One Summer: America, 1927
rent by a tremendous explosion, which blew out the front of the Palmer house and left every room exposed, like a doll’s house. People in neighbouring houses were thrown from their beds. Windows were broken for blocks around.
Stumbling through the smoke and dust, the Palmers – both miraculously unhurt – went downstairs and stepped out on to an eerie scene of devastation. Blast debris was everywhere – hanging from trees, littering the street, strewn across lawns and rooftops.Much of it was still smoking. Scattered about in an unintentionally festive manner were anarchist leaflets.
One of the first people on the scene was Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who lived almost directly opposite. He had just parked and gone in after an evening out. The bomber had probably waited in the shadows for him to go, then proceeded to deposit the bomb. Had Roosevelt arrived a minute later, he might well have been killed and America would have a different history. Roosevelt found Mr and Mrs Palmer whitened with plaster dust and wandering in shock. The attorney general was speaking, distractedly, in the pronouns of his Quaker childhood, addressing his neighbours as ‘thee’ and ‘thou’.
It was clear that the bomber had been blown to pieces by his own device. Alice Longworth, Roosevelt’s cousin, who was also present, reported that ‘it was difficult to avoid stepping on bloody chunks of human being’. One of the bomber’s legs was on a doorstep across the street. The other was fifty feet away. A big section of torso, with clothing still attached, was found dangling from the cornice of a house on a neighbouring street. Another indeterminate chunk of flesh and cartilage had crashed through a window of a house across the way and landed at the foot of the bed of Helmer Byrn, Minister Plenipotentiary of Norway. Most of the scalp was found two blocks away on S Street. To reach that point – both distant and uphill – the top of the bomber’s head must have been launched on a trajectory 100 feet high and 250 feet long. It was a big bomb.
So many body parts were lying about that officials at first thought there had been two bombers, or perhaps one bomber and an unidentified, innocent passer-by. Clearly the bomb had gone off prematurely. The presumption was that the bomber had tripped as he was about to set it on the Palmers’ steps.
Before the night was out newswires were clicking with reports that bombs of similar destructive magnitude had gone off in seven other localities – Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh,Cleveland, Paterson, New Jersey, and Newtonville, Massachusetts. Only one other person was killed – a nightwatchman in New York – but the knowledge that terrorists could mount coordinated violence on such a scale left many Americans distinctly unnerved. The bombs elsewhere were in some cases wholly mysterious, possibly because they had been delivered to the wrong houses. In Philadelphia, one of the bombs blew apart the house of a jeweller who had no connection to government or politics. Another severely damaged a Catholic church. Why the bombers targeted a Catholic church was never established.
Thanks largely to the fact that the Washington bomber had been wearing a distinctive polka-dot tie, detectives were able to identify him as Carlo Valdinoci. This was a big loss to the anarchist movement. Though just twenty-four, Valdinoci had become a legend in the underground. Federal agents had recently tracked him to a house in West Virginia, but he had escaped just ahead of them, adding to his reputation for cunning and invincibility. Valdinoci had been on the run since 1917 after an infamous bombing in Youngstown, Ohio. That bomb had not gone off as planned either. In fact, it had not gone off at all, so the police, in an act of unimaginable foolishness, took it to the station house and placed it on a table in the main operations room in order to examine it closely. As they tinkered with it, it exploded, killing ten policemen and a woman who had come to report a robbery. The bombers were never caught and the case was never solved. Radical cases rarely were.
The bombings had a wondrous effect on the mind of A. Mitchell Palmer. A lantern-jawed Democrat from Pennsylvania, he had been attorney general for just three months, but had already been the target of two bombs – a ‘Gimbel’s’ bomb that never reached him and now this one that most assuredly did. This left him
Weitere Kostenlose Bücher