less than 24 hours earlier. Whoever planted the bomb had wanted fear to linger on Wall Street.
Instead, people filled it again.
Thirty-eight people were dead. Families were learning they had lost husbands, wives, sons, and daughters. Hundreds carried wounds, and somewhere, the man who abandoned that wagon knew he had succeeded in killing innocent people.
Yet he hadn't succeeded in stopping the place he attacked.
The next morning, clerks walked past shattered windows and bloodstained stone and returned to their desks.
There is another uncomfortable part of the history worth remembering. The anarchist violence helped fuel the Red Scare and government crackdowns that eventually swept far beyond the people planting bombs. The country faced a problem Americans still recognize today: how to pursue genuine threats without allowing fear to give the government permission to trample everyone standing nearby.
We sometimes mistake resilience for a grand speech or a perfectly chosen national moment. In 1920, it looked much simpler.
People buried their dead, investigators hunted the killers, and workers returned to their desks.
Wall Street reopened, and the bombers disappeared into history.
